Huck Finn and democratic self-making

Once upon a time (really last October, but it seems like a long time to me), when I was still thinking about what to propose for a dissertation, I considered the link between con-men, or the more optimistically phrased "self-made men," and democratic childhood and authority. These are not obviously related, but if you think briefly about two important American books - Franklin's Autobiography and Huck Finn, you may begin to see a relationship between childhood, adult authority (or lack thereof), self-making and democracy. Unfortunately, this would be a lot like writing a dissertation, or part of a dissertation, on my favorite real life topic: frauds and impostors. More importantly, it didn't seem like the kind of thing that would interest many political theorists, and it would cause many other logistical problems for me on top of that. So, it was dropped.

But Paul Cantor has a nice essay on Huck Finn in the CRB that captures many of these points:

A Mississippi River pilot named Samuel Clemens reconfigured himself as a writer named Mark Twain, and the rest is literary history. Clemens was in fact one of the first to understand that in a democratic society a man might use the modern media to invent himself as a celebrity. In Twain's presentation, America is a land of disguises. As a runaway slave, Jim in particular must continually be kept under wraps. In a bizarre development—of whose irony Twain must have been aware—Jim ends up dressed in the theatrical costume of King Lear. One of the central motifs of Huckleberry Finn is the theatricality of democratic America. People are constantly playing roles in public, and changing their identities seems no more difficult than changing their costumes.
...
That is why nobody knows for sure anymore who anybody is in Huckleberry Finn. In the aristocratic world of the old regime in Europe, most people were immobile, tied to the land. That is what it meant to be a serf... But Twain's America is a land of wide-open spaces and that makes it much easier to become an impostor, a stranger in a strange land. This is perhaps the best example of how all the criminality in Huckleberry Finn is linked to the new democratic freedom and mobility. This explains why the con man has been such a central American theme. Before Twain, Herman Melville had chosen to title a novel about America The Confidence-Man. And con men have been a mainstay of American popular culture, especially its comedies, as the films of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers attest.
...
At least in democracy there is a chance of unmasking the imposture. The king and the duke are not really convincing in their aristocratic roles, largely because they were not born to them. As Huck explains to Jim, men born as kings make the most successful impostors. In Twain's view, aristocracy simply is fraud; it is all an illusion, based on mere externals, based on show, as again Huck explains to Jim: "I read considerable to Jim about kings, and dukes, and earls, and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, ‘stead of mister." For Twain, aristocracy is by its very nature imposture, some men claiming falsely that they are born to rule over others. But people bred to rule seem to do a better job of convincing others to accept their slavery. That is why, in the debate between aristocracy and democracy, Twain ultimately comes down on the side of democracy. Democratic life enables certain forms of imposture, but these are an aberration and can be exposed. As we see in the case of the king and the duke, in a democracy the inferiority of those with aristocratic pretensions is more obvious. But, in an aristocracy imposture is a way of life; it is the foundation of the regime. America does pay a price for building a new nation, but for Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn that price is worth paying for the sake of leaving the old regime of slavery in Europe behind.

I'm increasingly skeptical of the "immobile aristocracy of ye olden days" trope, which never seems to point to any particular moment in time when Europeans were strapped down to their villages. For one thing, it seems to me that few humanist writers between 1400-1700 stayed at home, and some ranged quite widely. We might say these were some kind of elite, which is true, but they didn't necessarily have to be born into the nobility to become such, they only needed to pursue a university education, which seems to be the impetus for much of their wandering. Consider, for example, the life of Thomas Platter, or John Comenius. Aristocracy persisted long after the decline of serfdom in England and France, so is it an age of powerful nobility to which we refer, or an age of feudalism, or just any age where social hierarchy is visible and unchallenged?

But Cantor's is an intriguing conclusion about the greater ability of democrats to detect impostors, and I think very much in line with my own view, frequently repeated here, that we should not rush to make impermeable whatever barrier has been breached by the most recent revelations of impostordom. We should not run background checks on all applicants to college, or call up the universities from which every job candidate claims to have a degree. This is the first impulse of victims of a con - tighten security so it never happens again! But if the very quality of the regime that creates impostors is also the one which unmasks them, then we ought to feel less paranoid about the dangers of letting a few slip through our fingers.

