I will get started on my proposed conversation about the underpinnings of modern ideological positions shortly, but first I need to say at least something about the decision handed down yesterday in the legal challenge to California's Proposition 8 banning of same-sex marriage. last night, I read U. S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's entire 136 page decision online [God, how I hate to read things like that on a computer screen! But I just could not see printing out the entire thing.] Now, I am a complete novice and lay person in this area. I have not even had the benefit of the wisdom of my son, Tobias, who is probably the most knowledgeable person on the issue in America, because he was too busy yesterday doing press and television following the release of the decision. So what follows is my untutored reaction.
By way of background, for those of you who have not been following this issue [or are from other, possibly more enliightened parts of the world, such as South Africa], this was a challenge in Federal District Court to a ballot initiative, or Proposition, in California that successfully overturned a California Supreme Court ruling making same-sex marriage legal in that state. The legal challenge to Proposition 8 was brought by two same-sex couples, whose case was argued by the rather extraordinary legal team of David Boies and Ted Olsen -- the lawyers on opposite sides of the hideous Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case that took the presidency from Al Gore in 2000 and handed it to George W. Bush.
Experienced and knowledgeable LGBT activists [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered] were horrified by the decision of Boies and Olsen to file the suit in Federal Court, because they feared that when it inevitably made its way to the High Court, the present collection of right-wing judges would be given the opportunity to hand dopwn a sweeping anti-gay opinion that would enshrine prejudice against same-sex couples in America's legal system. Boies and Olsen, who are being paid handsomely for their efforts, have been rather cavalierly dismissive of the advice of lawyers experienced in the field, apparently believing that they can, in arguments before the Supreme Court, hold the four moderate to liberal justices [Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan] and persuade Kennedy to make five.
Walker, who is, by the way, gay, required the litigants in the Prop 8 case to hold a full trial, rather than allowing them simply to submit briefs and supporting materials. The State of California, which was technically the defendant in the case, refused to mount a defense of Prop 8, so it was left to lawyers representing the proponents who had pushed the Prop 8 effort. Boies and Olsen put on a stream of high profile witnesses, who presented masses of evidence rebutting the standard claims that same-sex marriages were bad for children, would weaken the institution of marriage, etc etc. The Prop 8 proponents listed a large nunmber of witnesses in pre-trial papers, all but two of whom backed out before the trial. The two who did testify were extremely weak,and under devastating cross-examination by Boies and olsen [who really are good trial lawyers, let's face it] those two witnesses simply folded.
Walker's decision is extraordinary in several regards. First, he considers the testimony of the witnesses, and in crushing detail concludes that the testimony of the Prop 8 witnesses has no credibility and should be given no weight in the legal proceeding, whereas the testimony of the witnesses attacking Prop 8 is judged by him to be credible. He examines the credentials of these witnesses, and concludes that one Prop 8 witness [someone named Blankenhorn] has no credibility and the other has very limited credibility.
When he turns to the legal dimensions of the case, he concludes that the state has no rational basis for denying marriage to same sex couples ["rational basis" being the lowest bar a law is required to clear], and hence it is not even necessary to submit the law to heightened scrutiny [the highest bar].
When he is finished with his opinion, Walker orders that California immediatelty resume issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples.
So what does it all mean? Well, this decision will immediately be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, generally considered the most liberal Federal Appellate jurisdiction, and regardless of their decision, then to the U. S. Supreme Court. Walker's decision to hold a full trial is important, because it has established a record of fact that is overwhelmingly tilted against Prop 8. Theoretically, appeals courts are supposed to defer to the findings of fact of a court of first instance [because that court, either the judge or a jury, if there is a jury trial, is charged with making determinations of fact on the basis of evidence and testimony entered into the record.] In theory, the appellate court is only supposed to consider whether the lower court has made errors of law. So the heavy evidentiary balance in favor of the opponents of Prop 8 gives them a leg up at the appellate level.
But of course, the US Supreme Court can do anything it damn well pleases, as Bush v. Gore demonstrates, so we return to the question, What will Kennedy do? And about that, I am completely clueless.
Still and all, in these terrible times, it is necessary to take what little pleasure one can from these victories along the way. The Boies Olsen strategy still looks like a bad one, an extremely dangerous one, and it will be several years, presumably, until this works its way to the Supreme Court and is heard by them.
What can one hope for? Barring the untimely death of one of the right wing justices, which of course it would be inappropriate even to contemplate, what we must all hope and pray for is that Boies and Olsen are correct in their self-congratulatory self-image.
