Last Word

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man 1.3.

Theodore Morrison, The Devious Way (& Thoughts on Narrative Verse)

Introduction

Rather than go about this the usual way, I think I will discuss Morrison's The Devious Way by looking at the requirements for a verse novel or, indeed, narrative verse generally.

The reason we talk in prose rather than verse is that prose is extremely tolerant of approximation and looseness. When you read a paragraph of prose, most of the language simply 'goes by'; it is not put front and center but pressed into the surface of a stream of thought that is always going to, or coming from, somewhere else. Verse, however, is different in precisely this way, that it is not tolerant of approximation and looseness. In verse, language is never allowed simply to 'go by', because it is always put out front. Stream of thought is carried not by the purely functional way in which you say this only in order to get to that; it is carried out by turn and return, i.e., verse in the quite literal sense of a turning. This function of turn and return could be carried by rhyme, or by metrical pattern, or by repetition, or by alliteration, or any number of other things, but precisely the thing that differentiates the coherence of verse from the coherence of prose is that in verse poetry verses must call out or respond to other verses in some way. This, incidentally, is why free verse, which is easy to write, is so extraordinarily difficult to write well: it requires no discipline to write it, because turn and return, call and response, are not formalized at all, but free verse, in order to be verse and not bad prose, must still have the turn and return of verses, the call and response, in some way, and given what free verse is, your means of doing this must be far more subtle than it is in other forms of verse.

When looked at this way, however, the notion of narrative verse presents something of a problem. Prose is very narrative-friendly, but good narrative verse is quite difficult because narrative verse poses problems narrative prose does not; we might say that narrative is itself more prose-friendly than verse friendly. Decent epic verse is a greater achievement than brilliant lyric verse because there are two additional temptations to avoid when writing the former. The first temptation arises from the fact that the most natural thing to do with verse is to present snapshots: things frozen in time. If you think about most great, striking, or memorable verse, this is precisely what you will tend to remember: some very vivid detail, some remarkable description, a perfect allusion, an abstract or figurative characterization of action, some movement or process somehow caught in a single moment of stillness. In verse everything said is front and center at some point, and this makes it easy to bring narrative to standstill. To the extent you do so, however, your narrative powers have failed: narrative must move. The other temptation, of course, is to lose a grip on your verse as verse, so that the only thing that distinguishes it from prose is that you scatter it on the page less efficiently. In bad narrative verse the poet is repeatedly defeated by both temptations: the narrative thought stops and starts spasmodically, the 'verse' is really just absurdly out-of-shape prose -- bombastic, maudlin, or flabby.

This, then, is the problem of narrative verse. As we know from Homer, Virgil, and Milton, though, it is a soluble problem. The narrative in the Iliad or the Aeneid, or Beowulf, or Paradise Lost, moves, and while it sometimes slows down, it does so deliberately without any choking of the engine. Everything moves forward. Even the great narrative poets struggle with the problem, however: hearing or reading the narrative is never as easy in the Iliad as it is in even merely competent prose. The narrative has to be carried, not by the flow of language, but by how verses in their turn and return, their call and response, are woven together. All good narrative verse, then, requires two things: a discernible order contributing to the direction of the narrative and a tightness of language suitable to verse rather than prose.

The Devious Way is very inconsistent in how it meets these criteria and therefore does not succeed as a solution to the problem of narrative verse. It does not help that Morrison is writing a free verse novel, which compounds the problem to an extraordinary degree. Fortunately, he is actually a capable poet, and so recognizes that free verse is consistent with occasional and irregular use of traditional poetic technique, which he sometimes has to good effect. But 'free verse novel' is a label for what is perhaps the most difficult poetic problem known to the human race: how to write a long series of discrete verses carrying a continuous narrative suitable for prose, while not using most of the poetic tools for verse creation yet not falling into prose in the process. Morrison's book is not a total failure to solve this problem; it does many things right. Morrison chose an excellent narrative for the task, a modernized Troilus and Cressida tale. Chaucer had already showed the potential of this kind of narrative for verse, and although Morrison's 'modern' (i.e., non-epic, since most of what we mean by 'modern' in literature is really just 'inconsistent with epic' -- epic deals with things too timeless, or perhaps handled in too timeless a way, to be distinguishable as modern) characters are necessarily smaller and less interesting than Chaucer's epic characters, this is not a problem of any sort, just a difference in the kind of work they are producing. I went into the novel expecting the narrative to be one of the things I would not like about the book, but in fact it is a good narrative for a book of this kind. What is more, Morrison is quite sensible about the narrative; he keeps it both simple and reasonably interesting as a novel. So Morrison had the "narrative suitable for prose that could also be told in verse" part of the problem resolved quite well: it's a novel-ish narrative with verse-ish potential.

