Daniel Dennett and the Theology of Science.

This discussion is based on an excellent review of Professor Dennett's most recent book by H. Allen Orr, "The God Project," in The New Yorker, April 3, 2006, at p. 80. It is never a good idea to rely on reviewers for the opinions of any philosopher, so I suggest that you read Dennett's book Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomena (New York: Viking, 2006) and come to your own conclusions. I plan to do so. I enjoyed Professor Dennett's televised conversation with Bill Moyers, when Dennett's views were discussed for close to an hour.

I shall comment mostly on views of religion attributed to Dennett by his reviewers, but also on his own words. Dennett's ideas concerning consciousness (though mistaken, in my view) interest me much more than his views concerning religion. The difficulty with many attacks on religion from those who are hostile to it, as I have been in the past -- and as I still am in many ways -- is that they fail to understand what is religion and why it matters. Militant antireligionists are, of course, the most intensely, passionate and "religiously inspired" persons on the planet, except that their religion is atheism. They cannot help preaching to the masses. Michael Lerner in The Nation, April 24, 2006, at p. 20, summarizes many of my criticisms:

So I am led to the conclusion that the main reason that underlies the Left's deep skepticism about religion is its members strong faith in a different kind of belief system. Even though many people on the Left think of themselves as merely trying to hold on to rational consciousness and resist the emotionalism [Is such resistance possible or desirable?] that can contribute to fascistic movements, it's not true that the Left is without belief. The Left has been captivated by a belief that is called scientism. ... I rely on science to tell me about many aspects of the physical world in which I live, and in the new organization I've founded with Cornel West and Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, called the Network of Spiritual Progressives (http://www.spiritualprogressive.org/ ), we have developed an eight point Spiritual Covenant with America in which one of the eight planks is about defending science from interference by the state, religion or the capitalist marketplace.

Mr. Lerner is a friend of science, but not of antireligiousness, which is not required by science. Intolerance and dogmatism are unacceptable, whether they come from religious or nonreligious people. The subject of Dennett's book is the "scientific" study of religion. This raises some difficulties at the outset. Is the scientific study of religion possible? If so, then is it worthwhile to pursue such a study?

Any natural phenomenon may be studied scientifically. The question is whether religion is exclusively a "natural" phenomenon. One answer is that religion only occurs among conscious subjects, which means "us" (as far as we know). Hence, it is possible to study us in order to determine, scientifically, what happens in persons or societies that we then call "religion." Yet this will not tell us whether religious beliefs are true, since truth or falsehood is logically independent of the reasons that explain why someone holds a particular belief. I believe that it was Leon Wieseltier who made this point in a superb review of Dennett's book in the New York Times.

Notice that a science of religion will have no bearing on the theoretical import or non-empirical aspects of religion. Such a science will be irrelevant to religions, as myths or systems of meaning, in terms of the vocabulary of symbols or their truth-content. The scientific study of religion, even if it is possible, will only yield information of a factual nature that may well be irrelevant to the most important concerns of religion, as a phenomenon, which has to do with the meanings of religious stories and practices for the moral and spiritual lives of persons. I urge you to read George Santayana's writings on this topic.

Science, Santayana writes, expresses in human terms our dynamic relation to surrounding reality. Philosophies and religions, where they do not misrepresent these same dynamic relations and do not contradict science, express destiny in moral dimensions, in obviously mystical or poetical images: but how else should these moral truths be expressed in a traditional or popular fashion? Religions are the great fairy tales of the conscience.

Remember that all of the great fairy tales convey important truths, even though they are empirically false. Dennett puts on his lab coat and sets out to explain how religious beliefs arise, so as to debunk religious creeds, persuading readers that religion should be discarded or subjected to tests of "rationality," something which is pointless and irrational. Why should rationality matter when it comes to mystical insight? Is it "rational" to demand rationality of such insights? What kind of rationality? Objective rationality? Is Kierkegaard mistaken to speak of religious truth as "subjectivity"? What would Kierkegaard say in response to Dennett? Do you submit Hamlet to a test of rationality? Are there truths communicated in that work of literature?

Suppose I say to you: "We should submit your feelings of romantic love to the tests of rationality. Why love A, not B. B is a better cook, better sexually, so why care about A?" The answer will not come from a test tube, but from the statement: "I love A." This will usually be followed by a shrug of the shoulders. Why one loves a person is secondary. What love "is" (objectively) may be fascinating, but it is kind of irrelevant to the (subjective) experience of loving a woman. I am sure Dennett will agree on this. "Why love A and not B?" Answer: "because I do." Likewise, ask the believer: "Why do you believe in God?" Answer: "I just do."

Dennett is not deliberately insulting the reader. One senses that he regards religion as something to be dismissed and trivialized, non-scientific mumbo-jumbo, unworthy of acceptance by intelligent and sophisticated persons in our time. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")

This is, of course, a profoundly religious attitude about science, which assumes that what is not scientifically explainable is unreal, unimportant, or unworthy of our concern. Is this view rational? This is not a scientifically determined conclusion, only a value judgment. Many great scientists have not shared this assumption. For instance, Steven Jay Gould argued (persuasively) that religion and science have entirely different concerns because they are compatible forms of "knowing" or awareness concerned with different aspects of human being in the world. By way of comparison, see John D. Caputo, Philosophy and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), pp. 70-74.

I regard Dennett's religious attitude about science as a form of "scientism," which is mistaken because it is based on irrational beliefs concerning the scope of both science and religion. So I propose to study Dennett's view of science as a kind of "theology," to mirror his study of religion scientifically.

Notice Dennett's easy-going assumption that Darwin's natural selection "is the single best idea anyone has ever had." I beg to differ. Of course, whether an idea is the best idea ever is not a matter to be determined scientifically, since it is a question of values, subject to discussion and debate that is not amenable to laboratory verification.

I think a better idea is "love your neighbor as yourself." Consider the difference to human lives and the world if persons were really to adopt this latter idea. Think of how differently people would behave if they really believed in universal love. If Darwin's natural selection is accepted as true -- which I think it is -- then the world pretty much goes on as before. The religious person can say: "Great, Darwin figured out the mechanism used by God to get life going here." On the other hand, "to love your neighbor as yourself" is for you to become a very different person, whether you believe in the supernatural or not. A world filled with people who really believed in such love -- and lived accordingly -- would be a much better place than the reality we experience every day.

Yes, religion has been a force for evil. So has science. Think of nuclear weapons and those scientifically planned and run concentration camps. This is irrelevant to the point that I am making concerning, in pragmatist terms, the "cash value" of the two ideas: natural selection versus an ethics of love. I think experiencing love is more important than our theories about either religion or science. I think of this Judeo-Christian and, yes, also Islamic idea -- which has a secular variant, from Aristotle to Spinoza, Hegel and Romanticism to existentialism -- as the best of the two competing discourses, even as I find both discourses true and helpful to humanity. We do not have to choose between science and religion.

When it comes to understanding the emergence of life on this planet, in an empirical sense, I am a Darwinist. This is distinct from my formation of metaphysical views. Darwin certainly was content to think of himself as a biologist and would have been surprised to find himself regarded as a sort of guru on metaphysical matters. Charles Darwin should not become a nineteenth century version of Oprah Winfrey, much as I admire Ms. Winfrey.

What is religion? According to this reviewer, "Religion, as [Dennett] provisionally defines it, involves believing in, and seeking the approval of, a supernatural being." (p. 80.) In Dennett's words, "There was a time when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?" I disagree. Religion, in my view, is a phenomenon that coincides with the emergence of human beings on the planet. There was never a time when there were persons, but no religions.

Joseph Campbell says of the religious impulse in humans, which he sees as universal and natural to us, that "... universally cherished figures of the mythic imagination must represent facts of the mind [not the brain]: 'facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,' as my friend the late Maya Deren phrased the mystery.' ... " Religion is concerned with: "symbolized facts of the mind." I believe that its purpose is to bind us to one another and to our species-history and species-memory, so as to guide us in making life's natural transitions, especially in coming to terms with death. I suspect that Carl Jung and Ernst Cassirer were closer to the truth than Dennett when they identified the religious impulse in humanity with the source and foundation of language, art and all symbolizing, including the symbolizing used in science.

Thomas Nagel in his classic essay "What is it like to be a bat?" speaks of the human need to imagine what cannot be known with certainty, but may be deemed vital, nevertheless, to our flourishing. "We may imagine something by representing it to ourselves either perceptually, sympathetically, or symbolically." There are forms of knowledge that we need and can acquire only by means of symbols. Religious truths are of this sort, I think, because they are concerned with our natural spirituality. You can recognize and accept your spirituality, as a natural part of yourself, without joining any religious group or institution, just as you may appreciate art without joining one artistic faction or another.

In a published dialogue between Jean Paul Sartre and Fidel Castro (I am not a Communist nor an apologist for the Cuban Revolutionary Government, which I often strongly criticize and always oppose to the extent that it denies freedoms to its people), Castro said that the revolution would get people whatever they requested. Sartre asked: "What if they asked for the moon?" Castro thought for a moment and said: "We may not be able to get it for them, but we would understand that they need it."