The very small number of decent movies streaming on Netflix: an incomplete list

Occasionally, I get free month-long trials for Netflix, which usually extend to two months because I forget to cancel them until I see the charge on my credit card, and then promptly kill that money-sucker. This month a free trial was occasioned by the release of the disappointing fourth season of Arrested Development. But usually, the free trial is activated so that I can re-watch the first five seasons of Buffy for the eleventyeth time. Whatever the initial purpose however, I use these free trials to watch as many movies as possible, in a storing up acorns for winter kind of way, since I normally see about three movies a year.

The problem with this strategy is that Netflix has a worse selection of instantly streaming movies than a small-town public library in Wyoming. I have watched the first 20 minutes of so many terrible movies, I can't even count them. Practically the only public service Netflix streaming performs beyond allowing you to watch all the episodes of Buffy in one surreal weekend is hosting the first movies of some subsequently good directors (Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman), some Monty Python movies, and the (incomplete) library of classic high school flicks of the 1980s.

So, as a service to others like me (should any such exist), here is a list of non-terrible movies available on Netflix instant, rated according to James Bowman's extremely useful simplified system of see/don't see, except there are no zero star films here because "don't see" is the Netflix baseline, so there are only 2 stars (good movie), and 1 star (decent movie). These are mostly limited-release movies, but since anything released before about 1995 is limited to me on account of my having been either unborn or pre-conscious then, you will have to pardon some older but more popular inclusions as well.

1. Metropolitan **
2. Lust, Caution **
3. Heathers *
4. Tiny Furniture **
5. Ping Pong Playa * (** for simple but effective jokes though)
6. Jesus Henry Christ *
7. Bottle Rocket *
8. The Lost Embrace * (there used to also be other Burman movies available, but apparently no longer)

If you can think of more, let me know. Because I will probably watch them.

ADDENDUM: Commenters and emailers reminded me of/suggested to me some more:
Paper Chase **
Life in a Day*

Observations on the very small number of decent movies Netflix streams

Heathers is not a movie that could be made in the present. First there is the bullying and rampant classmate-killing. Then there is the use of suicide for satire. And as if that all weren't bad enough, all the teachers are shown smoking, indoors.

And I think it goes without saying that this exquisite funeral garb doesn't help:

John Adams on the French Revolution

For Withywindle and fellow inveterate pessimists, a letter from John Adams to Samuel Adams*:

New York, 12 September, 1790. 

Dear Sir,— 

Upon my return from Philadelphia, to which beloved city I have been, for the purpose of getting a house to put my head in next winter, I had the pleasure of receiving your favor of the second of this month. The sight of our old Liberty Hall and of several of our old friends, had brought your venerable idea to my mind, and continued it there a great part of the last week; so that a letter from you, on my arrival, seemed but in continuation... 

What, my old friend, is this world about to become? Is the millennium commencing? Are the kingdoms of it about to be governed by reason? Your Boston town meetings and our Harvard College have set the universe in motion. Every thing will be pulled down. So much seems certain. But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? What are they? Were Voltaire and Rousseau masters of them? Are their disciples acquainted with them? Locke taught them principles of liberty. But I doubt whether they have not yet to learn the principles of government. Will the struggle in Europe be any thing more than a change of impostors and impositions? 

With great esteem and sincere affection,
I am, my dear sir, your friend and servant, 

John Adams.

*This is as good a place as any to note that, in a modern secular sense, the Liberty Fund is doing what was once called God's work by collecting, republishing, and digitizing all of early modern thought, and if I ever have more than $5 to donate to worthy causes, the Online Library of Liberty will have to be a primary beneficiary of my largess.

The pressing questions of our age, 6

Are bubble necklaces essentially an ineffective feminine version of chainmail? And further, do they serve any aesthetic function to which a scarf would not be obviously better suited?