It's the rest of the problem that this verse novel fails to solve. Descriptions in particular seem to pose a problem for Morrison. He has some quite good ones, like this one (p. 46):

Stretched in a canvas chair, her lap in shade,
Her legs in sun, Christina leafed a book.
Her thought ran wavering up and down the page,
And what she tried to read was David's thought.

This is a good description of a recognizable phenomenon: Christian is reading a book David has thrust on her, and she cannot follow it both because it is not the kind of book she would usually read -- she is only reading it to find David's thought -- and because she is really more interested in thinking about David. The narrative function of these lines is clear, in four lines it perfectly captures a rather complicated scene, and while it's possible it could be improved, it is still a quite capable attempt to do what a poet should attempt to do in verse and poetic prose alike: say things exactly as they should be said. What is more, it's good as verse, too: each line presents us a reasonable stage for language to play its parts, and the lines are connected by turn and return. "Stretched in a canvas chair" calls and "Christina leafed a book" responds; "her lap in shade" calls and "Her legs in sun" responds; "her lap," "Her legs," and "her thought" gives us a more complicated structure of the same kind; the "Her thought..." line calls and the "...David's thought" line responds. It's true that it's not too far from what you would get in a perfect prose description of the same scene, but that's simply because perfect verse descriptions of scenes like this are going to have many similarities to their counterparts in prose; it's an ordinary scene with simple needs. This is solid free verse, suitable to narrative.

We get recurrences of this kind of description, so it's not an accident, but a sign of real potential. Most of the book is not like this, however; it reads like flabby, overstrained prose. People do not merely yawn; they yawn cavernously. People do not merely get angry; their faces knot with anger. People do not merely answer telephones; they answer telephones with fierce urgency. They do not just grin; they grin so that their grins show like cracked rinds. This is a book that needed a Jack Sprat editor. For instance, we get these two lines (p. 23):

Talk was catharsis. David sighed again,
Still unrelieved; the purge was incomplete.

Besides the unfortunate undertones of constipation (a misfortune only exceeded by a later line's description of someone's restraint by saying that they have 'the continence of a running spigot" (p. 110)), this is twice as many lines as actually necessary. "David sighed again, his catharsis incomplete" would do just as well and would involve less distraction from the narrative as we concentrate on David's purging.

Another example (p. 83):

Christina's aunt
Sighed as if heaving upward with her breast
Some weight of stone that had a lodgment there.

Do we really need the "as if"? Is there going to be any confusion about whether Christina's aunt actually has a heavy rock in her chest? Metaphor is more natural than simile, especially in verse; you should only similize when you get something out of it. Likewise, Morrison (and this is a recurring fault) can't say the mundane "a heavy stone that had lodged there"; instead of a heavy stone in the chest we get a weight that has a lodgment. There are, to be sure, conceivable poetic situations in which it would be better for something to have a lodgment than to lodge or be lodged, but they are surely quite rare, and it seems unlikely that Christina's aunt's heavy sighs are deserving of the honor.

We also regularly find verse shifting into something that is (1) very like prose but (2) only is distinguished from typical prose by the fact that it would usually be said better in prose. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that Morrison's Troilus and Cressida tale faces a serious problem that Chaucer nicely avoided. An epic Troilus, or Cressida, or Diomede, will naturally speak in verse. A modern-day David, or Christina, or Reuel who speaks in verse is very difficult to imagine. People do not converse epically, ever. They do not even usually converse lyrically. But a novel-ish narrative involving a love triangle and a Pandarus figure (Morrison actually has two, to split the functions of Chaucer's) will inevitably involve conversation. Morrison handles the conversation pretty well on its own, but it is very prose-like conversation (as it would have to be) embedded in descriptions that, if they were prose, would be purple or flowery. Now, I am on record as defending purple and flowery prose; but the contrast between conversations described in ways very similar to what you would actually hear and the conversational environment described in ways that would not be obvious to one actual experiencing them is jarring. And sounding like purple prose or flowery prose is not adequate for making something genuine verse; it's still just prose, however weirdly laid out.