Religion is humanity's way of saying that we need the moon. Part of what I understand by a human being or person is a concern with spirituality. We know that early homo sapiens -- long before the emergence of civilization -- buried their dead, created rituals of mourning and celebration, created art to commemorate the animals killed in the hunt out of respect for their spirits and as atonement. This is religion. Art seems to arise almost simultaneously with religion in the story of humanity's development, so does language.

Symbols and metaphors are needed to gesture at what is transcendent of human particularity and physicality, as against mortality and life's other great mysteries. Religion coincides with the universal experience of the numinous, also with the awareness of the proximity of death and love, of "limit" situations and mysteries in life. (Jaspers, Ricoeur)

Religion certainly existed long before science did in human history. What we now know to be scientific truth existed before science, as an intellectual discipline (the earth was round when people thought it was flat). Similarly, the spiritual or ethical truths found in the great religions existed also, in my view, before people were smart enough to discover them. It has always been true that we should love one another. It has always been true that slavery is evil and that discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual-orientation or gender is immoral. Some of us have still not figured these things out, but we can no longer wait for everyone to get it. We insist on freedom and equality now for all others, as we do for ourselves. This is based on a religious idea of human dignity and spiritual worth. ("America's Holocaust.")

Also, these early religions did not necessarily depend on, or concern themselves with, the "approval of a supernatural being." Nevertheless, they were religions. Many religions today do not concern themselves with winning the approval of a supernatural being. Buddhism is very distant from Western religions, in this respect, and classical Chinese myths are also much more abstract in their ethical concerns and teachings. Pantheism is a form of religious sensibility which is always with us.

Grudgingly, Dennett admits that: "... a scientific study of religion does not exclude the possibility that religious beliefs may be true." If this is so, then why does Dennett wish to "break the spell" and have humanity move beyond religion? What makes his "faith" in science "religious," is his apparent assumption that science could ever fill the needs and provide for the concerns satisfied only by religion in human life. He does not stop to consider seriously what we mean when we speak of religious truth. How is such religious truth different from scientific truth? (See "Has science made philosophy obsolete?")

Dennett's use of the concept of "memes" (derived from the work of Richard Dawkins, a militant antireligionist, "blessed" with a wonderful mythic or religious imagination) illustrates Dennett's own essentially religious sensibility. "A meme, a term introduced by Richard Dawkins, is any idea or practice -- any thought, song, or ritual -- that can replicate from one brain to another." (p. 81.) A "meme" is what used to be called a "good idea." Memes are a lot like our old friends Plato's "forms," except that they are wearing tiny space suits.

Notice how quickly metaphors and symbols take over and we are creating a religion in the language of science. "Dawkins often thought of memes as mental viruses, selfish parasites on human minds." Minds are not brains, or bodily organs, but abstract entities existing culturally and linguistically, made possible by cerebral processes that do have physical locations. Minds are not reducible to -- nor identical with -- those cerebral processes.

Freud disagreed with Jung concerning the role of libido in human emotional life. For Freud, love is sex; for Jung, love is sex and much more. In a letter to Freud, Jung spoke of Chartres Cathedral and explained that it might be described as "a pile of stones" and this would be accurate, as far as it goes. Yet this cathedral is also "a magnificent architectural structure" within a shared civilization, religion, tradition and with a meaning or meanings that are cultural. Love is more than sex. Mind is more than brain. Chartres Cathedral is more than a pile of stones. That cathedral, apart from its beauty, is a chapter in a saga entitled: "The Story of Christianity or Religion in Western Civilization." In a way, so are you. This is true even if you are an atheist.

Minds are not spacially constrained, so that we may encounter the mind of Shakespeare in his plays, or Dennett's mind in his books. A mind cannot have a "virus." A concept of a "meme" cannot be "selfish." Ascribing such qualities as "selfishness" to non-persons is a logical error known as an anthropomorphism. (Look up "the pathetic fallacy.")

My computer is feminine, willful, flirty, witty and annoying. I call her: "She who must be obeyed." If we deny the religious imagination -- as the Victorians tried to deny sexual appetite -- it is merely displaced into other areas of activity, becoming pervasive in our lives. Our technology and media will then acquire religious connotations. We will "personalize" our gadgets. Even in an atheistic setting, religion will emerge. College students may not be joking when they identify their religion as "television." If technology or economic activity become our only gods, then this "religion" is much sadder than any form of atheism or traditional faith.

Religion is not about individual self-interest, but more like an aesthetic or moral need of the species that may require even the sacrifice of personal survival, as love sometimes does. (See my story "The Soldier and the Ballerina.") Naturalism is valuable and accurate as a method in science, but not necessarily as a metaphysics. Science only requires the adoption of a naturalistic method, not your belief that all of reality is reducible to what science can explain naturalistically, since this metaphysical claim is not one that science can explain naturalistically. (See "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")

As Joseph Campbell explains, for Carl Jung, religion has to do with inner survival, not external evolutionary "success":

" ... the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies -- not only those of sex and aggression -- have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces [concerned with the needs of the night]; and the myths [ -- states Jung --] when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man [and woman] has weathered the millenniums."

John Updike and My Grub Street Blues.

John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism by John Updike (New York: Vintage, 1984).
John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Ballantine, 1989).
John Updike, "Lust," in Deadly Sins (New York: William Morrow, 1993), p. 40.
Gore Vidal, "Rabbit's Own Burrow," in The Last Empire: 1993-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 81.
John Updike, "Incommesurability: A New Biography of Kierkegaard," The New Yorker, March 28, 2005, p. 71.

"Morning in America."

John Updike is one of the greatest living American writers. I never imagined that I would speak in such glowing terms of Updike, despite his literary talent. But then, I guess this essay is partly about learning to see myself as not all that distant from someone like Updike. This is not because I am deluded enough to consider myself his equal as a writer. It is only as a human being facing the same humbling challenges and ultimate dissolution that I presume to mention my faltering literary hopes in the same breath with his great achievements. My point is not to compare the sort of writing that he does with what I can do, but to suggest that people who feel a need to write, at whatever level they manage to do it, may have some important things in common and may be worthy of your attention for that reason alone. Maybe the same can be said of those who feel the need to read. We belong to a shrinking community.

Although I have never met him and I am not likely ever to do so, I hope that I am not being presumptuous in thinking of Updike as a friend. Of course, we have met in the pages of his books, establishing a more genuine and lasting connection through literature than is possible from a casual handshake with a stranger in a crowded room. You can't read someone's writings, return to them more than once out of sheer pleasure, continue to delight in them, and not like their author -- at least a little bit. To my astonishment, I like Updike quite a lot.

"Don't bother with Updike," I was told. He's a Republican. I was a college senior when this bit of wisdom -- which happens to be anything but -- was passed along to me. The subtext was clear enough: He's a rich, white guy, who writes for other rich white people and is probably offended by someone like me even reading books, let alone fantasizing about writing some of my own. For years I believed this nonsense and walked past the rows of his books on the shelves of the bookstores and libraries. He is the "official" writer of the establishment, I thought, he is not "for you." Well, I think that he is "for me." Whoever you are, he is for you too -- that is, if you care about good writing.

These days I hear similar things said by minority persons about mainstream or "white" writers in general. There seems to be a politicizing of literature (and everything else) at the moment by some critics, who apparently believe that we should have an ethnic or racial test for writers. As a result, writers who happen to be white and male, like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace -- whose work I have ignored in the past -- should be regarded as unworthy of our attention. I probably felt this way at some point, although I might not have said so. I now think that this is very wrong.

The political critics should bear in mind that such an attitude might equally well be applied to minority writers -- and it probably is by many readers -- so that among the authors who should be read for pleasure by young people in white suburbia, are writers like Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison and the great James Baldwin (try the first paragraph of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room), who will too often be ignored.

Saddest of all, the number of young men, especially in an urban setting, who know or care about books has diminished substantially. Young men, for the most part, are not reading anybody's books. Women read more than men in all ethnic, racial, religious and economic categories, after adjusting for educational level. It is mostly women -- and thank goodness for them! -- who buy books in America. In fact, it is rare today that a young minority person, male or female, knows or is concerned about any of these writers or even about literature.

If you are an African-American or a Latino person coming accross these names for the first time, then I hope that, by the end of this essay, I will have persuaded you to read Updike and the others that I will mention during the course of my discussion. Reading any book is better than reading none, but reading good books is best of all for you. Books will change you. Updike certainly has this power to transform the reader, so do Vidal and Mailer, Roth and Bellow, Erica Jong and William Styron, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges -- so that you can then go out and change what needs to be changed in the world, knowing that others have made way for you.

A young Latina sat next to me on the subway train the other day enthralled by a book with a glossy cover, which turned out to be The Great Gatsby. My guess is that she is already engaged in her own search for that light at the end of the pier.

Reading a book is like spending a few hours with someone that you will otherwise never meet, one of the most fascinating or funniest, most learned or charming people in the world. That voice on the page begins to sound in your head as you read and you alone are the beneficiary of all that wisdom and charm.

