fieldus

Discussion with Philip Zimbardo, researcher who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in The Believer. Touches on punishment and responsibility:

PZ: It’s really very complicated, it’s really a central issue that has to be dealt with more. And I think philosophers have to deal more—it’s really a philosophical and legal issue. In the extreme case, it really is “The situation made me do it.” So are we going to put the situation on trial? Well, we don’t have a mechanism. Now, I gave a talk at Harvard Law School and [Harvard psychologist] Jon Hanson said that these ideas should provoke a revolution in legal theory because we have no way of putting the situation on trial. In a sense, international tribunals put the system on trial. They have individuals, but that’s the real importance of international tribunals for crimes against humanity. They say even though, within your system, it was acceptable for you to do this—kill Jews, or kill Tutsis—that there’s a higher international standard of humanity, of justice, that applies, and so it’s that ultimate system which dominates your parochial system, your Nazi system, your communist system, etc.

BLVR: As you say, though, it’s the individuals who are being tried.

PZ: Yes, even there, you know, what comes out of that is the guilt or innocence of each of the leaders. So tribunals say, “We have the power to put leaders on trial, even though they in fact—none of them actually killed anybody—it’s just they created a policy, they created a system.” But I would hope they would go to the next level and make explicit: “In punishing this person we are really publicly declaring that this ideology produced the crimes against humanity. And so we, as an international body of humanists, of jurists, decry the horrors of this kind of system.” So you’re really sending out a message: it’s the system that’s wrong, and these people helped create it. Hitler helped create it, and Pol Pot.… But once it’s created, once the Stanford Prison Experiment was created, I’m irrelevant. If I had died during the thing, it would have gone on. The guards would have been happier. If Hitler had been killed, the whole thing would have gone on only because it had already corrupted the legal system, the educational system, the business system. With all these mechanisms in place, he became irrelevant. In fact, he would have been a big martyr.

BLVR: That’s interesting—you know, there’s a philosophical view of punishment that’s called “the expressivist theory of punishment”—they say that the goal of punishment is not to give people what they deserve, which is hard to make sense of, and not just to deter future crime, but to publicly express your condemnation of an act. Punishment is the only way to express moral condemnation of an act or a system. If you don’t punish the culprits, you’re sending an implicit message that the act is morally acceptable. And I suppose you could apply that to responsibility, that’s the new way to look at responsibility, as expressing our condemnation.

PZ: Yeah, most punishment does not deter, except for a very short time. There are so many factors that go into producing any kind of crime that a deterrent effect can’t have that much influence. In fact, most people don’t even know that someone got arrested in New Hampshire, or Arizona, or Alaska for something and is on death row. So how can it be a deterrent for me here in San Francisco? But the notion that we as a society want to express our revulsion about this kind of act makes sense—that it’s an expression of a public consensus that this is wrong and that we will not tolerate it. And that’s what I’m saying. International tribunals should make explicit that what we’re expressing is this revulsion about a system that could create these crimes against humanity. And the way we’re doing it is by singling out people who were instrumental in carrying out the policies of that system.

IV. “YOU CAN’T WIN A WAR ON NOUNS.”
BLVR: This talk of responsibility and control reminds of the quote by Condoleezza Rice you cite in the book. She’s explicitly denying the power of situtationalist elements to influence people like terrorists. She puts it all on them, on the wickedness of their characters: “When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and say that someone is making them do it? No, these are simply evil people that want to kill.”

PZ: Right—I was furious! Here’s this supposed intellect. “They’re just evil people.” And you guys are not [evil], you guys are saying, she especially, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” She’s saying, if we didn’t do this [the war on terror] we could have a nuclear bomb go off in the US.

BLVR: You’re very hard on her in the book. The whole Bush administration, really, and Rumsfeld and Cheney especially.

PZ: God, yes!

BLVR: I wanted to play devil’s advocate and ask whether in their own way they were trapped in the situation as well. Which led them to institute their policies. It’s a little harder to figure out the details of their situation because there’s so much we don’t know, but isn’t it reasonable to assume that they were in one just as much as…

PZ: No, but see, in their case, they helped create the situation.

BLVR: That’s true, but in doing so, weren’t they also part of a larger situation that led them to create the situation in Abu Ghraib?