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
THE CONVERSATION
Tomorrow, I am going to try to say a few things to set the stage for the conversation I suggested we have, about the theoretical presuppositions of competing ideologies. I am not really concerned about the labels we place on the different positions. Rather, I want to get beneath the labels to what underlies the positions. Perhaps the best way to proceed is for me to lay that out in a post, and then allow a couple of days for comments and guest blog posts and such before we move on. In the meantime, I will continue to comment on the passing scene. [I mean, can one really pass over in silence the touching romantic comedy of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston?] Let's try it and see how it goes.
A PROPOSAL FOR A CONVERSATION
I would like to start a conversation, through the medium of this blog, about the fundamental presuppositions of competing ideological perspectives -- Conservative, Liberal, Radical Marxist. I do not have in mind an argument about political candidates or party platforms, but an exploration of the assumptions about rationality, habit, sentiment, human society, economic organizations and the like, and a debate about the plausibility, the defensibility, of those assumptions. I am moved to suggest this conversation because the public discourse in this country has become hopelessly debased and deeply confused. I have no illusions at all that such a conversation, even if it should attract a sizeable circle of participants, will in any future available to me result in a change in our politics. But I feel the need at least in this space to strive for a higher level of clarity than I find anywhere on the left or the right today.
Let me know whether this proposed conversation holds any interest for you, and especially whether you might be willing to contribute guest posts, short or long, at some point, so that I am not simply talking to an imaginary circle of interlocuters.
Let me know whether this proposed conversation holds any interest for you, and especially whether you might be willing to contribute guest posts, short or long, at some point, so that I am not simply talking to an imaginary circle of interlocuters.
THE BIZARRE, THE LOONY, AND THE UGLY
No doubt you have all heard of the cry now going up from Republican spokespersons to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, so that Hispanic children born in the United States of parents who are not citizens will have stripped from them their citizenship. I can only assume that this new demand originated with an extensive survey of the Hispanic community, which revealed that there were still isolated pockets of potential Hispanic Republican voters who had not been completely alienated by the Arizona law and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Republican leadership. So the call to repeal the 14th Amendment is a last-ditch effort by the Republicans to guarantee that they will never again get another Hispanic vote.
It is not hard to ridicule this latest Republican talking point, although it is difficult to pay it as much attention as it deserves, considering all the other bizarrerie being dumped into the public conversation by the Republicans. But I do think it is useful to distinguish those right-wing causes that are merely loony from those that are deeply ugly and immoral. For example, the call by Iowan Republicans to resurrect the original failed 13th Amendment, so as to be able to strip Obama of his citizenship for accepting the Nobel Prize, qualifies as gloriously loony. But the proposal to strip children of their citizenship is among the ugliest ideas to drip from the festering sore that today is called The Republican Party.
As is so often the case, I find that the most satisfactory response to Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham can be found in The Good Book. I have in mind the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:27: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." [I prefer "whited sepulches" to the Revised Standard's "white-washed tombs." They are synonymous, and the latter is undoubtedly easier for modern readers to understand, but "whited sepulchres" is one of the most beautiful phrases in early modern English, and is worth preserving.]
Oh, by the way, if you did not understand my reference to "the original 13th Amendment" and the Nobel Prize, here is an explanation copied from an interesting blog called "Vast Public Indifference," whose author I was unable to find on the site:
"Last month, the Iowa Republican Party adopted a platform that calls for "the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution." They mean the 13th Amendment that was passed by congress and ratified by 12 states in 1812 — the one that reads,
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
As far as I can tell, the "Thirteenthers'" interpretation of this almost-amendment is fairly silly — they think it applies to titles such as "Esquire" and awards such as the Nobel Prize."
I think you will agree that this qualifies as loony.
It is not hard to ridicule this latest Republican talking point, although it is difficult to pay it as much attention as it deserves, considering all the other bizarrerie being dumped into the public conversation by the Republicans. But I do think it is useful to distinguish those right-wing causes that are merely loony from those that are deeply ugly and immoral. For example, the call by Iowan Republicans to resurrect the original failed 13th Amendment, so as to be able to strip Obama of his citizenship for accepting the Nobel Prize, qualifies as gloriously loony. But the proposal to strip children of their citizenship is among the ugliest ideas to drip from the festering sore that today is called The Republican Party.
As is so often the case, I find that the most satisfactory response to Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham can be found in The Good Book. I have in mind the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:27: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." [I prefer "whited sepulches" to the Revised Standard's "white-washed tombs." They are synonymous, and the latter is undoubtedly easier for modern readers to understand, but "whited sepulchres" is one of the most beautiful phrases in early modern English, and is worth preserving.]
Oh, by the way, if you did not understand my reference to "the original 13th Amendment" and the Nobel Prize, here is an explanation copied from an interesting blog called "Vast Public Indifference," whose author I was unable to find on the site:
"Last month, the Iowa Republican Party adopted a platform that calls for "the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution." They mean the 13th Amendment that was passed by congress and ratified by 12 states in 1812 — the one that reads,
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
As far as I can tell, the "Thirteenthers'" interpretation of this almost-amendment is fairly silly — they think it applies to titles such as "Esquire" and awards such as the Nobel Prize."