Chicago

Just got back from a few weeks in the healthful studiousness of the U of C academic cloister, where you can write 10 pages a day (note to present and future dissertaters) to insistently "laid back" and sticky-hot San Diego. Now moving on to Filmer, absurd culmination of early modern absolutism. If blogging is not light, you will know that I am slacking.

In the meantime, you can read the epic U of C Core thread at Phoebe's blog.

Finally, sights of Hyde Park:

The sexy history of the civilization of women

Since I've been hanging out at the U of C for the past couple of weeks, I thought I'd revisit the Maroon after long neglect to see whether it can produce any absurdity comparable to the Crimson's daily output. And, yes: the university will be offering a new civilization sequence in something called, “Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations.” But what is the civilization of women, or the civilization of sexuality, or the sexual civilization of gender? One of the faculty in charge of the sequence explains:

“We decided to go with Civilizations because of the very interdisciplinary and diverse nature of gender and sexuality,” Zerilli said. “They are a fundamental part of existence, and without them, there would be no civilization whatsoever.”

Well, yeah. There are a lot fundamental parts of existence without which there would be no civilization whatsoever - air, water, fire, humans, agriculture, art, war, government, etc. But either these things are too sub-civilizational to study historically ("Oxygen in World Civilization"), or they are already part of the content of the historical study of a civilization, as indeed, are gender and sexuality.

The College's definition of a civilization deviated from what I assume were its Burckhardtian origins some time ago, at least as indicated by its course offerings: there is Euro Civ and Ancient Mediterranean Civ, offered separately even though one could opt to take them together in Western Civ, a different course. There is America in Western Civ, which was more or less just American history with initial starting points in England. And then there are the modified Civs offered on study abroad programs, which are narrower versions of the campus offerings that focus on the site-specific history of the country or region in which you are drinking and partying for the quarter. But these variations retained a view that civilization is the history of a particular place and the various poleis that have planted themselves there over time, and it can be understood by reading the texts it produced (or looking (drunkenly) at sites, if you are abroad).*

It seems that by definition then, there could not be a course in "World Civilization," except either relative to  "Martian Civilization," or as a 12-quarter sequence that combined all the other world Civs into a vast History of the Entire World. (Actually, that could be kind of great. As a serial enrollee in Chicago's Civ courses, most of which I really liked, I could get behind that, though maybe not as a College-wide requirement.)

Nor can civilization be redefined as Universal Topic in Specific (or, in this case, Universal) Civilization, because that is just a thinly-disguised and lazy version of a course on the History of Universal Topic. The history of universal topic, be it ladies, sex, music, colonization, science (the latter three being already existing Civ options) is precisely the opposite of what is meant by the history of a civilization. Civilizational history is by definition temporal and contextual - how Greek city-states led to Greek empires while the Roman republic became the Roman Empire which ate the Greek empire and the rest of the world and then was eaten by Christianity and so on** - whereas histories of topics are a cross-civilizational comparison - the social role of women in the Inca Empire vs. the social role of women in modern France. (Incidentally, this is also the worst possible approach to history since it has no necessary temporal dimension at all. Social roles of women simply float free across the globe like hot-air balloons. And this is just how the Civilization of Women course will apparently be organized - into "thematic clusters.") There is nothing wrong with building regular college courses around universal topics, but there is something demented about calling universal topics by the name "civilizations." There is no Civilization of Women, or Colonial Civilization, or Musical Civilization.

It seems pretty clear from this article that turning their plain old department-housed topical courses into Universal Topic in Universal Civilization courses is a good way for faculty to expand enrollment in courses about their own specialties by offering Core credit for them. This is exactly what's done at Harvard with Gen Ed courses - persuade the registrar to allow your class to fulfill the "ethical reasoning requirement" and watch your enrollment climb. There is in principle no limit to the number or content of courses that could fulfill the "ethical reasoning requirement," since the requirement is only intended to be a capacious placeholder for whatever the faculty want to offer, so why not sneak your own course in, whether or not it was designed with the requirement or any conception of a general education in mind? If the popularity of Gender Studies warrants calling it a Civilization, maybe the vacuousness of the Core warrants calling it Gen Ed requirements?