A book is never the same for any two readers. Good readers, especially, discover layers of new meanings and nuances in a favorite text with every reading, some of which may not have been fully appreciated even by the author. Literature is a kind of conversation, so that (as with any good conversation) the flow of energy is in two directions, reader and text alter each other in the process of absorption. This means that some part of Shakespeare and Plato, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens stays with you, after you read them. Some part of me, stays with you.

Updike began life in humble circumstances in Pennsylvania farm country, in a place called "Shillington," and was not a child of privilege. He describes himself in his memoir as a "Democrat," despite "not being a dove," and even as a "liberal." My mental image of him as attending fashionable Manhattan dinner parties with the glitterati from the publishing and film industries, tossing back Martinis and making substantial contributions to the Republican party may fit the "life-style" of the successful middle-aged novelist, though I doubt it, but certainly not of the young man who became that novelist. Besides, I can not imagine Updike as a contributor to the Republicans even now, when he enjoys a well-deserved and Trump-like wealth, at least by writerly standards.

Those who have a sense of being outsiders early in life, like Updike, tend to hang on to that sense forever. This is a blessing for a writer. Even if they are conservative in many ways, outsiders will always be deeply troubled by social justice issues that we in America, perhaps unfairly, do not associate with the Republican party.

I love that word "Martini," by the way, because it conjures thoughts of sophisticated Manhattanites in evening clothes at chi-chi parties during the fifties and early sixties, chatting about Freud and Picasso, and planning adulteries. I am not too sure of what a Martini is, except that olives enter into the experience at some point, perhaps the same might be said for creative forms of adultery. The things that I can imagine doing with an olive -- or a grape -- would astonish you.

Anyway, that mythical realm of carefree glamor among artists and "media" people is now gone, if it ever really existed -- and even if it did, I doubt that it would fit the mature Updike-style. The parties downtown still take place, of course, but (judging from the newspaper photos) the elegance is nowhere to be found. I wonder if people still call each other "darling"? Only if they've never met, I guess.

My rejection of Updike occurred at the dawn of Reagan era, the long pleasant summer of 1981, which was anything but "Morning in America" for me or the people in my neighborhood. My recollections of life as a "street-kid," who was secretly good in school but could not allow his friends to know it, are colored by the anger that I felt then, which is entirely different from the anger that I feel now.

My anger then was the young man's anger at a society that told him that "money meant success" and that if you didn't have it -- and I didn't -- then you simply didn't matter. My anger now (when I am not exactly "old," only not-so-young) is cooler, less dangerous, usually, more like the frustrations of the contender who almost made it, then realized that the game was fixed from the start and that he was never going to make it anyway, just before his final plunge into failure and utter destitution. The "nice" thing about hitting rock bottom, as the old street wisdom has it, is that there's nowhere to go but up. Also, what you learn when you lose everything, including nearly your life, is that "failure" and "success" are words that mean whatever you want them to mean, and that money may have very little to do with either of those concepts. Torture will either break or kill you, or it will make harder than steel.

You can be a "failure," in every important human sense of the word, with lots of money in your pocket. You can also be a "success" despite being poor. The man or woman who has nothing is more free, for one thing, than the owner of a successful business, not least in terms of self-image and identity.

I was intrigued by Updike's memoirs and many of his collected essays, which I found in a bookstore located (appropriately enough) in a shopping-mall, whose denizens are often to be found in Updike's writings as subjects of investigation. I admit that I am one such denizen myself, on occasion, since I have been known to "mall" (as my daughter might say), even scoping out the occasional bargain at K-Mart -- so as to accessorize my thrift store attire -- given the stylish sort of a chap that I am, before heading to the multiplex to see the latest installment of the "Batman" films, which are profound works of art.

Naturally, I do this strictly for purposes of philosophical research into the delusions of postmodern beings in contemporary America and plan to write about it all from a suitably cynical perspective in the near future. Meanwhile, pass me that popcorn.

I have now read lots of Updike's non-fiction, including his memoirs and many of the essays in this collection. There must be more of both, essays and memoirs, along with all the fiction "out there" since Updike is prolific, but I have read enough to form an opinion. I have stayed away from the novels, until now, because I was afraid of how much I might like them. I preferred to read Kafka or Borges, Henry James or Dickens, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow (whose Herzog is a close friend), but not the Great Gentile White Males of American literature (GGWM) -- I opted for the Rebels and Outsiders, like Vidal, Mailer and Styron (who falls into the "Southern Outsider Category").

I will always be closest to the rebels. Now I also plan to study those whom I have previously ignored. I realize that any great writer, no matter how central he or she may be to the culture, is a kind of rebel. I am embarking on my Updike season. I am planning to read several of his novels, starting with Roger's Version and Bech: A Book, and will report on them eventually.

There is a theory that Updike does not exist. John Updike is said to be only the invention of a well-known New York novelist named Henry Bech. I have found little evidence to support this theory, though there is a suspicious awareness of Manhattan life and Jewish lore in Updike's writings. In any case, as fiction or as fact, the name "Updike" has aquired a "connotation" and seems to refer to something real, like the names "Sherlock Holmes" or "Santa Claus," though Updike himself is much less plausible a character than either of those two, or than Henry Bech for that matter. This is something that he would probably admit.

We must try to understand one another, Updike and I. After all, neither Updike nor I have chosen the places where we find ourselves in America's social hierarchy on the basis of such "immutable characteristics" (to use the Supreme Court's language) as race or ethnicity, in addition to economic status. If I am not willing to be judged by such things, then why should I hold someone else responsible for his own slot in a classification scheme that is totally arbitrary and not of his choosing? No reason. Besides like all writers, Updike and I are members of a "discrete and insular minority." (Look up footnote 4 in the Carolene Products case in Constitutional Law.)

I have decided to put on my space suit and explore the strange territory of white, middle- and upper-middle class life in those pockets of affluent America known as "suburbia" and the comparable upscale neighborhoods of Manhattan. I plan to visit Updike country. Besides Updike, I expect to read some of his younger colleagues and some predecessors, maybe Frank O'hara or John Philip Marquand, or Henry Green -- Luis Auchincloss resides in "nosebleed" aristocratic territory, which I cannot enter -- but my contemporaries, Franzen and Wallace, are accessible to me. No doubt both think of themselves as "regular guys." Needless to say, they are far from it. Maybe I'm wrong about that. We'll see.

I will purchase Polo shirts and clothing at Brooks Brothers. I will be seen publicly in "sensible" shoes. My pale complexion and pleasant demeanor will allow me to enter these rarefied settings, undetected by the natives. I will eat white bread and mayonaise. I will refer to my daughter as "muffy" or "buffy," even, if absolutely necessary, "kitten." Upon my return to my own neighborhood, like Gulliver, I will seek to describe my adventures and discoveries.

Yes, I am stereotyping as a way of communicating how it feels when Latino women are described as, say, "spicy" or Latino culture is reduced to "Desi Arnaz" playing the conga drums and singing "Cuban Pete" (which I like!) by the mainstream media. I keep forgetting where I left my straw hat, but I always have my gonga drum handy and I am wearing my favorite shirt with the puffy sleeves.

For now, the subject is Updike. To begin with, he writes some of the most beautiful English prose that I have encountered in contemporary literature. I selected these examples because they are not exceptional nor extraordinarily good, but only routine evidence of Updike's Mozart-like ease with our glorious language. Similar paragraphs can be found by simply opening any of his books at random. From his essays:

"While in the spell of this most benignly paternal scholar of our hearts, we forget that his own enchanting presumption of life as a potentially successful adventure may itself be something of a fairy tale. Though as scholarly as he needs to be to establish his texts and their variants, he does not investigate the origins of Western fairy tales; are they not, for all the bits of pagan lore they contain, medieval in spirit as well as setting, and saturated in Christian cosmology? The themes of mock death and rebirth, of inner integrity, of repentance and the penitential ordeal, of appearance as illusion, of an anthropomorphic Nature -- are these not religious in essence? Is not the risen Christ the supreme Sleeping Beauty, and His redemption of the fallen world the immense transaction which the magical transactions of fairy tales mirror in miniature? Can, in short, fairy tale reassurances survive the supernatural ones?"

From his memoirs:

"To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by laying down in front of amunition trains, there really is no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates. Peace is not something that we are entitled to but an illusory respite [that] we earn."

From his review-essay in The New Yorker:

"To Paul's contemporaries and to Kierkegaard's, the scandal of Christian dogma (god incarnate crucified and risen from the dead) was something to be got around and built in, a stumbling block converted into the cornerstone of Christianity's humane, busy Church. After Kierkegaard, to thinking Christians, the scandal was of the essence -- a confrontation, for crisis theology, with the drastic otherness and unaccountability of God, on the far side of a leap of faith unaided by reason and propelled by human dread and despair."

Whatever you say about his politics, Updike can write like Domingo can sing. The pleasures and instruction to be found in Updike's books more than justifies their costs, financial and otherwise, placing readers forever in his debt.

Updike's Concerns.