I think you will agree that this qualifies as loony.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
THE OLD BOB RETURNS
For months now, I have been maintaining an elevated tone in this blog as I wrote my memoirs. But my friends know that there is a nasty little ideologue lurking beneath this gentlemanly surface, so the time has come to get some things off my chest. Let me begin with the 44%, or one hundred million plus, of adult Americans who, according to a 2008 Gallup survey, agree with the statement that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at sometime within the last 10,000 years or so." This comports well with a 2005 survey that showed roughly the same number [42%] claiming to be strict creationists.
These figures can in part be explained by sheer ignorance. This is, after all, a country in which very large percentages of adults cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, even though those same people will wear little yellow ribbons to show their support for the troops. But as the recent decisions of the Texas Board of Education make clear, the embrace of so-called Creationism, which is to say the denial of the fact of evolution, is grounded in Christian beliefs as well as in just plain ignorance or garden variety stupidity.
Now, I don't want to enter into a serious conversation with any of these folks, in which I adduce the experimental and observational evidence. Let Richard Dawkins do that. I just want to see a law passed that mandates that hospitals ask whether patients hold these views, and then, if they say yes, requires a doctor to explain the scientific basis of any procedure that the hospital is about to use in treating the patient. Here is how it would work:
A Fundamentalist Christian is brought into the hospital suffering from life-threatening colon cancer. On the forms he fills out at Patient Intake, he says he is a Born-Again Evangelical Christian who believes that the world is ten thousand years old. The doctors then tell him that his best chance of conquering the cancer is radiation therapy. However, they explain, radiation therapy rests on the theory of radioactive decay, and that in turn depends on the fact that the half lives of the relevant elements are millions of years long, etc etc. So, before they violate his most deeply held convictions by beginning the radiation therapy, they just want him to sign a release acknowledging that he no longer believes that the earth is ten thousand years old.
I mean, these are the people who pass laws requiring doctors to show pictures of aborted fetuses to women who want abortions, right? What do you suppose would have happened if someone had put my proposed requirement into the omnibus health care reform bill?
Then I want someone to ask Sarah Palin what she thought she was doing when she had amniocentesis to find out whether her unborn baby suffered from Down's Syndrome. Did she recant her rejection of evolution before the procedure, which, after all, depends on Genetics built on that theory?
We could save a ton of money nationally if all the Fundamentalist Creationists would forswear treatment that conflicts with their religious beliefs, and just die. Of course, we would have to require them to permit their children to be treated, but since we are talking about maybe one hundred million adults, you have to think that's a lot of expensive high tech treatment that wouldn't have to be delivered.
And it won't do for these folks to say, "Well, I am still a Fundamentalist Evangelical Born-Again Inerrant Christian about most things, but I am willing to make an exception for radiation." That would be like a triskaidaphobic saying, "I have a deep-rooted fear of the number thirteen, so although I accept addition and subtraction, multiplication and division generally, I draw the line at any calculation that involves the number thirteen." You cannot pick and choose the implications you like and the ones hyou don't like of a proposition whose general calidity you deny. [I love the fact that hotels routinely omit the number thirteen when labeling their floors. Do they not understand that the floor after twelve is the thirteenth, even if you call it Fred?]
I know, I know. You will say that secular humanist rationalists just don't have the stomach to let people die a hideous, unnecessary death simply because they profess ignorant, stupid beliefs that contradict the medical treatment that will save their lives. But I am not a secular humanist rationalist. I am an atheistical anarchistic Marxist, and we are made of sterner stuff.
Just saying.
These figures can in part be explained by sheer ignorance. This is, after all, a country in which very large percentages of adults cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, even though those same people will wear little yellow ribbons to show their support for the troops. But as the recent decisions of the Texas Board of Education make clear, the embrace of so-called Creationism, which is to say the denial of the fact of evolution, is grounded in Christian beliefs as well as in just plain ignorance or garden variety stupidity.
Now, I don't want to enter into a serious conversation with any of these folks, in which I adduce the experimental and observational evidence. Let Richard Dawkins do that. I just want to see a law passed that mandates that hospitals ask whether patients hold these views, and then, if they say yes, requires a doctor to explain the scientific basis of any procedure that the hospital is about to use in treating the patient. Here is how it would work:
A Fundamentalist Christian is brought into the hospital suffering from life-threatening colon cancer. On the forms he fills out at Patient Intake, he says he is a Born-Again Evangelical Christian who believes that the world is ten thousand years old. The doctors then tell him that his best chance of conquering the cancer is radiation therapy. However, they explain, radiation therapy rests on the theory of radioactive decay, and that in turn depends on the fact that the half lives of the relevant elements are millions of years long, etc etc. So, before they violate his most deeply held convictions by beginning the radiation therapy, they just want him to sign a release acknowledging that he no longer believes that the earth is ten thousand years old.