PZ: One thing is the abuses in Abu Ghraib. But I’m saying they were the principals in creating the whole—I don’t know what the broadest context is—the war on terror. That is, Cheney primarily, and Bush and Rumsfeld and George Tenet. For very consciously aware reasons, they decided to label the global challenge of terrorism—which it should have been—a war on terrorism, so that Bush could be the active commander in chief, so you have martial law, so you could suspend lots of rights. That’s why it’s called the “war on terror.” And you can’t win a war on nouns! We lost a war on drugs, we lost a war on poverty, we’re losing a war on terror. It’s not clear if verbs win or adjectives win. So I hold them responsible because they set up the system; they are the Hitler and Goebbels and Goering. Each of them said, “Here’s my domain, and I’m going to run it this way, and we’re not allowing alternative views. Saying anyone who criticizes us is putting our boys and soldiers in harm’s way. Anybody who criticizes is not a patriot.” So they set up all these mechanisms to say, you know, you’re feeding the enemy, you’re killing the soldiers by protesting against it. And then essentially instituted… because of this unique power base, the NSA secret thing, they’re spying on us, they have these renditions, torture things, a whole set of things that are alien to everything, all basic American values. The Military Commissions Act, which they pushed through, overturns two hundred years of Anglo-American law. I mean, give up habeas corpus. Simply redefine someone as an [unlawful] enemy combatant; that means they have no rights. And essentially anyone in the world suspected of terrorism can be arrested anyplace in the world, brought to an undisclosed place without a charge, and kept there indefinitely. There’re people in Guantánamo that have been there for seven years with no charges against them except “suspected of terrorism.”

For me, it’s not a matter of their being “trapped in the situation.” I’m saying: They created the situation. They created a system in which each of these parts fell out, so I’m saying they are responsible.

BLVR: In that expressive sense?

PZ: I like that expressive view, yes. But, you know, if we were the losers of the war on terrorism, they’d be held in a war-crimes tribunal. If in fact there was a real war and we lost in Iraq, they would say, “OK, you invaded our country under false pretenses, you did all these things, all these people died. We’re going to put you on trial.”

Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, I find the third person very difficult. I do it in short stories, but… I’m sometimes tempted by a baroque third person. But that’s, again, hard to do or, oddly enough, too easy to do. Nothing about writing is straightforward, but it’s not especially difficult to write a humorous, verbally tricky fantasia, because that’s a way of dodging certain big challenges. The big challenge for me, as I said earlier, is intimacy. The third person seems particularly apt if you want to write a novel that is less intimate; the satiric novel comes to mind.

TEV: It’s a different feeling kind of work. Both reading it and writing it.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. But it can work really well. I mean look at someone like Jonathan Coe. Great third person writer. Great panoramic view of society and town and country and all the rest of it. He’s writing in a very specific tradition and really knows what he’s doing and can really do plot. My problem with third person, from a selfish point of view, is that I find it hard to write sentences that are ungratuitously interesting and at the same time don’t intrude or lapse into formal incoherence; and I’m interested in sentences that are both ends and means, because that’s the most interesting, high-stakes stuff, the stuff I most want to read. Third person sentences, when I write them, seem to gravitate unduly towards the most efficacious, most simple, pared down. This raises the problem of reductiveness, of false transparency, of false authority.

Typically, a writer’s style matures towards simplicity and stays there. I’m attracted to the idea of arriving at simplicity and then going onward from there. There’s a part of me that believes that flat, conversational writing, which has undoubted strengths and is the most popular way of writing fiction, is playing it safe. It can be a little too well-behaved. It can reinforce established ways of seeing things. If your third person is a little frisky or frilly, people will ask, “Who is this narrator? Where does his personality come from?”