So what can we say about The Devious Way? Verse novels can fail in three possible ways: they can fail both as verse and as novel; they can succeed as verse but fail as novel; or they can fail as verse but succeed as novel. Morrison's work falls into this third category. This is a pretty decent novel (or rather novella, as it would be in prose): plausible characters in a good story, and Morrison's modifications of the standard Troilus narrative, by making it less tragic (it is not a tragedy but a story about the devious ways life travels) make it more readable, and are done well. Ironically, given that Morrison is a poet, it fails as verse. Some of the verse is very good; most of it, however, is inconsistent, and some of it is really just bad prose. Because it succeeds as novel, and because Morrison does have poetic skill, it is probably better than most verse novels. I am very much in favor of the idea of more verse novels; but The Devious Way, I think, shows that we still have a long way to go before we get any that are quite adequate.

Lovely as a Lapland Night

To a Young Lady who had been Reproached for Taking Long Walks in the Country
by William Wordsworth

Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!
--There is a nest in a green dale,
A harbour and a hold;
Where thou, a Wife and Friend, shalt see
Thy own heart-stirring days, and be
A light to young and old.

There, healthy as a shepherd boy,
And treading among flowers of joy
Which at no season fade,
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A Woman may be made.

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

On Singer on Religious Liberty

Peter Singer has a truly absurd article up at The CapTimes in which he insists on -- 'argues for' would be too generous a phrase -- a particular conception of religious liberty, one in which it boils down to "rejecting proposals that stop people from practicing their religion," meant in the very strict sense of giving freedom only from things that make it impossible to practice your religion. He considers several cases -- Jewish and Muslim laws for slaughtering animals, Catholic opposition to contraception, the advocacy of certain Jewish groups of separate seating for men and women on buses and opposition of the same to elminating military service exemptions for full-time religious students. The basic idea, of course, is that nothing absolutely requires Jews and Muslims to eat meat, and nothing absolutely requires Catholics to be engaged in health care services, and nothing actually requires ultra-orthodox Jewish groups to ride buses or not to serve in the military if they are religious students. So there's no problem, and appeal to religious liberty in these contexts is a misuse or abuse of the right.

In reality there are plenty of problems with this, of course. The first is that it's effectively a claim that rights associated with religious freedom protect nothing except belief and a small handful of practices that the religion in question explicitly requires even in the face of death. For instance, on Singer's reasoning it's not a violation of religious liberty to forbid Catholics to attend Mass or Confession on pain of death. The reason is that, while there's a general requirement to attend Mass and Confession, it's a defeasible requirement: you aren't required to risk your life to go to Mass. And so on down the list. There are certain things that you are absolutely required to do even in the face of death -- hold fast to the confession of faith, for instance -- but very, very few religious practices fall under this category. And this tends to be generally true, although different religions have different ways of handling this issue (pretty much every major religion does, because historically it has come up on occasion). Anyone who thinks that religious freedom means that you are free to do those things that your religion requires you to be a martyr for, and nothing else, and that anyone appealing to religious liberty for other uses is "misusing" the right, deserves to be ridiculed as an idiot. Yet this is what Singer's argument requires: the prohibition or requirement would have to be categorical. If we start adding exceptions to this principle, however, Singer's argument falls apart -- his suggested solution is not, in fact, the solution to the problem, but some more complicated principle he doesn't give.

And these things are much trickier than Singer suggests, in any case. For instance, he says, "Catholicism does not oblige its adherents to run hospitals and universities." This is true in a sense, considering only this. But there's a good argument that the Church does require Catholics to defend the Church against any intrusion into its intrinsic rights and privileges and any unnecessary intrusions into its customary rights and privileges (and since Catholics have run hospitals and universities for something like eight centuries now, these are very, very customary) and it explicitly in a number of documents requires Catholics to uphold rights of religious conscience that are clearly more broad than anything Singer has in mind. So here we see another thing that Singer has overlooked: some requirements are specific and some requirements are general, and Singer is clearly only thinking of specific requirements. Yes, it's true that the Catholic Church does not require its adherents specifically to work for, maintain, or support hospitals and universities; but this does not mean that it has no relevant requirements that require specific action under the given circumstances.

