Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 22:19:08 -0400
From: Stirling Newberry <allegro-AT-thecia.net>
Subject: Re: PLC: Advisory Board for PHIL-LIT


Earlier someone stated that "he did not care why" Myers et al were doing as
they did. This is a mistake, knowing why tehy are doing what they are doing
- for personal agrandisement - is essential.

Myer's wants to create an area which looks like one of the "gardens of the
interenet" but is really a place for him t hold court talking about his
particular brand of academic philosophy. He is far from the only person
trying to do this. Whether he, and others, are successful depends to no
small extent on the quality of discussion outside of their reach.

It is - in minatureand minor  form - the anrachy - dictatorship -democracy
quandry. Anarhcy looks superficially like democracy, to the point where
those who want to control events will claim that they are the same. People
who want anarchy often aid and abet this by trying to claim that democracy
is best served by anarchy. The oligarch then claims "We need Law and
Order", and people support them, because they would prefer law and order to
getting nothing done, to anarchic civil war and sniping.

The democratic response is to be organised with out the repression
associated with it. To set aside those mechanisms, however effective they
might seem in the short run, which are in the long run destructive to the
larger purpose.

Today I spent some time at the Early Picasso exhibit now at the Museum of
Fine Arts. At the time the modern was emerging, there were groups of people
dedicated to it. We, growing up in the Modern, have a romanticised version
of that past, and are constantly looking for the place where the next wave
off avant-garde is comeing from, the place where it is "happening".

But there is never any such place unless there is a core of people to make
it. Such a core does not come about unless it is possible for the kinds of
thinkers and artists who will do things to inhabit it. Most people dream of
knowing the next Mahler or Brecht or Piccaso. In truth they would prefer to
be with the next Salieri.

This is a basic conflict. The reducition to psuedo profoudn communalisation
of existing dogmas is the most congenial of companies. Everyone can have
their say, everyone's say, since it is a reflection of that past, is
respected. Everyone is paraphrasing already existing ideas, and so they can
be concise and clear. Everyone feels listened to and happy.

There is a cottage industry on the internet growing up to supply the
illusion of being close to an intellectual core. In truth the kind of
fights which are a routine part of any such place would not be permitted in
the kind of fuzzy pseudo-salon atmosphere which is being sold - a kind of
Starbucks of intelligent salon conversation.

Big egos don't bother me. I have one, most of the people who I have ever
known who have gotten something done have one, or develop one through their
work. The confusion between pride in ones accomplishment, and ones own
infallibility does bother me, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for it.
No one - regardless of the number of awards or honors is beyond reproach,
especially since such objects are often given out for low quality work that
happens to make people happy. The retreat to who is an insider and who is
not being the standard for how a person's ideas are received and treated is
pernicious and counter-productive. The establishment of double standards is
destructive to free inquiry, and the forming of little cliques of people
who go after someone whose "tone" tehy don't like - while doing much worse
among themselves is corrosive to intellectual hoesty. And yet because of
the motion towards the reducing everything to social relationships - that
is what we have reached.

Myer's list is an implicit criticism, it is a criticism of open discussion
and debate, attempting to declare that it will only lead to open warfare
and open hypocrisy. The only response to such a criticism is to do better.

If Mr. Trail wants to know who I am lecturing - it is myself. If he does
not have the humility to realise that some of these points might also apply
to a person who rights rhetoric texts on one hand and then breaks his own
rules on the other, then he is doomed to watch the sort of people like
Myers rise up and take over. If he wants to watch the ideas he has spent a
lifetime developing and teaching over come by Myer's burbling about the
whichness of wherefore in a semi-catagorical mode, then he can continue to
sneer at people who do not kiss his backside. He can continue to operate
under the delusion that he can simply smear and sneer at them and claim
that they are nothing at all. Otherwise - he will have to consider another
course.

Earlier my analysis of the problems with intellectual life in this country
were met with open contempt, my advocacy for reform sneered at and slapped
down with accusations of mental instability or suggestions I could be
bought off. I will now say clearly that the enemy of academic honesty is
not people like me - but people like Myers. Because they are selling the
kind of superficial connection to what seems like intellectual conversation
- people will buy it, unless better is available.




Stirling Newberry
business: openmarket.com
personal: allegro-AT-thecia.net
War and Romance: http://www.thecia.net/users/allegro/public_html




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