TEV: … to whom does this sensibility belong or who is it being generated by?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s extremely hard to have that. And I’m not very interested in third person narrators (or first person narrators) who are distracted by their authorial existence, since at this point that is usually just too old hat for words and, if you’re not careful, drags the novel down to the level of a Wikipedia-deep philosophical footnote. And then you have the free indirect style, which means that you slide from the third to the first person. Herzog is a superb example. Also, third person narratives lend themselves, in my hands, to plottiness, and the problem with plot is that it becomes – and again, all this is from my point of view – it becomes excessively psychological and ordinary. Whereas if you want a narrative capable of the full, flickering range of empathies, the sort of empathies that everybody has, that approximate the depth and spottiness of human apprehension, you are able to draw that out much more in the first person. At least, that’s the case with me. I suppose it means I’m as limited as a writer.

and then this on lyrical moments:

TEV: Why do you think there is a resistance among young, American writers to what you have called the lyrical moment?

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know, actually. If there is, it may be because it’s so hard to write.

TEV: So, we’re lazy?

Joseph O’Neill: No, I mean that if it were the case that everyone could write a so-called lyrical novel if they wanted to but had decided against it, then their resistance to it has authority. But is that really the case? I doubt it very much.

Take Zadie Smith, for example, who is resistant to the lyrical realist novel at the moment. I think she’s allowed to be, because she’s actually written that way in her last book, and has kind of shown that she can do it and has come away from it with reservations. She’s earned her resistance.

That said, there are a lot of critics, or readers, who don’t have a taste for so-called lyrical writing and can’t be expected to write lyrically before they voice a negative opinion about it. And again, you can’t really argue with taste. If people prefer to read something else, that’s fine.

You’ve mentioned this resistance of younger Americans, who are you thinking of, in particular?

TEV: No one necessarily in particular, really. Rather, I was thinking back to your comments about American writers under 65 and coupling that with things that you talked about in your interview about the lyrical moment. It seems to me like there is a nexus of those of those concerns.

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: Because I agree with you. It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

Relates to the Zadie Smith’s brace review of Remainder and Netherland in the NYRB.

Esther Rantzen writing in The Telegraph puts Tracey Connelley and Steven Barker, responsible for the death of ‘Baby P’, into an intergenerational context.
Were the social workers in Haringey aware of this? If they weren’t, will they be in the future?

The truth is that ordinary-looking people can conceal crimes so hideous that they are impossible to imagine. Only by assimilating that fact can we take lessons from it. Some of what we learn may be difficult to accept. For instance, we now know that Steven Barker, 6ft 4in and 18 stone, has an IQ of about 60. Many child abusers have IQs of less than 70. In an age when we rightly try to protect people with mental disabilities against stigma and discrimination, it has become fashionable also to protect their parental rights.

But we must, if we are to save lives like Baby Peter’s, recognise the fact that their children are at risk. Add to it Barker’s known record – that, as a child, he enjoyed torturing animals, skinning frogs and breaking their legs, and was prosecuted by the RSPCA – and a very disturbing picture emerges. Serial killers often begin their career by torturing animals. Ten years ago Barker and Owen were arrested when their grandmother, aged 82, accused them of torturing her in a bid to get her to change her will – accusations that never reached a trial because she died a few months later.

David Ulin - the LA Times book editor writes about information overload:

Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload. In her recent essay collection “The Winter Sun” (Graywolf: 196 pp., $15 paper), Fanny Howe quotes Simone Weil: “One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming.” That’s the point precisely, for without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in — because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way. There is the present-tense experience of reading, but also the chronology of the narrative, as well as of the characters and author, all of whom bear their own relationships to time. There is the fixity of the text, which doesn’t change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago. St. Augustine composed his “Confessions” in AD 397, but when he details his spiritual upheaval, his attempts to find meaning in the face of transient existence, the immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide. “I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert,” Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, “Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 244 pp., $24), “and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control.” That is what reading has to offer: a way to eclipse the boundaries, which is a form of giving up control.

Here we have the paradox, since in giving up control we somehow gain it, by being brought in contact with ourselves. “My experience,” William James once observed, “is what I agree to attend to” — a line Winifred Gallagher uses as the epigraph of “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” (Penguin Press: 244 pp., $25.95). In Gallagher’s analysis, attention is a lens through which to consider not just identity but desire. Who do we want to be, she asks, and how do we go about that process of becoming in a world of endless options, distractions, possibilities?