I mean, these are the people who pass laws requiring doctors to show pictures of aborted fetuses to women who want abortions, right? What do you suppose would have happened if someone had put my proposed requirement into the omnibus health care reform bill?
Then I want someone to ask Sarah Palin what she thought she was doing when she had amniocentesis to find out whether her unborn baby suffered from Down's Syndrome. Did she recant her rejection of evolution before the procedure, which, after all, depends on Genetics built on that theory?
We could save a ton of money nationally if all the Fundamentalist Creationists would forswear treatment that conflicts with their religious beliefs, and just die. Of course, we would have to require them to permit their children to be treated, but since we are talking about maybe one hundred million adults, you have to think that's a lot of expensive high tech treatment that wouldn't have to be delivered.
And it won't do for these folks to say, "Well, I am still a Fundamentalist Evangelical Born-Again Inerrant Christian about most things, but I am willing to make an exception for radiation." That would be like a triskaidaphobic saying, "I have a deep-rooted fear of the number thirteen, so although I accept addition and subtraction, multiplication and division generally, I draw the line at any calculation that involves the number thirteen." You cannot pick and choose the implications you like and the ones hyou don't like of a proposition whose general calidity you deny. [I love the fact that hotels routinely omit the number thirteen when labeling their floors. Do they not understand that the floor after twelve is the thirteenth, even if you call it Fred?]
I know, I know. You will say that secular humanist rationalists just don't have the stomach to let people die a hideous, unnecessary death simply because they profess ignorant, stupid beliefs that contradict the medical treatment that will save their lives. But I am not a secular humanist rationalist. I am an atheistical anarchistic Marxist, and we are made of sterner stuff.
Just saying.
Monday, 2 August 2010
THE RETURN OF THE SNARK
Whew! Who would have thought it would take eight hundred pages to tell the story of my life? Now that I am done, I want to go back to commenting on the passing scene, but first I need to say just a bit about the experience of reliving my life before a live audience [a bit like The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey]. I learned some things about myself along the way, of course. One of them may surprise you. I have always thought of myself as something of a slacker. I mean, mostly, I daydream and play endless games of Spider Solitaire and FreeCell on my computer [I maintain a 77% win average in Spider, making full use of the undo function, and a 96% win rate in FreeCell without using the undo. That takes a lot of practice.] I watch an hour of The Young and the Restless five days a week, and all the reruns of NCIS I can find. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover how much I have actually done in my life. I think this simply shows that if you live to be seventy-six, it is hard to avoid doing something.
I have been delighted and astonished and moved by the warmth and generosity of your responses, both in on-line comments and in email messages. To misquote Sally Fields, you like me, you really like me. Who would have thought that an old balding philosopher with a facial tic could make so many friends on the web? Maybe this online dating thing has a future.
While I have been madly writing and posting, writing and posting, the world has been going to hell in a handbag. Rightwingers have reached levels of sheer nuttiness that are beyond the powers even of a Jonathan Swift to satirize. I have a good deal of snark pent up in me, and if I do not unload some of it, I fear that it will do permanent damage to my nervous system. Starting tomorrow, I will try to catch up.
However, today is a day for rejoicing and bragging, so here goes.
I have just received word that the University of the Western Cape in South Africa has decided to confer on me the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa. This honor comes to me in recognition of my efforts over two decades to help young Black South Africans to get a university education, so it really belongs to all the people who have donated to USSAS over the years, and to the folks in South Africa who have selected the students and mentored them, and to Susie, who has folded and stuffed endless envelopes with me. Next March, Susie and I will be the guests of the University at their annual commencement ceremonies. As it happens, this coincides with Archbishop Tutu's last appearance as the Honorary Chancellor of the University, and as close readers of my Memoir will recall, he is the Honorary Chair of the Advisory Committee of University Scholarships for South African Students, although I am sure he does not recall that fact. I am thrilled, needless to say. I shall carry to South Africa my silk Harvard doctoral robes, a present from my parents in 1957, and shall have a chance to say a few words at the Commencement ceremonies. [Wisely and somewhat cautiously, they indicated that I would have "three to five minutes" to speak.]
So, as Kim Leighton suggested in an email, I am now to be addressed as Doctor Doctor Wolff [rather like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22. ]
I have been delighted and astonished and moved by the warmth and generosity of your responses, both in on-line comments and in email messages. To misquote Sally Fields, you like me, you really like me. Who would have thought that an old balding philosopher with a facial tic could make so many friends on the web? Maybe this online dating thing has a future.