Updike's primary concerns are his three passions, which also happen to be the three subjects I find most fascinating: eros and the love of women, or just the mysteries of women; the United States of America; as well as the status of Christianity and God's whereabouts in a post-religious age. My guess is that these will be the dominant concerns not only in his studies of literature, philosophy and theology, but also of his own fiction.

A way to get at these topics may be to examine one of the attacks launched on his work by an adversary, Gore Vidal (who is not, in my judgment, as much of an adversary as one might think). Vidal speaks somewhere of "an Updikean fondness for cunnilingus" with mild disdain, though hardly with shock. The author of Myra Breckingridge is bound to have heard of the practice before, perhaps in Hollywood.

All I can say on this subject is that I admit here and now to sharing in Updike's "passionate" interest in the "art of pleasuring a woman orally" (in the memorable words of Dr. John Gray), and I try to take full advantage of any opportunity that life offers me to practice and sharpen my "skills," as it were, so as to get better at it. In fact, I can't think of a more fun way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon than working on exactly those skills, while pausing occasionally to read something by Updike himself. Updike says of lust:

"How can sexual desire be a sin? ... Did not God instruct Adam and Eve to be fruitful, and to multiply? ... The singleness of flesh is itself a vivid metaphor for copulation."

You said it, John. So much for eros. But then, there is Updike's tendency -- which I share -- to defend (and sometimes to criticize) American governments and his respect for the institutions of the United States. Updike was one of the few writers to justify the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Vidal warms to his attack on this issue:

"For a certain kind of quotidian novelist there is nothing wrong in leaving out history or politics. But there is something creepy about Updike's overreaction to those of us who tried to stop a war that was destroying (the dead to one side) a political and economic system that had done so well by so many [writers like Updike]. Updike is for the president, any president, right or wrong, because at such a time 'it is a plain man's duty to hold his breath and hope for the best.' For thirteen years?"

Updike strikes back at his critics in a tone dripping with contempt:

"Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas (Johnson). These privileged members of a privileged nation ... full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders [and for their country]."

For some reason these exchanges seem remarkably contemporary. Vidal and Updike both clearly love the United States. Despite Vidal's attacks on the current Administration, he writes of little else but of his country, which is mine too, of its history with tender concern and genuine affection. Vidal may sometimes disagree with Updike about what the country should be pursuing as an international policy, which version of the American experiment best represents the values found in the Constitution and what it really means to be an American in this post-cold war era. Readers can only benefit when their best writers disagree about such matters.

On the historical question, Vidal is right that the Vietnam conflict was a colossal tragedy; Updike is right, however, to insist that criticisms of the U.S. then and now, were and still are often idiotic, self-contradictory, hypocritical, overstated and irresponsible. Both would say that the United States should not be a military empire, should respect international law and be mindful of its responsibilities as the world's dominant military, economic and cultural force.

I describe Updike and Vidal, equally, as patriots -- although I think much more of their literary than of their political opinions, given that both can write with what I can only describe as genius. These political polemics and their opinions concerning, for instance, sewage treatment options are not my primary interest in their work. I am more fascinated by their literary magic than by political opinions that one can hear debated, though not so well, any Sunday morning on television or in the daily newspapers.

Beyond any political differences, there is a "feeling" in both writers' confident prose, as they joust and circle each other, warily, that they are among the very best living masters of the novel form and of English prose. I have been most influenced by Vidal, who is certainly America's finest essayist, but I recognize Updike's great gifts.

It is said that Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci could not stand each other, though history is silent on the subject of whether either artist expressed an intense interest in "cunninglingus." Given the revelations of contemporary scholarship concerning the private lives of both Renaissance men, it is highly unlikely that either would have "gone down," in a manner of speaking, for that sort of thing.

My Grub Street Blues.

"We need spirit, Bullworth, we don't need no ghost now ..."
Amiri Baraka in the film, Bullworth (1998).

Amiri Baraka, The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), pp. 1-3. (William J.Harris and Amiri Baraka, eds.).

Updike and Vidal are the sort of exceptional talents who will stand out in any group of writers. They deserve their success. A lot of what is published today is second- or third-rate stuff, however. Much of it gets into print, seemingly, on the basis of whether the writer attended a big name school -- preferably Yale -- or went to some "Bread Loaf" conference in Iowa or Idaho, or some other place in the pleasant mid-west of the nation. Few of the people who get to do such things are minority group members.

Too much of what is published and reviewed in America is about nothing, except navel gazing, by gazers who lack Updike's genius for phenomenological observation and description (maybe this explains the lack of interest in literature by young minority men). Some published writers display very mediocre intellects, but enjoy the advantages of trust funds. Few writers who see the society "from the bottom up" get published. Even fewer who are really angry -- and with good cause -- about the forms of injustice and oppression that exist here and now, who are truly "unpleasant" writers, will get to see their books receive the support that they deserve from a major publishing house. This is especially true if the angry writer is a woman. And that's if they get published at all, regardless of how fine or alive and important their writing happens to be.

I am reading three very different women's books at the moment: 1) Virginia Woolf, whose elegance and understated emotion, allusiveness and images, overwhelms me with delight and admiration; 2) Penelope Fitzgerald, whose melliflous sentences and wit sparkle on the page. Nothing is wasted in her work, nothing is awkward or clumsy in her manner. Ms. Fitzgerald is there on the page, then disappears behind the life-like puppets on her stage; 3) Agnes Heller's controlled philosophical prose screams of intelligence and a desire to communicate, so that the massive amount of scholarship and intelligence underneath the writing never becomes obstrusive. All three are highly recommended.

By registering my protest here against "literary exclusiveness," I may well be condeming myself to self-publication and marginalization hereafter, but the rage that I feel at the bulk of the mediocre or barely adequate prose that I find in the major bookstores, often backed by big publishing houses and newspapers, when writers of the caliber of Amiri Baraka get ignored or receive an insulting indifference to a life's work that leads him -- after thirty years of brilliant, fiery prose and poetry -- to publish at his own expense, is unberable.

Thankfully, Mr. Baraka continues to write, despite insulting and unsurprisingly ignorant responses to his poetry (which, after all, is not intended as a position paper) by some people in New Jersey, where he was criticized as poet laureate for his response in verse to the 9/11 events. Whatever one may think of Mr. Baraka's politics -- much of which I reject, and some of which I accept! -- he deserves more of our best or most serious attention, as a people, and much more of the loyalty of a publishing industry that has a responsiblity to the culture as well as to the bottom line.

Mr. Baraka is an important American artist and a political critic -- and he is a patriot! -- one who deserves to be read and heard, whatever we may think of his opinions. Most of all, he deserves what he does not receive to a sufficient degree -- respect and attention, even from his critics, including academic critics at elite institutions and publications.

See us and listen to us, to those of us who must write or die, because we have no other way of demanding attention to our anger at the routine violations of our persons that go unnoticed, unpunished and legitimated by media silence and State indifference. Listen to our anger and disgust at the corruption in American institutions in some places and times -- institutions that are devoured by the cancers of organized crime and greed -- because we wish to continue to believe in America's promise. We care about contributing to the real national culture born in street corners and on the Internet, scrawled in graffitti on walls and sidewalks. Read the self-published books that are sold or given away by some of us on subway trains, because we refuse to be censored or discouraged by the system of rewards and prizes granted to those who write "elegantly" about the parties they went to last summer in the Hamptons, elegantly and yet much less well than we write about suffering insults and slights, or sometimes much worse, from the powerful political "bosses," pundits and trend-setters of the society, usually acting through political goons as "frontpersons." Right, Senator Bob?

Amiri Baraka has written some paragraphs that are every bit as fine as anything found in The New Yorker, though in an entirely different voice:

"I had the New York Times under my arm. I was in civilian clothes and I remember that I was reading The New Yorker. I'd stopped at a bench and sat down near a square. It was quiet and I could see a long way off toward the newer, more Americanized part of the city, the Condado Beach section, where I could only go if in uniform, so they would know I was an American and not a native. I had been reading one of the carefully put together exercises that The New Yorker publishes constantly as high poetic art, and gradually I could feel my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was crying, quietly softly but like it was the end of the world. I had been moved by the writer's words, but in another very personal way. A way that should have taught me even more than it did. Perhaps it would have saved me many more painful, scenes and conflicts. But I was crying because I realized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it. I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with what this writer was and what that magazine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my poetry ..."

I felt my own tears rise as I read this passage, feeling the sadness and frustration of a man knowing that his glorious music was falling on deaf ears, like Miles Davis playing for an audience that ignored his "deliquescent" sounds in order to chat, smoke and eat noisily. I respect writers of the caliber of Vidal and Updike because both -- and I know this as surely as I know my own name -- would instantly recognize Baraka as a writer worthy of their attention and ours. If it is true (and I am not sure that it is) that The New Yorker today would happily publish Mr. Baraka's work, then his own efforts deserve much of the credit for changing our assumptions about what good writing is and can be.

Any father of a daughter should read Baraka's "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and Poem for Kellie Jones, born 16, May 1959." If Amiri Baraka had written nothing else in his working life, then this achievement alone would justify all the years of striving and entitle him to be called: "a significant American poet." He is a significant American poet. He's a writer who matters to many people, in many places. I happen to be one of them.