*I think Music in Western Civ and Science in Western Civ were already available when I was there, so this is not exactly a new development. Universal Topic in Universal Civ is a further extension.
** No complaints about the tendentious interpretation, please.

First world problems: I'd rather die than be required to stop overdosing

Harvard students ask a question for the ages: how do you expect me to get medical care when I have made myself dangerously ill (again) if I have to have "awkward" encounters with the medical staff? This is unjust. I am entitled to unlimited alcohol poisoning treatment, no questions asked. When you say "no consequences" for showing up unconscious at urgent care, you need to be consistent: no consequences, even if it's my third time there this week:

Several others said that the policy—along with the prospect of further meetings with deans and parents—may be a deterrent in deciding whether to seek help. “There’s a thought of, ‘Why bring them to UHS if I can take care of them better myself?’ That way they have no disciplinary issues to deal with,” said Adam O. Brodheim ’16. 

Juan E. Bedoya ’16 said that he has taken care of several friends who were inebriated, but chose not to take them to University Health Services because of the potential awkwardness of talking to an administrator after an incident relating to alcohol. 

Another freshman, who was granted anonymity by The Crimson to protect her roommate’s privacy, said she has been hesitant to use UHS after her roommate’s second trip to Stillman Infirmary. “The Dean in our Yard gave her the ultimatum that if she had to go one more time there would be serious repercussions,” she said. “So even though she has abused alcohol in a scary and dangerous way since then, my friends and I don’t want to take her to UHS because we don’t want to be the reason she gets asked to leave.”

And they do have a point, in their blockheaded way. The university's claim to "encourage students to place health and safety above all else" is ambiguous. Is prioritizing health and safety a matter of prevention, or of emergency treatment? Some might say that one way to place health and safety above all else is to assume that personal responsibility is possible, and to punish unhealthy and unsafe behavior like drug use and binge drinking accordingly. But Harvard disagrees, presumably because it believes that unhealthy and unsafe behavior is so widespread and unavoidable that the only option is to intervene in emergencies to prevent fatalities arising from irresponsibility, since death is the most unhealthy outcome of all. Perhaps a commitment to emergency intervention is at odds with emergency prevention? In the meantime, those who prefer the homeopathic remedies of college freshmen for their alcohol poisoning are encouraged to befriend the individuals interviewed for this article.

When Locke met Hobbes

Lest you become convinced that I'm encouraging the overthinking of academic frauds at the expense of delighting in them, I should add that what impostors also do is give us ideas for own careers when, due to our slowness of dissertation progress, we, like A.D. Harvey, fail to ever get an academic job and are forced to live, scorned, in the shadow of the academy. Should this eventuality befall me, do not be surprised if the following series of events unfolds:

An article will appear in the Journal of the History of Political Thought about Hobbes's theories of optics. In the sixth* paragraph, passing mention will be made that Hobbes at the end of his life secretly met Locke on several occasions, and record was kept of these meetings by the young third earl of Shaftesbury. The third earl was then becoming proficient in Locke's famously indecipherable shorthand, so the notes were unnoticed until a graduate student came across them while browsing an obscure Bodleian collection that included some items from the third earl's correspondence with a minor Irish clergyman. He first mistook them for Locke's own notes until he realized that Locke was being described in them, but the graduate student was then tragically killed in a mountaineering accident, but not before he showed his research to his advisor at the University of North Baffin Bay, who began preparing it for submission and received a revise and resubmit from the British Journal of Timely Snipings at Academic Nemeses, only to die shortly thereafter of smallpox. And then I found it! Only my name might look different at that point. In fact, it is also possible that it will have multiplied into several names, one or two of which will be the exclusive authors of high-brow, nipple-heavy erotica. However, that is beside the point, which is that, in these notes on the meetings between Locke and Hobbes, the third earl mentions among other commonalities that both men vigorously agreed about the excellent understanding of their thought demonstrated in the doctoral dissertation of a 21st century graduate student named Miss Self-Important. But don't let any of that distract you from the import of this revelation - Hobbes and Locke met directly and even exchanged ideas!

If this fails, I will take a job at "the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic: the Institute of History, Philology and Philosophy." If they reject me too, then I will take up a collection of plastic shopping bags.