While I have been madly writing and posting, writing and posting, the world has been going to hell in a handbag. Rightwingers have reached levels of sheer nuttiness that are beyond the powers even of a Jonathan Swift to satirize. I have a good deal of snark pent up in me, and if I do not unload some of it, I fear that it will do permanent damage to my nervous system. Starting tomorrow, I will try to catch up.
However, today is a day for rejoicing and bragging, so here goes.
I have just received word that the University of the Western Cape in South Africa has decided to confer on me the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa. This honor comes to me in recognition of my efforts over two decades to help young Black South Africans to get a university education, so it really belongs to all the people who have donated to USSAS over the years, and to the folks in South Africa who have selected the students and mentored them, and to Susie, who has folded and stuffed endless envelopes with me. Next March, Susie and I will be the guests of the University at their annual commencement ceremonies. As it happens, this coincides with Archbishop Tutu's last appearance as the Honorary Chancellor of the University, and as close readers of my Memoir will recall, he is the Honorary Chair of the Advisory Committee of University Scholarships for South African Students, although I am sure he does not recall that fact. I am thrilled, needless to say. I shall carry to South Africa my silk Harvard doctoral robes, a present from my parents in 1957, and shall have a chance to say a few words at the Commencement ceremonies. [Wisely and somewhat cautiously, they indicated that I would have "three to five minutes" to speak.]
So, as Kim Leighton suggested in an email, I am now to be addressed as Doctor Doctor Wolff [rather like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22. ]
LIFE ENDS -- THE VERY LAST INSTALLMENT OF MY MEMOIR
While I was going on cruises and safaris, buying an apartment in Paris, practicing the viola, running the Afro-American Studies doctoral program, and attending Patrick's wedding, I was also working on yet another book. I had not really planned it, but as time went by, I felt the old urge to put pen to paper -- or ones and zeroes in a word processing program's memory, as writing has now become. For the first time in my life, I consulted a literary agent, John "Ike" Williams, a pretty high end operator with offices in Boston. I pitched several ideas to him, and he seized on my suggestion that I write a book growing out of my experience in an Afro-American Studies Department. Thus was conceived Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, yet another title taken from a well-known work. [Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson, for those who do not recognize the allusion.]
I began the book with a long narrative account of my transition from Philosophy to Afro-American Studies and the ways in which the experience changed my life. Much of that first chapter has been incorporated into this Memoir. Then I undertook to tell the real story of America, as I had learned it from my colleagues, and to contrast it with the false story embalmed in generations in college American History textbooks. I traced the ways in which those textbooks, edition by edition, slowly altered their narratives to accommodate the pressures generated by the Civil Rights Movement, after which I began again, and told the true story of America as a land of Slavery and Freedom, Bondage and Citizenship.
Ike was very upbeat about the prospects of placing my little book with a commercial publisher, and did his level best to find a home for it, but thirty or more houses turned it down. Hugh van Dusen was still running Harper Torchbooks, and allowed as how my earlier book for him, In Defense of Anarchism, had sold 200,000 copies, but even that was not a good enough reason, apparently, for him to publish this new manuscript. Eventually, Ike sent me a letter formally terminating our contractual agreement. I figured when even your agent gives up on you, it is time to move on, so I put the book on the shelf and went back to having fun.
Several years later, Jennifer Jensen-Wallach urged me to try to find a publisher. I got the addresses of thirty or so academic houses from the library and sent out a host of letters. In that crowd of editors was a philosopher, Tim Madigan, who was teaching at St. John Fisher College in Rochester and serving as the Philosophy Editor of the University of Rochester Press. Tim knew In Defense of Anarchism and decided to take a chance on my Afro-Am book. In due course, it appeared, with a 2005 publication date. Alas, yet another offspring stillborn. Autobiography did only marginally better than Moneybags, though it did finally sell enough copies to justify a paperback edition. It is by no means one of my favorites among the books I have written, but it has some good things in it, besides the stories of my departmental adventures. Still and all, if you are going to read only one work of revisionist American history, I would certainly send you to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States rather than to my little effort.
On November 8, 2003, I returned from one of my regular South African trips. It was six weeks before my seventieth birthday, an event that I had decided to memorialize by throwing myself a dinner at Del Raye, an upscale Northampton restaurant that Susie and I particularly liked. My sister, Barbara, would be there, as well as Tobias, Patrick, and Diana.
Something about the prospect of turning seventy triggered in me a feverish, irresistible need to write my memoirs, and without any hesitation, I sat down at my computer and began to type. It was immediately clear to me that my life fell naturally into three major stages: the twenty-seven years of my childhood, youth, and education, ending when I completed my Instructorship at Harvard and moved to the University of Chicago; the twenty-four years that encompassed my marriage to Cindy; and the final years during which I rediscovered my childhood sweetheart, Susie Shaeffer, and persuaded her to marry me.