Which leads to a third point. The Catholic Church also requires of its adherents acts of mercy, among which are visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, and instructing the ignorant. Fulfilling these functions in an optimal way is precisely one of the reasons Catholics developed hospitals and universities. Singer only considers ends; he leaves means out of the scope of religious freedom entirely. This means that Singer's account of religious liberty is consistent with an extraordinary degree of religious persecution: no law would violate religious liberty unless it took away all means of fulfilling the relevant requirement, even if it made it extraordinarily difficult to do so. Now, Catholics being a large population with a wide diversity of resources, if contraception insurance is really so serious a matter as to demand the total dismantling of centuries-old and highly successful Catholic hospital and Catholic university systems, it would still be possible for Catholics to fulfill the requirements of mercy in some other way, although not as effectively. But it's important to understand that this 'religious liberty' is so minimal that very little short of active violence is forbidden. Religious congregations can be taxed out of existence; states can make laws so restrictive that it is very difficult for people to do anything to practice their religion (as long as it is still possible); religious property like churches or synagogues can be confiscated at will; and so on and so forth, and none of it counts as a violation of religious liberty. Given that all of these are historical ways in which religious groups are persecuted, Singer's conception of religious liberty is a pretty pathetic sort of freedom. What is more, it is a historically rootless conception of religious liberty as well: if you look at the history of the development of religious freedoms you will find almost immediately that all these kinds of scenarios were part of what the religious freedoms were developed to avoid, and Singer's account of religious liberty has room for none of them.

It is unclear why we are forced into this strait of considering requirements alone, anyway. There is no form of liberty that we protect solely by looking at what is absolutely required for it. Suppose, for instance, that you have a certain right -- make it whatever you will -- and that you are faced with government actions that, while technically consistent with that right, put you in a position where you will be worse off if you make use of that right. Singer is arguing that, as long as a government action is technically consistent with right to practice your religion, it is illegitimate to criticize and oppose a government action on the basis of that right, because your opposition is not "really" based on that right. But this is irrational nonsense. Even if something is technically consistent with a right, that doesn't mean that it can't be opposed on the basis of that right. Because not only are there things that are strictly required or prohibited in order to maintain a right in the first place, there are different things that make a society better or worse in terms of that right. For instance, technically, if we are all allowed free speech one day a year, and only one day a year, we still have a right to free speech. I mean, one day a year you can say whatever you want; that's free speech, and everyone has a right to it. But that doesn't mean that this is a society that is a good society in terms of its respect for free speech. Obviously that's an extreme example, but it makes the point: some actions are more conducive to the protection that the right is supposed to give. Some actions penalize people using their rights even though they still allow them to act in accordance with them. People can reasonably appeal to rights even when they are not strictly violated in the case at hand, if they feel that the case at hand is putting the society uncomfortably close to being the kind of society that would violate the right. Likewise, they can actively work for a society that offers more extensive protections for that right, and they can oppose actions that roll back protections for that right, all in the name of that right. None of this is unreasonable.

Moreover, it's simply good sense to realize that people are being reasonable if they oppose actions that unnecessarily make them worse off if they act in accordance with their right; and it's good sense to recognize that a reasonable government will take steps not to make people worse off when they act in accordance with their rights, to the extent that that is possible. This means that people can appeal to their rights on a much grander scale than Singer is allowing, and, yes, they can do so even if other people disagree. If you say that I can have free speech but only as long as I give up my job, I am not being unreasonable in opposing your conditions in the name of free speech, despite the fact that you are technically still allowing me free speech. If your whole claim that you are still protecting religious liberty rests on the principle that you are allowing people to do what the Catholic Church says they should do, and all Catholics have to do in return is shut down their universities and hospitals, you really don't have cause to be surprised if any of them happen to think that you are an enemy of religious liberty. If we allow freedom of press as long as the press sticks to print, it is entirely possible to doubt that we are seriously doing what we should to protect freedom of press, and it is no good insisting that the press under our plan has perfect and complete freedom because there's nothing about the freedom of press that requires journalists to use television and radio.

It is entirely true that on these last few points, since we aren't dealing with strict requirements, the lines could be drawn in more than one place. They have to be negotiated through normal and reasonable channels of society. But one thing you don't get to do is tell people that they can't negotiate them. And Singer's argument requires this, since it implies that (for instance) no one can oppose an action by appeal to a right because they are worried that the action, without violating the right itself, makes it easier to violate the right, or that it imposes undue hardship or too high a price for the exercise of that right, or anything that is not a strict violation of rights. No rights can be properly protected under those terms; it's a claim that no one can appeal to them until they are in imminent danger of being violated, that no one can advocate a society that does better in protecting them. What Singer is arguing is ridiculous for any right; and it is a ridiculous thing to argue here.