What Vidal and Updike have in common with Baraka, besides a language and a tortured national history, is me, the devoted reader of good writing. In my moments of deep despair at the possibility that I will not be heard, that I will not be read, I am heartened by friends like Vidal and Mailer, by James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, Susan Sontag and now Toni Morrison, a recent discovery, but I can also count on the cool and gentle voice of John Updike, as he whispers in my ear:

"Have faith. May you surround yourself with parents, editors, mates, and children as tolerant and supportive as mine have been. But the essential support and encouragement of course come from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. ... "

I have things to say and you should hear them.

The Dionysian Trap and the Promise of Philosophy.

The image accompanying this post will probably been blocked. It may be found at: http://www.moviestarmovies.com/Images/MorganFreeman.jpg or http://www.hollywood.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/MF13.jpg

Orlando Patterson, "A Poverty of the Mind," in The New York Times, March 26, 2006, at p. 13.
Nicholas Kristoff, "A Woman Without Importance," in The New York Times, March 26, 2006, at p. 13.

I noticed an Op-Ed in the Times by Orlando Patterson focusing on young African-American males. Professor Patterson questions the accuracy of social scientific approaches -- when they are regarded as exclusively valuable and important -- in understanding educational failure among young minority men and their frequent turn to crime. The attractiveness of street culture ("The Dionysian Trap") may be more helpful on this issue.

Joblessness, poor housing and other "factors" that can be weighed and analyzed "statistically" are preferred by scholars seeking to avoid cultural (or, indeed, profoundly political) explanations of such phenomena. I think this is because such explanations are not considered sufficiently "rigorous" and are not the kind of "theories" or "studies" respected in academia, since they are hardly the concerns of serious scholarship in a scientific age. After all, the important thing for university professors is tenure and promotion, the social benefits and cognitive value of their works are deemed secondary. Politics, especially an engament with thinkers like Marx and Freud, may be a bad move, career-wise.

I agree that culture is probably as important as economics in explaining the tragedy of young urban males. African-Americans provide the model emulated by all other subcultures. Similarly, culture explains the curious mating rituals and behaviors among tenured faculty at Yale University. Culture is not something to ignore -- and yes, it is necessary to say this -- in seeking to understand human social behavior.

Young African-Americans or Latinos do not receive validation or respect (in Hegelian terms "recognition"), by knowing Elizabethan poetry. Such a curious interest -- if it is discovered -- is more likely to result in a "guy" getting his head bashed in. It is "uncool" to be bookish. Much more so today than in the past. Professor Patterson writes:

... a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes and behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and changing natures of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in their brutalized past. It is impossible to understand the predatory sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of those young men without going back deep into their collective past.

In a culture that identifies worth and merit, granting respect and status, solely on the basis of wealth or power (things which most of those young men do not have and are not likely to have) the only way to get the respect given to their white counterparts is through violence. Those white rivals are seen at the mall, with very attractive young women, purchasing all of the things that young minority men would also like to have. In the thinking of those young minority men, the only way to get respect is through violence and money. Money is acquired through violence. So is recognition from the very people who are, otherwise, contemptuous of those young men.

I have experienced that look of disdain and insulting disregard for one's opinions and status on the part of some affluent people in this society, long after I was young and indistinguishable from other urban males. Even (or especially) in upper middle class settings, there are humiliations for urban men. Minority men, no matter how accomplished, are in for some insults for the rest of their lives in American society, sometimes much worse.

When the same asshole who needed your help to survive a law school course is hired by the law firm that will not look at your resume and then treats you like shit when he sees you at the courthouse, pretending that he does not know you, you realize that this person is already an excellent candidate for the judicial position that he will occupy soon enough. Such a person will not be targeted for destruction by criminal conspiracies or experience the destruction of his writings by protected hackers. He will be deemed a "safe" player in the system, a guy who "goes along to get along." John?

As a young minority male, your parents will be lucky to pay the rent this month, so they can't help. The media "models" crime for you and your cultural heros solve all problems by kicking ass. What you have to be and do is not difficult to figure out under such circumstances. Hence, the attractiveness of a "gangster" life, which is intended by the culture to be attractive for young African-American and most poor young men. (Only one new "error" discovered so far.) Probably for the same reason that an Internet image of an African-American actor playing "God" in a movie is offensive enough to be obstructed when I try to post it in this blog. (See "New Jersey's KKK Police Shocker.")

No one is going to make you C.E.O. of Time/Warner at 16 (and the person who holds that job, incidentally, happens to be an African-American!), but you are convinced that in order to get that cheerleader to notice you, it is necessary to step out of a Benz' in an Armani suit, wearing a gold Rolex and your toughest expression, like Denzel Washington or Wesley Snipes, or like Andy Garcia in The Godfather III, or Al Pacino in Scarface. So what is the answer? How do you get those things?

You may decide to develop an elaborate plot in order to become what, you assume, she wishes you to be. You may get good grades, go to grad school, get a job in accounting, dress conservatively, work sixteen hours a day for twenty years and become Vice President in Charge of Marketing. However, the Machiavellian "payoff" (as it were) will not arrive until some point in your mid-fifties, if at all. This is "unsatisfactory," as they say in the therapeutic community.

Alternatively, you can go out and commit crimes and get money and recognition right away, except that you will probably be dead or in jail by the time you are twenty-five. McDonald's is not an option. Values at home do not come from "Dad," who not only does not know best, but is never around, because he is in jail, or dead.

Your mother works all day and half the night, but is lucky to be able to pay the rent and feed you. Sometimes the electricity gets shut off because it has not been paid for a few months. You may not have cable. Your clothes look like shit. There are no books in your home and it is always noisy, crowded, dirty. On Saturday nights the police show up to arrest one of the neighbors or maybe somebody in your home who "got a little rowdy."

You see your mother and other family members treated disrespectfully all the time. You are the subject of patronizing, insulting condescension on the part of persons of both genders who are morons, but are white, wear suits every day to work, live in the suburbs and drive a nice car. Everyone tells you that "politics is bullshit," America is "a lie," there is no "God," morality is about "getting yours because the other guy is going to get his," women are "all about the money and that's it," and you only get "respect and attention when you've got money."

I wonder why kids have trouble learning the right values these days?

The results are not difficult to predict or anticipate. Mysteriously, that young man will probably not do well on the SAT. Perhaps he will not go on to study cosmology at Princeton. I wonder why? That young man was me, to some degree. My solution years ago continues to be the solution of many others. "Splitting" or dividing the self into a persona that reads for four or five hours a day -- usually nothing related to the boring stuff at school -- goes to museums or films, writes or paints; and another persona that spends time with friends, in the old days doing idiotic, "young male" stuff, while trying to avoid serious trouble.

I actually believed in America's promise, in the reality of the legal process and in politics. My experiences have tempered my enthusiasm for the legal system, but (foolishly) I am still hopeful about America's promise. I say this after experiencing hacking, obstructions of my cable signal, insertions or "errors" and removal of letters from my essays, dozens of annoying phone calls from computerized telemarketers at all hours, including early Saturday morning phone calls from the "Hispanic Bar Association." I doubt it.

Many young men today will not make it to forty-six and standard disillusionment. Nihilism and apathy, crass materialism and violence, sexism (which makes both young men and women into victims), and persistent, insidious racism will destroy them, some more quickly than others. Yet this plague, this Holocaust afflicting young men and women of color will be ignored, for the most part, by society. It will be ignored by judges and courts contributing to the problem. It will be ignored by politicians, hoping to cut a deal to bring public expeditures to their districts, where they have many friends who are "contractors" of one sort or another, contractors who will find a way to show their appreciation. Right, Senator Bob?

Two million of our young men and women, overwhelmingly African-American and Latino, are in prisons. Corporations that are building and running those prisons -- usually hiring minority people as "frontpersons" -- will make a fortune, paid for with your tax dollars, for doing so. It is cheaper to send those young men and women to Harvard than to keep them locked up. Yet it is preferable to many in our society to incarcerate young minority males than to educate them. This is probably because of all the money that can be scammed by crooks profitting from the prison industry. Don't let them fool you about that. They -- afluent whites mostly -- want those scary kids in jail. Cops are there to protect them, they secretly believe, and not you in blue collar land. They have a point.

On the same page of the newspaper is an article about a young woman in Pakistan, kidnapped on her way home from school, forced into a brothel, beaten, raped, reduced to her sexual function, deprived of all self-esteem, kept naked in a bare room. She miraculously escaped her confinement, but is now a victim of social stigma in her society, nevertheless, because of this sexual assault on her.

She is now the target of litigation to restore her to the control of the loathsome brothel keeper, who will receive the assistance of police (who are paid off, just like in some American communities, for example, in many sections of New Jersey), and the help of courts, lawyers, judges in continuing to torture that young woman. Her sexual acts -- which were forced upon her -- are deemed to make her "unclean" and "sinful." Her sexuality is both her only source of identity and a category of guilt for this young Pakistani woman. Some things are universal, sadly, since women are even more disadvantaged than men in both the richest and poorest societies. They are demonized for the very sexuality that is, often, their only measure of worth or importance.