I was so seized by the desire to get my story onto the page that I even suspended my viola lessons and practicing while I wrote. Although I had no reason to suppose that anyone, even members of my own family, would have much interest in reading the memoir, it seemed desperately important to me that I complete the first part of it before my birthday party. The only person to whom I showed what I was writing was Jennifer Jensen Wallach, who at that very moment was hard at work, under my direction, on a dissertation dealing with literary memoirs of Jim Crow. Jennifer offered some invaluable advice about the writings of memoirs that I incorporated into my manuscript as I churned out the pages. After four weeks of the most intense effort, I had reached the moment in my life when I set out from Cambridge for Chicago, bringing to a close the first part of my story. The manuscript was almost three hundred pages long. Virtually unaltered, it is the text that I eventually posted on this blog.
To this day, I have no idea what impelled me to pour my earliest memories onto the page. After I was finished, I made a few half-hearted efforts to find a publisher, but I was neither surprised nor really disheartened when I was told, repeatedly, that there was no market for the memoirs of someone neither famous nor infamous. So it joined my other unpublished books on my shelf -- the early deterrence and military strategy book, the two books about my family. As has been the case on five or six other occasions, the writing was itself exhilarating and satisfying. I do not even think I mentioned it at the dinner.
And so the years passed, easily and happily. Our periodic trips to Paris became the high points of each year. Somehow it was decided that when we were in Paris, I would do the cooking, so each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I would take a large shopping bag to the open air market in Place Maubert and buy several quail or half a rabbit or some thon or espadon. Then I would wander from stall to stall, gathering up courgettes, eschallottes, and champignon, perhaps some real butter [which, miraculously, in Paris does not have either calories or cholesterol], and always two or three kinds of fromage. The kitchen of our apartment, although small, is fully equipped, and I have cooked hazelnut encrusted rabbit, quail, dorade royale, and even a full scale absolutely authentic bouef bourguignonne. Susie and I love to eat out, returning often to little bistros and restaurants within walking distance of our apartment, but I especially enjoy the dinners I have cooked myself. We sit in our Philippe Stark chairs at the tiny two-tiered plexiglas table that serves as our dining table, turn the lights low, put some baroque music on the Bose CD player, and sip wine -- red for me, white for Susie.
All my life, there has been a voice in my head telling me that I am not working hard enough, that I am not doing enough. Each time I finish a book, the voice is momentarily silent, but inexorably it reappears. For reasons that are completely mysterious to me, when I am in Paris that voice is stilled. As I arrive in the fifth arrondissement, a great weight falls from me, and I am able simply to enjoy the streets, the shops, and the buildings of Paris. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is our neighborhood church, a block and a half away; the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages is up the street; and the Jardin du Luxembourg is close enough for the two of us to have a picnic on the grass and watch children sail their boats in the circular pond.
On December 22, 2005, Diana gave birth to Samuel Emerson Wolff, my first grandchild. He was followed, two and a half years later, by his sister, Athena Emily. By this time, Patrick and Diana had moved back to San Francisco, so I am able to see my grandchildren no more than two or three times a year, but when I do visit, I can see that Patrick has grown to be a loving and devoted father, delighted by his son and daughter as I was, so many years ago, by him and his brother.
As I was taking my daily walk this morning, turning over in my mind what I would say in this portion of my memoir, a thought occurred to me that, although banal and commonplace, is nonetheless deeply resonant with meaning for me. Chapter Six of this volume makes it evident that I am intensely aware of my relationship with my father's father, Barnet Wolff. I now find myself standing in the same relationship to Samuel and Athena that Barnet stood to me. We span five generations, with me as the pivot between the late nineteenth century world of immigrant socialists in Lower East Side New York, and the twenty-first century world of San Francisco. My fondest wish is that Samuel and Athena will eventually find in my life something of the inspiration that I found in Barnet's. Perhaps the day will come when they will turn the pages of this Memoir, as I turned the pages of my grandfather's letters to my grandmother, looking for a usable past.
In time, the big house and the harsh New England winters grew too difficult for Susie to handle. Her MS progressed slowly, to be sure. There were long periods when her condition was stable, and yet, inexorably, she suffered some loss of mobility. At the same time, I was beginning to think seriously about retirement. With my characteristic braggadocio, I had told my colleagues and students that I would remain in the department, running the graduate program and the personnel committee and the Scholars program until I was eighty. But the truth is that all of these tasks, at first so challenging, had become routine. Susie and I puzzled for a bit over where we ought to move. Florida held no charms for either of us, and both of us felt uprooted when we were on the West Coast, even though Jon and Tamara, Susie's son and daughter-in-law and their children live in Seattle, and Patrick and Diana and my grandchildren live in San Francisco.