These are elementary questions, and for me, they cycle back to reading, to the focus it requires. When I was a kid, maybe 12 or 13, my grandmother used to get mad at me for attending family functions with a book. Back then, if I’d had the language for it, I might have argued that the world within the pages was more compelling than the world without; I was reading both to escape and to be engaged. All these years later, I find myself in a not-dissimilar position, in which reading has become an act of meditation, with all of meditation’s attendant difficulty and grace. I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.

Found this from GK Chesterton after searching for essays on Great Expectations (of which, more to follow).

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses,
by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some
condition to which the human spirit can come.

from Chesterton’s intrdoduction to The Old Curiousity Shop

This has some resonance with what Coetzee had to say about literature and its capacity to offer relief for the extreme soul. See earlier post.

Interesting paean to Amy Hempel and the minimalist approach to writing in The LA Times.

To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer’s kitchen table for 10 weeks taking apart The Harvest. The first thing you study is what Tom calls “horses.” The metaphor is — if you drive a wagon from Utah to California, you use the same horses the whole way. Substitute the word “themes” or “choruses” and you get the idea. In minimalism, a story is a symphony, building and building, but never losing the original melody line. All characters and scenes, things that seem dissimilar, they all illustrate some aspect of the story’s theme. In The Harvest, we see how every detail is some part of mortality and dissolution, from kidney donors to stiff fingers to the television series Dynasty.

The next aspect, Spanbauer calls “burnt tongue.” A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images, short-cut adverbs, and cliches.

In minimalism, cliches are called “received text.”

In The Harvest, Hempel writes, “I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.” Right here, you have her “horses” of death and dissolution andher writing a sentence that slows you to a more deliberate, attentive speed.

Oh, and in minimalism, no abstracts. No silly adverbs like sleepily, irritably, sadly, please. And no measurements, no feet, yards, degrees or years-old. The phrase “an 18-year-old girl” — what does thatmean?

In The Harvest, Hempel writes, “The year I began to say vahzinstead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.”

Instead of some dry age or measurement, we get the image of someone just becoming sophisticated, plus there’s burnt tongue, plus she uses her “horse” of mortality.

See how these things add up?

What else you learn about minimalism includes “recording angel.” This means writing without passing any judgments. Nothing is fed to the reader as fat or happy. You can only describe actions and appearances in a way that makes a judgment occur in the reader’s mind. Whatever it is, you unpack it into the details that will re-assemble themselves within the reader.

Amy Hempel does this. Instead of telling us the boyfriend in The Harvestis an asshole, we see him holding a sweater soaked with his girlfriend’s blood and telling her, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.”

Less becomes more. Instead of the usual flood of general details, you get a slow drip of single-sentence paragraphs, each one evoking its own emotional reaction. At best, she’s a lawyer who presents her case, exhibit by exhibit. One piece of evidence at a time. At worst, she’s a magician, tricking people. But reading, you always take the bullet without being told it’s coming.

Raymond Carver was the most famous celebrated of this style, though after his death there has been some controversy regarding the influence of his editor, Gordon Lish. Overbearing or much needed - you decide. James Lasdun, for one, is in no doubt that the longer Carver is less impressive than the shorter. Read his essay analysing the impact of Lish’s stringent editing in The Guardian. Charles McGrath, Carver’s editor at The New Yorker, contrasts himself with Lish, but puts this in the context of Carver’s growing maturity as a writer and self-editor.
Continue Reading »

From ESPN:

According to reports, he [Vernon Forrest] was robbed at a gas station, where he had stopped to put air in his tires and allow his 11-year-old godson to use the bathroom. A man approached Forrest and demanded his Rolex and championship ring, and after the man took the items Forrest pulled out his .45 and chased the man on foot.

That’s when another man, presumed to be with the robber, had a verbal confrontation with Forrest, and the two exchanged gunfire. Forrest was shot eight times. Thankfully, Forrest’s godson was in the store at the time of the shooting.

Stephen Mitchelmore writing about the impact of a serious head injury in his blog, This Space:

I submitted and looked at the witness statements. One saw the cyclist fly into the air still holding the handlebars, then land to lie stock-still across the tarmac. The other witness got out of his car and ran over. After a minute or so the cyclist opened his eyes, sat up straight but did not respond to questions. Blood ran out of his right ear. Then he insisted on moving to the side of the road.