Much the same reduction to sexual function is true for young women in the United States, especially poor and minority girls. Those young women see, on a daily basis, women wearing highly revealing attire in nose-bleed heels, reduced by the media to their physical attractiveness. They see smiling mannequin-like "models" on red carpets, magazine covers, television. The women that girls are taught to admire are, essentially, sexual objects. Whatever their other achievements may be, they will be trivialized by comparison with issues of appearance.

The message is that your worth, as a young woman, depends on your sexual attractiveness and nothing else matters much about you. This is to make a young woman's dignity a function of the way mostly men regard her, of her physical attributes, and to turn physical appearance into the only meaningful source of self-esteem. This is also to make young women "obsolete" by age twenty-five. It goes a long way, in my mind, towards explaining bulimia and other eating disorders, together with related forms of self-destructiveness. As a father, this is a subject of some concern to me. At fifteen, my daughter has suddenly become a "vegan" and I worry about whether she eats well enough.

In Hollywood, a woman (regardless of how fine an artist she may be), is essentially finished as a leading actor or actress, whatever the preferred term is, by age thirty-five, forty tops. Exceptions are quite rare. The energy and work that is required to maintain physical attractiveness, sexuality that is agressive and yet not to appear as anything but innocent and "virginal," is all-consuming. The result is self-destructive behavior, promiscuity, and a mysterious lack of interest in studying Continetal philosophy at Duke.

When combined with the same nihilistic messages received by young men or the well-meaning relativism and empty, idiotic anti-male ideology of many so-called "radical feminists," or the "politically correct" thought police, it is unlikely that those young women will fare much better than their male counterparts. Bring Christian fundamentalists (with their tenth century solutions to contemporary social troubles) into the picture and the situation seems hopeless. All of these groups have agendas that have nothing to do with the wellfare of those young people, male or female, suffering from discrimination and sexism, alienation and confusion about values.

Violence for young men; sex for young women; that is what our society offers minority and poor kids. If they live in Scarsdale, Connecticut, of course, then these things will be taken up in middle age -- as they should be -- along with "art appreciation" courses at a local college.

Only one conclusion is possible: things are pretty fucked up. We need to think. We need to talk to one another. What is a good or truly human life? How are the values of love and beauty essential to such a life? How are we required to treat one another in order to live such a life? How can we think about these things today and about changing the culture, so as to allow young people to develop into healthy men and women? How can I be worthy or deserving of love? How should I love others? What do my answers to these questions have to do with being a "person"? Who do I trust, as a teacher, on these issues? What do I really want in life?

The greatest challenge is finding a way for that conversation to take place today, in a language that will make it accessible to those same young men and women. Hollywood's contribution to this discussion and assistance in meeting this challenge is essential. Cultural factors must become a component in any governmental or community project aimed at coping with these social ills. Aesthetic theory must be invoked too. Unfortunately, a documentary with Nancy Reagan advising kids to "just say no" is unlikely to solve the problem.

These areas of inquiry, like philosophy, are the playground of a lot of highly privileged people, mostly white men, who attend Harvard University and now wear bow ties to demonstrate their hipness. We must do better than this. We must rethink these issues, inviting everyone to a national, non-traditional conversation on these cultural and philosophical troubles that we face.

Maybe we should give a call to the Wachowski brothers ("let's do lunch!"), Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee and other film makers and shoot the breeze with them about developing films addressing these matters in new, philosophically aware and sophisticated ways, that are accessible to all, while still being financially successful. I know, I know ... film producers have kids too. A film about the life of James Baldwin is long overdue.

Now there is a subject worth thinking about. To quote the One: "Whoa ..."

What is elitism?

The image I hoped to provide to accompany this post featured a young African-American man, wearing a jacket and tie, carrying books to school. This image, and probably the film from which it is taken, is found offensive by racists. I hope that you will see it for that reason alone. Despite the difficulties in posting my essay this morning, I feel that it is important to say this today. We must make it possible for young African-Americans, especially, to acquire the education that will allow them to create the lives they deserve. It is in our interest, as a society, to do so. Please see my essays on Cornel West's philosophy. The image that some people do not want you to see is at this link: http://www.joblo.com/images_movie_reviews/finding_forrester.jpg

Finding Forrester (Columbia/Tristar 2000), PG-13, $12.95 (Tower/Borders).

The worst accusation that can be made against students or any of us these days is the charge of "elitism," which may come from the Left ("those conservative fundamentalists who insist on the study of Great Books are elitists!") or the Right ("the glitterati with their trendy values and anti-family attitudes are elitists!"). Like most people, I see the merits in each criticism. My tendency is to say that they are both right to some degree. Much depends on which specific examples are emphasized.

What is elitism? And is it a good or bad thing?

According to the Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Oxford: 1994), at p. 117: "Elitism" is the "view that the formation of elites in some sphere is desirable, and the status and privileges of existing elites are worth protecting." This is an ambiguous definition for an ambiguous concept, the first part of which should be detached from the second.

Is elitism ever desirable?

In the arts, sciences and sports, it may be inevitable. Yet certainly in terms of political rights or access to important institutions or economic opportunity, I am against elitism, as defined above. I am against the idea of "inherited" privilege, so-called "status" or social elites, based on birth-right. My populism is very American: there should be no landed aristocracy conferring special rights on some people from birth. No European-like aristocracies please. In fact, of course, some people are always better off than others, in every society and in countless ways. Some division into entrenched classes may be unavoidable in all human societies or even in social groupings. Compare two recent New York Times articles dealing with this issue: David Brooks, "Karl's New Manifesto," in The New York Times, Sunday, May 29, 2005, at p. 11 with Brent Staples, "A Short History of Class Antagonism In the Black Community," in The New York Times, Sunday, May 29, 2005, at p. 9.

As an ordinary person, I recognize unique talent or genius in others and celebrate it. If the term "elite" is used to describe Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jane Austen, Ludwig Beethoven, and so on, then it seems to me that there clearly are people who are pretty "elite," that is, natural "aristocrats" in terms of merit or talent. This is not an attack on the values of democracy or equality. It is just common sense. Every society has some stratification, as I said, probably based on unfairness at some point, and the United States is no exception.

It is better, from the point of view of material comforts and opportunities, tragically in some cases, to be born into the affluent "class" in America -- or anywhere for that matter -- than it is to be poor. I say "tragically" because poverty often results in the loss of scores of individual talents that might serve the community's interests. One feature of contemporary societies that is almost unbearably sad is the loss of human potential and the waste of millions of lives resulting from such evil stupidities as racism and illegitimate social hierarchies, not to mention the rigid applications of pet theories by social scientists, who are often blinded by those very theories to the human realities before them.

This does not make it right or good that there is social injustice, I hasten to add, nor does it mean that I approve of economic or other disparities in society. These things exist; I simply recognize them. I recognize also the obligation to struggle against such human tendencies in any way that we can. No matter what social class one is born into or the circumstances of one's early life, there will be trade-offs involved in one's development, that is, advantages and disadvantages will result wherever one happens to find oneself in the social hierarchy.

No one can be described as "elite" in every sense or in all ways, in terms of all talents and aptitudes. "No one is as stupid as an intellectual can be," said Talleyrand. If this is true -- and in politics it may be true -- then I suppose it is also the case that few poor people can be as careless with money as some rich people are, though not all. J. Paul Getty's remark that "a billion dollars is not what it used to be" springs to mind as the very definition of a miser. All the more so since the statement was made, allegedly, when the industrialist was having second thoughts about paying several hundred thousand dollars to ransom his son from kidnappers.

Whether it is called "elitist" or not, I think that young people should study "the best that has been thought and said," to the extent that experts can arrive at some general consensus on the list of works to which such a label may refer. And I am pretty sure that they can. Such a list will include persons of both genders, and of several racial, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. It will be "diverse," these days -- and it should be -- but it will also be made up of works that we all recognize to be great. The first author to be included on any such list, anywhere, must be Shakespeare.

Yes, some of these masterpieces will appeal more to one group of readers than another, but if books are truly great, then they will address universal human concerns and appeal to all intelligent or sensitive readers -- regardless of the accidents of race, class and gender -- provided that prospective readers have been given the education necessary to appreciate such works. The issue that should trouble us most is not whether there will be an elite in any society, since you can be pretty sure that there will be. What must concern us is to recognize the potential for achievement in persons excluded from power and social status by birth and do our best to equalize the opportunities available to such persons.

In a complex society, such as the United States, where so many competing "factions" (to use Madison's term) and communities jostle and prod each other in reaching for the proverbial "brass ring" of "success," the questions will be: 1) How is elitism to be defined? 2) Who is to be admitted to the ranks of the elite? and 3) How is admission to the institutions that provide the means by which to enter the elite class to be determined? And if we say by "merit," then we have merely moved the task of definition one step back: For then, how do we define "merit"?

Maybe the only way to get the training that leads to admission to America's "power" political or intellectual, economic or cultural elite (the 5% or so of the population that owns most of the real corporate wealth in the economy), is to wrestle with those great books in good schools and later on in life. It is at this point that the issue becomes especially thorny.