*Numerology in action.

Round-up of academic frauds

The NYT Mag is on a roll with academic fraud coverage, first the UNC physics prof who is the self-proclaimed 1% of everything - brains, beauty, marital material, and now, cocaine smugglers who are actually innocent. This was written with a degree of irony and panache rarely found in the maudlin pages of NYT Mag. Now there is the Dutch psychology prof who made up all his studies but now is vewwy, vewwy sorry for it. Look at that remorseful puppy face!

“I have fallen from my throne — I am on the floor,” he said, waving at the ground. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself.”

Emoticon worthy. The rest is the kind of self-congratulation disguised as self-indictment that resembles the job candidate who says in an interview that his greatest failing is that he's too much of a perfectionist - I loved beauty too much! Data no beautiful unless I invent it!

This coverage is great at two levels - it forces the NYT to publish one fewer tale per week of tragic and mysterious (usually child) disease that you and your children will probably never get but will now spend inordinate time worrying about contracting. And, of course, academic fraud is practically my favorite subject ever, after the actual (non-fraudulent) academic subjects themselves. (Well, let's be real, in some cases, it's more interesting than the academic subjects.)

Reading these kinds of things while writing a dissertation is especially heartening because, more than any other academic thing I've written - and I have never been able to write even a college term paper quickly - the dissertation is slow going. Getting it right - or trying to - means spending months on one chapter, writing up an account of Hobbes's paternal power, reconsidering the argument, reading someone else's understanding of it, going back and re-writing to account for that, going back again when a different thought occurs to me in connection with another part of Hobbes, then going back again when I thought I was done with Hobbes but a problem in Filmer arises that requires re-reconsideration of the Hobbes argument. The professional advice about this situation is to "just get it done," and I understand the practical impetus behind this suggestion, which is usually given in light of the consideration that one has a life to live that should not be indefinitely held up by a mere bureaucratic requirement like a doctoral dissertation, which will probably be accepted no matter how bad it is. But I don't exactly mind the slowness of the process or the apparent abstruseness of it, if only the Just-Get-It-Doners would pipe down. Hobbes is difficult for a reason. The Just-Get-It-Doners, however, are vindicated by people like Stapel - the super-producers who write and publish with approximately the regularity and speed at which I drink coffee. And there really are superstar non-frauds like that in every discipline, but for the sake of a discipline's integrity (and for the schadenfreude of us snails), it is good to regularly see the perils of academic aspirations to celebrity.

However, my personal preference in the realm of frauds is for impostors over plagiarists and data-fabricators, so I found the labyrinthine tale of A.D. Harvey more excellent than both these hyper-successful NYT egomaniacs. A.D. Harvey is interesting because he was so unloved that he had no perch to fall from by the author's discovery of his numerous identities. He was probably correct to believe this damning article would actually raise his stock quite a bit, as it would constitute precisely the kind of probing examination of his work that he'd longed for and frustratingly never received (except by versions of himself, of course). This is the perfect reply to the accusations against him: "I look forward to learning about significant overlap in your article. I hope you mentioned all eight of my academic monographs and my contributions to journals published in the US." And true fact - I read some of his articles after reading this one (spoiler: they are pretty much all about sex). Depending on whether he believed his college porn novel was truly great (hard to say from this piece, but I'm skeptical given his education), A.D. Harvey may be the only one of these egomaniacs to actually understand himself (quite a feat given the multiplicity that his self encompasses) and his colleagues. He saw that in a world of peer review, where your own talents may fall short, the unjustified esteem of others can compensate. Maybe your work will eventually be judged by History to be worthless, but the disparity between the judgments handed down in the court of History and those of peer reviewers might be vast. Plagiarists and data-fabricators teach us that ambitious people take shortcuts, but maybe impostors are more than simply ambitious people who can't properly channel their desire for success and esteem. For one thing, they are willing to forego esteem for themselves, since they are usually posing as someone else. Impostors point us to more interesting problems with identity and what is annoyingly called "the social fabric." And impostors do funnier things, like muse prolifically on the nature of the female nipple.