That was it really. I read the words with a forensic attention, as if each was an unrequited love letter, yet what I really wanted wasn’t there. I wanted to see what was not seen. Why was the fracture below the overhang of the skull? If my head struck the tarmac (there is no curb), how was this part damaged rather than the crown? Perhaps it hit the frame of the car, but wouldn’t that have been more damaging at such speed? Reading the statements has not been enough; answers have become questions.

What remains? The legacy of traumatic brain injury for one. My inner ear was damaged so I have had to retrain my sense of balance (this also has a weird side effect that mimics chronic fatigue syndrome). I may be able to cycle again as a result and so regain the freedom I lost. My sense of smell has gone and may never return - this also diminishes the sense of taste - while concentration and short-term memory levels are lower. On the plus side, I think my writing has improved; that is, has become more closely attuned to what concerns me and renews the fascination with books with which I began twenty-four years ago. This beginning and the time in hospital tell me that, while reading and writing are not enough, life isn’t, either.

Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.

But as this last, beguiling collection of stories bears witness, condescending to Updike as the lyricist of small satisfactions misses the power of his great, deep, subject: the pathos of American boyishness; the gap between bright expectation and experience into which the Rabbit Angstroms and the rest fall with their air of desperately bewildered ruefulness.

As they take their plunge, they snatch at whatever action can come to hand – a drive into the night with no particular destination in mind; a fling with a neighbour in a power outage – to postpone the hostile blankness of self-reflection. Updike has often been accused of using women instrumentally, as so many gratifiers of arrested sophomoric urges, but this platitude short-changes his erotic generosity.

and

Updike was better at the elegiac than the catastrophic. But My Father’s Tears, despite the implication of the title story, isn’t all mood indigo. Updike’s genius was for the richly relished, precisely nailed, moment; his incomparable powers of translation between what is observed and what gets fixed in memory: a girlfriend who was all outline “in silverpoint”; a miniature rainbow trapped in an austere Vermont bathroom, refracted from the bevelled edge of its mirror. That was his great offering to his readers. No one else will do the droll shoulder-shrug, the gee-whizzery of bruised American innocence with as much piercing truth. At the end of his lovely concluding tale, “The Full Glass”, you brim with his own gratitude for the dizzy sweetness of life and you return the favour by being thankful that John Updike lived and wrote.

Amen. Despite the recent disappointment with Roger’s Version, I count Rabbit As Rest as one of the best 20 C novels in English - full of the virtues which Schama enumerates in his review.

Geoff Nicholson and Will Self discuss the art of walking

Not a spectacularly interesting exchange, but this from Will Self wasn’t bad:

I very like the ‘munching on mental nothingness’ line, and it does apply
to me perfectly well, too. I liken it - again - to meditation: I set off thinking programmatically - or perhaps only troubled by what they call, in German, ‘the ear worm’, perhaps some ghastly mid-seventies pop ditty the lyric of which I can’t chak, or maybe more rarefied composition of lines, tropes and imagery, drawn with great intent from what I see and hear and smell and feel. However, in the fullness of time the steady beat of the feet usually manages to subdue all this. I pursue very high mileages for this reason: twenty-five, thirty - even thirty-five miles in a day. Up at these high mileages (like, I would imagine, high altitudes, although such a notion is inimical to me: I adore mountaineering literature, but only read it when I’m lying in a hammock in the delta), I find that I become - like your Old Etonian - absorbed into the landmass, feeling its contours as you might those of a body one is seeking carnal - or at any rate, sensuous - knowledge of.

As to the gestural - yes, I am too old for walking lobsters on a leash through the Tuileries, or negotiating Florence by dice, or finding my way around Berlin using a map of Hartford, Connecticut. I distrust the idea that the society of the spectacle can be torn down in this fashion - although I do believe long distance walking can undermine it. I cleave to airport walks for this reason: walking to the airport, taking a flight, then walking at the other end. Not only does this negate the way prescribed folkways banalize the sublimity of international jet travel, but because the physical perception of distance is so much more vivid than the mental, it actually feels as if Manhattan has been rammed into the Thames Estuary: in place of the special relationship an hideous miscegenation of cities.

Prescribed folkways??