If education has a lot to do with access to the elite class in a society, and certainly this is true in the U.S., in the age of information, then the training that makes such admission possible may become a matter of right, but if everyone has a right to become an "elite" achiever, then what does the word really mean anymore? After all, somebody has to be average.

Equal rights to achievement -- by which I do not mean money earned -- may result in differential results of efforts for any number of reasons, most having little to do with talent. Equalizing opportunity should not preclude efforts to compensate for gross injustices in outcome, such as vast and absurd disparities in wealth. For this reason, I am a socialist.

There are obstacles and social injustices regarding access to elite universities that provide the poorest citizens and racial minorities with opportunities to enter the ranks of power and privilege. You cannot get into the great social world without a degree from a top-tier school, but you can not usually get into one of those schools -- even if you would normally deserve to be there -- unless you have had a solid and equally elite "prep" school education, which is simply out of reach for most poor and minority children's families. A small number of scholarship students will not be enough. Donating a million dollars to the alumni fund is also not an option, usually, for the families of minority students.

So in deciding who is an "elite" thinker and how you get to be one, societal economic and political factors have to be taken into consideration. This is not simply to grant Karl Marx his due, but to admit (once again) to what is common sense. For instance, it has been pointed out by one journalist:

"The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150, 000.00. According to the educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen [freshpersons?] at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in. [And again:] The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admission, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve [the ruling class,] the more they articulate the views of the Left."

"Karl's New Manifesto," at p. 11.

We can either sit around bemoaning the fact that "life is unfair" (which it is) and complaining that too many "White European Males" form a part of the curriculum at elite schools, which may also be true; or we can work to make sure that more people from the bottom of the social hierarchy (including poor whites) and more minority group members get to top schools, so they can complain about the "White European Males" on their way to Wall Street and a life of affluence. Ideally, through greater access to education, we may even come to live in a society where there is less disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest of us.

True, at this time, greater social equity seems like a remote possibility. Nevertheless, we can work to make sure that the number of persons burdened with spiritual as well as material poverty through inadequate or non-existent education, a condition depriving them also of the chance for meaningful participation in the cultural and intellectual life of their communities -- thus, effectively, silencing them, which is a powerful form of oppression in itself -- that this number is diminished as much as possible. In his now classic work (which is new to me) The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse ...

"... urged black intellectuals and artists to establish their own institutions and reclaim black American culture from those who sought to appropriate it. 'The special function of the Negro intellectual is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white middle class who has poisoned the structural roots of the American ethos and transformed the American people into a nation of intellectual dolts.' "

Rachel Donato, "The Cultural Revolutionary," in The New York Times, Book Review, Sunday, May 29, 2005, at p. 19.

Even those of us whom Mr. Cruse might well classify as "intellectual dolts" can see his point. "The best that has been thought and said" is the birth-right of each human being born into this world and must be made available to people, to the greatest possible extent, so that we can then discover all of those potential "elites" that, like diamonds in the rough, are only in need of a little polishing in order to sparkle.

In American society, the obligation to make these great educational institutions available -- especially to African-American students before all others, in my opinion -- is simply a moral imperative, given our tragic history of African slavery and its aftermath. We should all be happy about a societal decision to provide extra or supplemental educational opportunities to African-Americans at elite universities, as a matter of moral obligation and at society's expense.

If African-Americans cannot expect reparations for slavery any time soon, then at least they should expect a concern from those with knowledge of history and moral sense to repair the injuries that are STILL inflicted on these people (and, therefore, on all of US) -- since these are our fellow citizens, our brothers and sisters -- by the hideous legacy of slavery and pervasive (if increasingly subtle) forms of racism, which continues to exist and to destroy lives. For selfish reasons this makes sense too. Our next Albert Einstein or Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez or Susan Sontag may be wasting away in a barrio or poor neighborhood, unable to read or solve simple mathematical equations because of skin color.

We always need a few more diamonds to sparkle in the light.

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption."

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Raymond Chandler.

All of us are actors. We play roles every day in our normal lives. I am a husband, father, son, writer and lots of other things. You probably have just as many or more roles to play in your life. As Hamlet complains, we "jig, amble and lisp." Yet none of these roles that we play exhausts the human capacity for role-playing. For many of us, exactly like great actors, no single role ever touches to the very bottom of the self. Whatever the self may be -- assuming that there even is one self for each of us -- we may never come to know it fully. We must be something more than the roles that we play in society.

Among our roles are those that we associate with gender. We behave as "men" are supposed to behave; or we are "lady-like," or "demure," as one of my professors once said to the women in my law school class not so long ago. Yes, I am aware of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Half-wits and psychologists (a redundancy?) will ask: "Does that mean that you're gay?" No, it means that I am a human being. A person is something more complex than your simplistic psychobabble categories and jargon will allow. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.") Oscar Wilde comments on the mask-like quality of gender in society and on stage.

Of all the motives of dramatic curiosity used by our great playwrights, there is none more subtle or more fascinating than the ambiguity of the sexes. To say that only a woman can portray the passions of a woman, and that therefore no boy can play Rosalind, is to rob the art of acting of all claims to objectivity, and to assign to the mere accident of sex what properly belongs to imaginative insight and creative energy.

The greatest Hamlet on film for me, is Kenneth Branagh's version with Kate Winslet as "Ophelia." I would stand on line for days to purchase tickets for a stage performance of the play with Ms. Winslet as "Hamlet." It will never happen, but a fantasy film in my mind is Hamlet with an all-American cast, starring Melanie Griffith as the troubled Prince of Denmark. In fact, Hamlet's sensitivity and "adolescent" emotions (T.S. Eliot) may be beyond the grasp of all but a few great male actors in the post-Hemingway era. It takes a powerful and very "feminine" freedom with feelings to play that part, which is something that most men these days cannot achieve.

The word "persona" originally meant the masks worn by tragedians in the theaters of ancient Greece. We all have real faces (presumably) behind the masks that we wear. Yet none of us can say for ourselves what our private faces are really like, because we only know ourselves from the "inside" whereas others see us from the "outside." There are masks for others and masks for ourselves, masks that we wear and masks that wear us. "The man who wears a mask," Oscar Wilde reminds us, "will come to resemble it." Are judges getting this? ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Senator Bob Struggles to Find His Conscience.")

The fascinations of a mask are explored in works of art as diverse as Phantom of the Opera or The Mask of Zorro. I am reminded also of Yukio Mishima's The Confessions of a Mask. In solitude, of course, we allow our masks to slip. We slide out of our social disguises, permitting our actions and natures to be seen dispassionately -- if only by ourselves -- or by God, if He is "out there." (My review of V for Vendetta was destroyed by censors from the Garden State, after they had plagiarized it.)

Solitude offers a liberation from the pressures to make ourselves attractive to others. We all arrange our personas so as to beguile and charm others, to make others smile or feel happy, especially when we are sad or in despair. We try to fit in to a context, in order to become whatever is deemed "normal" for as long as we are interested in that context.

There is a little bit of Leoncavallo's "Canio" (from Pagliacci) in all of us, forced to see ourselves in the mirror as we remove the grease paint and bright costume of the day, costumes worn always for the benefit of others, who like it when we make them laugh. By helping them to forget their troubles, we may escape our own. Dustin Hoffman asked Laurence Olivier in a moment of exhaustion: "Why do we do it, this acting thing?" With a smile, Olivier responded -- "Why? Look at me, look at me, look at me! That is why."

We all feel this need to be seen; also not to be seen. Actors feel this contradiction more intensely than the rest of us. Perhaps politicians and judges do too. In espionage novels, the "agent" is always "undercover," pretending to be something other than what he or she is, in a world where nothing is what it seems. One thinks, again, of Shakespeare's dramas and, even more, of his comedies. Both John Le Carre and Graham Greene, also Joseph Conrad, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have exploited this espionage setting to dramatize issues of identity and metaphors of imaginative self-creation that now seem increasingly timely and relevant for all of us, spies and non-spies alike. We live in a time when all of us are "undercover" and in disguise. Every writer, especially Shakespeare, reveals truth by disguising it in illusion. (See "The Taming of Somebody" and "Is there a problem about fictional discourse?")

To be seen, we must be willing to appear in an unguarded, vulnerable, morally naked state. In a world filled with torturers and racists, who would reduce us to stereotypes and epithets, this is impossible. It takes a great deal of courage for a person to reveal him- or herself. By doing so -- by asking to be seen by the Other -- we are also inviting that Other to see him- or herself. It is not easy even to write some of these blog essays for Internet consumption, especially in light of non-comprehending and hostile responses, even attempts at censorship, one is likely to experience. Every writer must feel this way sometimes. Perhaps in a climate of hatred, it is impossible for any of us to become who we are, so we withdraw into the theater of the psyche.

Who are we really? If we are merely the persons others can observe and claim to know, as Hume and Skinner might suggest, then we need to be clear about exactly which group of others this might be. The people who know us privately, do not know us publicly. Those who know us professionally, do not know us socially. Those who know us intimately are not aware of us as economic or political agents. Each group of friends or close "strangers" knows a "character," a performance, a mask. Perhaps this is just as well, for their protection and our own.