Susie had spent many years in Chapel Hill -- it was there that I found her after my marriage to Cindy ended -- and Susie's older son, Lawrence, was now living in Cary with his new wife, not far from Chapel Hill and close to his two sons from his first marriage. We decided that we would relocate to the upper South. Since I had dragged Susie to New England for the first twenty-one years of our marriage, it seemed only fair that we should choose for the next chapter of our life together someplace that was her turf.
2007-2008 was a terrible time to sell a house, of course. The economy was collapsing, prices were plummeting, and houses in Amherst were lingering on the market for 350 days and more before selling. We placed our house in the hands of a hotshot agent at the leading firm in town and turned our home into a showcase, ready to be walked through by potential buyers, if indeed there were any. At that point I had a brilliant idea -- I say this without any false modesty. "Put the word out," I said to our agent, Jackie Zuzgo, "that the real estate agent who succeeds in bringing in the buyer will get a free week in our Paris apartment, with money for plane fare as well." That did the trick. Anyone in a three state area who showed the slightest interest in housing of any sort was wheeled through our house by agents eager for a trip to Paris. Within a month, we had sold our house -- at a loss, to be sure, but we sold it -- and we were free to leave.
That still left unanswered the question that was preying on my mind. Ever since 1936, when my parents placed me in the Sunnyside Progressive School as a two year old, I had been in school. Each Fall, for seventy-two years, the world had started anew for me as the next school year commenced. What on earth was I going to do with myself? Barbara, long retired from the World Bank, told me not to try too hard to make plans, because whatever I decided would be changed within six months after I retired. I thought about starting a career as an educational consultant. I saw myself flying Business Class to campuses across America to advise them on how to recruit and keep minority undergraduates, or perhaps how to restructure the Humanities to fit the Information Age. A little time with Google revealed to me that in the real world, "educational consultant" means "someone who can tell you how to get your son or daughter into an Ivy League college."
Since I had long since been forgotten by the world of academic Philosophy, it seemed unlikely that any universities would be calling with invitations to spend a few comfortable years as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. [The original Wikipedia entry on me began "Robert Paul Wolff was ..." That did not bode well.]
What to do with myself? I was talking with Patrick about this conundrum one day, when he said: Why don't you start a blog?" And so I did. I launched The Philosopher's Stone on April 28, 2007, more than a year before I finally retired, but after nineteen posts, I lost interest and suspended it. Then, on June 1, 2008, I returned to the world wide web, posting a steady stream of ruminations, comments on the passing scene, and even the first five chapters of the Memoir I had written four years earlier. In early April 2009, I decided to post the last chapter of my memoir, a segment at a time. Then something remarkable happened.
It came about because Tobias forwarded to me an essay he had read and admired by a University of Chicago Professor of Law and philosopher, Brian Leiter. Leiter, it seemed, runs two blogs, one on law and the other on philosophy, and although I did not know this then, he had become the clearing house for news and information about academic philosophy around the world. I looked him up on the U of C website, found his email address, and sent him a message telling him how much I had enjoyed his essay. [I do this quite often. It has always seemed a pity to me that people reserve their nicest remarks about someone for the funeral.] Leiter responded in very friendly fashion.
My old student Rita Reynolds had figured out how to put a hit counter on my blog, and I had been keeping tabs of the number of people who visited each day. I was averaging about 150, maybe a few more on a really busy day. Suddenly, in a single day, eleven thousand people visited my blog. Leiter had posted a small note about my blog, and I had gone viral. When things quieted down, I was left with two thousand or so folks visiting my blog regularly and reading my stories about the Harvard Philosophy Department back in the late fifties.
I was thrilled. By the sheerest chance, I had re-entered the public conversation. I decided to continue writing my memoirs, posting a segment each day. Thus began the most extraordinary three and a half months of my writing career. I found myself writing morning, noon, and night, pouring words onto the screen and posting them as fast as I could compose them. As I soldiered on, through the Chicago years, the Columbia years, and into the UMass years, I began hearing from people around the world who were reading my memoirs as I was writing them. This was an experience completely different from any I had ever had as a writer. Always before, I would write quietly and anonymously in my study until a book was finished. Then I would publish it and wait to find out whether it had found a readership. But now, people were making comments on each episode, or contacting me by email, the very day that I had written the words.