All That We See or Seem

A Dream Within A Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Rational Cascades

One of my interests is in the phenomenon of what I call rational cascades. We often model reasoning as if it consisted in tiny little arguments of organized premises leading to conclusions by well-defined rules of inference, each argument essentially standing alone. But this is obviously not how human reasoning actually works, even among very rational people. Many of our inferences are, of course, probabilistic; but even more important than this, I think, is the fact that if you refute a premise, this doesn't just affect the argument immediately at hand; changing that premise is likely going to affect a whole lot of other arguments, inferences, and estimates, even if one does not yet know how. There might have been other things that partially depended on analogy with that premise, or were made probable by that premise, or are implied by that premise in combination with other things that have not been changed; it might affect your assessment of evidence elsewhere, or your evaluation of certain kinds of arguments.

In practice, this does not occur all at once, but slowly as our minds work out their views more consistently. A change causes a cascade, but in human beings the cascade takes time to promulgate. This is the explanation, I think, for a common phenomenon, namely, coming to realize that you already believe or don't believe something. I read something about Eddie Izzard once which talked about how he was performing one night and suddenly had the intense realization that he no longer believed there was a God -- not that he suddenly came to the conclusion that there was no God, but that he suddenly realized he already didn't believe there was a God. Now, that sounds a bit odd if you think of human reasoning only in terms of set arguments, but it makes sense in terms of cascades: the foundations eroded, and it just took time to realize it. One also finds plenty of cases in the opposite direction, people who suddenly realize that they've believed in God for a while without expressly putting it that way. In essence, some change happened that committed them, but working out the commitment and its effects was not necessarily straightforward. And we find this sort of thing across many different fields.

Of course, by the same token, given that we play off each other, rational cascades can happen in a more complicated way between individuals; thus when you look at the history of logic, you find that the area of logic, broadly construed, in which people have most often considered issues relevant to rational cascades is rhetoric. In a sense, in fact, you can think of rhetoric as the logic of rational cascades for human minds. Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, for instance, which puts itself forward as not so much a logic as a rhetoric, could very well be read as a partial theory of rational cascade. We tend not to think of rhetoric as having much to do with logic in itself, but of course this is a new thing.

The difficulty with dealing with rational cascades, of course, is that they are (1) complicated; and (2) catastrophic. They are complicated because there are so many possible relations among ideas and judgments (analogical, probabilistic, implicative, associative, etc.). And they are catastrophic because they really are cascades: there are changes and changes and suddenly some critical threshold is reached and the whole thing moves. The human mind works as a sort of sandpile. Add a grain or take a grain and the sandpile is much the same as it was; but add or take away enough and a few more grains force the whole pile to adjust. But it's clear that some grasp on them is possible: kinds of behavior and typical causes can be identified, and to some degree have been. It's also clear, however, that doing so requires going beyond what we normally think of as logic to look at how character, environment, and social interaction affect reasoning.

'Epistemic Closure'

'Epistemic closure' is one of those terms that has come to have two inconsistent meanings, a technical one and a popular one. The technical meaning is that you are operating in a system in which, if something is known, and that something entails something else, then that something else is known. That is, if I know that the sky is blue, and if the sky can't be blue unless it exists, than I also know (simply because of these two things) that the sky exists; epistemic closure would apply if all known truths were like this -- we would then say that knowledge is closed under entailment. You could have variations on this. although entailment is the most common one; for instance, one could have an epistemic closure principle in which knowledge is closed only under equivalence, in which case we'd have to talk about equivalence rather than entailment. But the basic structure is pretty straightforward. Closure occurs when a property that applies to something also applies to everything you can get as a result by a particular operation; and epistemic, of course, just means 'having to do with knowledge in some way'. The concept is useful because it raises all sorts of philosophical questions.

In the past few years, though, the phrase has taken on a popular use. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, we owe Julian Sanchez this obfuscatory usage. In this usage, it just means 'closedmindedness'. There is absolutely nothing lost by using the phrase 'closedmindedness', except that everyone knows what that means; and there is absolutely nothing gained by using 'epistemic closure' except that you might more easily get the insult by the slow-witted. The term arose in the context of politics, and it touched off a pretty big bunch of posts and discussions, mostly of the uselessly handwringing or idiotically supercilious kind in which people speculate airily about the characters of others without any serious evidential basis, but I've noticed it a few times here and there, so perhaps it is coming back. If you mean that someone has a closed mind, though, just say that they have a closed mind; 'epistemic closure' makes you sound either pompous or cowardly or both.