If as Sartre says, "the self is only in the world" and ceases to exist as soon as we withdraw from the world, then each of us must achieve that withdrawal occasionally in order to really know him- or herself. Persons burdened with the blessings and curse of great fame may appreciate this point. Traditionally, the knowledge of God was regarded as equally impossible in society -- and for similar reasons -- because of the unreality of the world and of ourselves as actors in it. No external perspective will reveal my most fundamental reality, which can only be "seen" by someone I love, or with love. Love is the only force permitted to enter all of the secret places in the magic castle of my self. My guess is that the same is true for most people, especially for all survivors of childhood trauma. (See "Beauty and the Beast.")

Even in private we are still reacting to social expectations. We examine our actions, yes, but only in order to improve the performances that we will eventually give. All good performances are intended to communicate truth. It may be that in the absence of others, there would be no need for a performance at all, no need for a self. No identity would need to be fashioned and protected, but only a pure being would have to be achieved. Such a thing is almost inconceivable.

Wittgenstein insisted that "there can be no private languages." Perhaps there can also be no identifiable self dwelling, like the Edwardians, in "splendid isolation." We need others to confirm our identities, to confirm who and what we are, to confirm our choices. Others serve as mirrors for the psyche, even as we do the same for them. Others must respond to an embodied self. The Other sees a body enter the room. (See R.D. Laing on "petrifaction" and "ontological insecurity.") The world sees a person of a particular age, gender, economic class, well-groomed or not. To be embodied is to be limited. It is to be seen. But it is also not to be seen, for it is only a physical body that is seen.

I remember a Mel Gibson character disfigured in an accident, who points to his face and says: "If this is what you see, then you don't see me." For a handsome movie star to say this is poignant because one realizes that the same must be true in his "real" life -- for different reasons -- and in the lives of so many others. How many women can say the same? Many. If you see only the external trappings of a self, then you do not see the artist creating that self. And to the extent that you create an identity in society, you also are an artist.

When I say "limited," I mean that these embodied characteristics serve as constraints on self-creation, so I resent them. The "postmodern" ambition is absolutist: we desire a total freedom of identity. We want to be all things human -- and impossibly -- to be limited to none. We do not wish to be pinned down to one physical identity as opposed to another. It is because I am male that I cannot be female; because I am a Westerner of European ancestry that I cannot be African or Asian; because I am middle class and casually dressed that I cannot be in a blue suit from Brooks Brothers at the same time, or in traditional Arab or Japanese garb.

I can only act on the world or see it and express myself from my "perspective." Every perspective is incomplete, only partial and hence, unsatisfactory. Yet this recognition alone tells us of an objectivity that transcends such perspectives, a center of value that is everywhere. This is to reach for the Sartrean notion of a totalization. We cannot help being haunted by the hope for an impossible freedom, arising from an absolute realization of one's identity in community. But is there such a thing at all? Or is this only another example of what Sartre describes as the "universal desire to be God"? (No, Freudians this is not meant literally, except for psychiatrists perhaps.) The reading list on this issue includes Nietzsche, Foucault, Artaud and Vidal, maybe also Michael Frayn and Julian Barnes.

The development of computer technology has done much to liberate us from these limitations of the body and to make the dream of an imaginative freedom in art and life -- if not our "ambitions of divinity" -- a bit more plausible. For the first time in human history millions have been emancipated from the condition of imprisonment within the corporeal, physical envelope of the body, thus allowing us to pursue meaningful interactions with others, who are similarly disembodied, in cyberspace.

Computers allow us to reconsider our identities in the age of the Internet (the "Matrix"?). We no longer give commands to a machine, but we enter into "dialogues" -- sometimes "personal" ones -- with "friends" located (what does "located" mean in the computer age?) in different countries and cities. We navigate simulated worlds. We create virtual realities. All of this through the use of language, we exist in (or become?) "simulacra." (Baudrillard)

Computers allow us not only to communicate and exchange ideas with others, but also to assume personae of our own creation. (See "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.") Computers permit us to hide physically, while also revealing aspects of ourselves not seen in our daily lives, like Cyrano writing letters by proxy and in code to Roxanne. (See the image accompanying this essay -- if it has not been blocked by New Jersey's evil minions.)

I wonder how many readers of Internet texts realize all of the levels of communication taking place right here and now, the many messages being conveyed, simultaneously, to different recipients in this one text? Not many, I am sure. There is one person, at least, who will understand.

Computers permit us to become something different, to become the Other. Computers invite us to reverse Nietzsche's dictum and "become the persons we are not." Maybe this is another way of describing acting. We are transformed in cyberspace into disembodied and perspectiveless perceivers, finally achieving what Thomas Nagel describes as "the view from nowhere." One is reminded, once more, of Sartre's maxim that every human being "wishes to be God."

We discover, however, that such a view from "nowhere" is always only an illusion. It is the illusion of art. Every perspective must be rooted somewhere, in some essence or center, which need not be geographical or empirical. For instance, to be "middle-class" is to have a perspective, but not a geographical one. Like Dorothy on her return from Oz, we discover that the bluebird of happiness was always in our own backyard.

This amounts to saying that the only way to discover what is universal is to discover what is particular in ourselves. (See "Elaine Pagels and the Secret Texts of Christianity.") In cyberspace everyone is a dualist, both a body and mind. The "body" is simply invented, from free-floating images. Neither body nor mind is to be found, by the way, when the other is around on the Internet, so the trick is to come to terms with the protean nature of the self. The Other, the screen self, is a use of language.

But then, we step through the mirror and discover that identity is always a fiction, a thing made with smoke and mirrors, a conjuror's trick. All of us are actors. Every attempt to capture and define a self, is doomed to fail. This is especially true when the attempt is made by those who wish to imprison us in their categories. What others -- except for a very few others -- can seize and hang on to, will no longer be me. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

It is now up to us to create the narratives in which we acquire the meanings or identities that we wish to inhabit. Best of all, there are no limits. Sherry Turkle has examined this phenomenon in several books: The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1991) and Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995). In these works, Professor Turkle traces a set of boundary negotiations telling the story of the growing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies and machines.

Professor Turkle asserts that the new sense of identity is "decentered and multiple." She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people's experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, Other, machine and world. "The computer emerges," according to Ms. Turkle, "as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth." The Internet serves to mediate between a role-playing public self and the more honest and free private self. The relevance of this analysis to the mind/body discussions found elsewhere in this blog should be obvious.

My screen self is both an entity that exists "out there" -- in cyberspace -- and "in here," within the confines of my personal space, because both belong to and come together in the very ordinary person sitting at his keyboard, wearing a forties hat, sipping some strong coffee on a lovely morning in New York. I am wearing my "Batman" underwear. Except that it is now midnight and I am wearing a black costume and mask. Suddenly, I am transformed into the exact replica of Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Imagination is the ultimate light saber. Imagination prevents us from being hurt because it allows us to escape the scrutiny of those who are incapable of understanding the adventure that they are asked to share. I have suggested that actors and all artists are great psychologists. This is because persons rich in imagination are able to enter the imaginary world of others. (Relax, Freudians.) Politicians and lawyers also live in dream landscapes, usually featuring elaborate costumes. This is to say nothing of the fantasy world of business and finance where people "buy money." (With what, I wonder?)

Human beings canot help shaping and constructing what they call their "realities." Reality is simply unbearable for many of us, if it cannot be relieved by the "magic" of dreams and intuitions, not to mention the ultimate reality-altering (and reality-creating) power, which is "love." To borrow a term from recent cinema, think of this reality-altering power as "tuning." (See Dark City.) I will turn every evening with a woman I love into a romantic comedy, so that she will be happy. Yet I will also find a way to let her see all there is inside me.

Sir Ralph Richardson was asked about his stunning performance as Shakespeare's "Falstaff," he paused (an actor's pause), and whispered ... "at 7:30 P.M., as the curtain rises, you must dream." As I place my fingers on the keyboard and see words appear before my eyes, magically, I say: "I must dream." This is the special enchantment reserved for children and those injured in childhood -- it is never for those who hate -- it is the capacity to enter "Neverland" at will, by dreaming, while still being wide awake. This enduring cpacity to laugh, dream, and create is enough to inspire absolute hatred and the venom of persons whose death-like reality of evil I describe as a barrel of shit. I would rather die than be what they are. (See Finding Neverland.)

At what point does the writer meet his character, the screen persona? How about the author and reader in any text? Do they meet at all? Where is the boundary today between human and technology? Will our technological extensions of human capacities change the human essence? Or have they already done so?

We can only find what is universally human, as I say, by finding ourselves. This is not a task that can be forced upon a person nor can it be accomplished through torture. I can only manage my anger or pain and express them -- also my hopes and dreams -- through the mysteries of philosophy and literature, by writing. The same is true of my sense of self. Others can do so by acting, painting, or by doing scientific work, or arguing in court. In opening his memoirs, for example, Gore Vidal writes:

... if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not sure that I have known even one person well, but, as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.