I heard from old students, former colleagues, and people I had never known who took the time to send me a message. Charles Parsons, my old classmate, graduate student apartment mate, and Columbia colleague, wrote several long, fascinating messages in which he corrected all manner of errors in my memory and typos in my writing. It seems that in addition to knowing everything and being super smart, Charlie is also the world's best copy editor. Andrew Levine, the distinguished political philosopher whose dissertation I directed at Columbia, sent several long, fascinating emails about his own experiences in the Academy and his ideas about what I might turn my efforts to once the memoir was finished. Todd Gitlin, whom I still think of as my student, although he is now an important senior voice on the left, checked in with suggestions for getting the memoirs published [no luck there, I am afraid].
These months have been a grand international conversation. The quality of the comments has been extraordinarily high, and the generosity of those who have commented means more to me than I shall ever be able to say. In all, well over one hundred people from every part of the world have joined the conversation sparked by my memoires and stories. Here they all are, in the order in which they appeared [and my apologies if I missed anyone]:
Corey McCall, NotHobbes, Ahmed, PhiloDemos, Kenosser, Bob, Ajrosa, Jacob T. Levy, David, mew123, Andrew, Ann Davis, Graeme Wood, Steven, Todd Gitlin, Bryan, Mohan Matthen, Aaron Garrett, Tombo, David Pilavin, Emily, John S. Wilkins, Matt, Benjamin, Brenda, Andrew N. Carpenter, Warren Goldfarb, Jeff Englehardt, Aliyah, Michael Zhou, David Berry, Velicia MacKay, Pranay, Ryan Dischinger, M, Aaron Preston, wj, flying scotsman - Graeme Forbes, Jeff House, David Berry, Roberto Loja, sbrown 07 - Ken Brown Cal Poly, Brian Leiter, Blanca Macelroy 1230, Margaret, The Rooster, Kristina, Buck, John M., raistlin7000, Jim, Brenda, Tobias Wolff, Charles Parsons, Enzo, Meat Sounds, Michael, Adam, a student, Patrick, Interlocuter, Philosophy, Allen Hazen, hilde, Konigsberg Walker [a favorite of mine, that one], Noumena [another favorite], Laurence B. McCullough, Jonathan, rvincent63, Ian J. Seda Irizarry, Ter@LV - Thomas Ryckman, Bob Unwin, Ionnis, Simon Halliday, Enzo Rossi, Eric Schliesser, Steve_Strasnick, analyticphilosopher, gwern, Anna, marinus, KWH, Al Cyone, aman, wj, andy, tom, Mr. Lonely, JP (Smits), Pat (Greenspan), Dorothee (Benz), Robert Viennau, Charles, Aleph, Carissa, Steven, Angus, Chad, C, Wade, Awesome, Chris, Oboe 316, andrEw, J. Vlasits, Liviu, Kristina, CW, and Philip Kovacs,
In addition, forty five of you took the time to send me email messages. Here you all are: Charles Parsons, Ann Davis, Patricia Greenspan, Todd Gitlin, Andrew Levine, Warren Goldfarb, William Polk, Boram Lee, David Pilavin, Ernest Sosa, Tobias Wolff, Kenneth Wray, David Kane, Douglas Quine, Kevin Hall, Andrew Flynn, Mack Sullivan, Amato Stuart Nocera, Dick Schmitt, Jerome Doolittle, Alex Rose, Srivatsa Monthi, James Klagge, Andrew Lugg, Kenneth Winkler, Pranay Sanklecha, Roman Bonzon, Rita Moss, Allan Silver, Eddie Goldman, Michael Ruse, JP Smits, Andy Jones, Arthur Danto, Rosa Cao, Chris Byson, Gail Rodney, Rita Reynolds, Andrew Rosa, Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Deborah Haar, Lloren Foster, Barbara Searle, and Kim Leighton.
What is it like to write one's memoirs? I am reminded once again [see Volume One, Chapter Four] of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired on June 1, 1992 -- "Planet Kataan" -- the twenty-fifth episode of the fifth season. The Enterprise, you will recall, encounters a beacon in deep space that emits a signal which knocks Captain Picard unconscious. While lying on the floor of the flight deck of the Enterprise, he imagines himself marooned on planet Kataan, which is going to be destroyed by the explosion of its sun. Picard lives an entire life on Kataan, marrying, having children, growing old, having grandchildren, absorbing the culture and history of Kataan. When Dr. Crusher manages to bring him back to consciousness, he finds that he has been out for only half an hour, but there remain in his mind a lifetime of memories. In these past four months, since early April, I have been in a fugue state, reliving at a frenzied pace the entire seventy-six years of my life. It would not be accurate to say that my life has flashed before my eyes, as is often said to happen when one faces death, for that is a passive experience, something that happens to you. Rather, I have, with a remarkable urgency and intensity, recreated my life in my words.
There is a certain inexorability about writing one's memoirs. As one goes on, one gets closer and closer to the present day until, abruptly, not exactly unexpectedly but certainly with a considerable measure of regret, one runs out of life to write about. At this point, it seems I have only two options: to die, or to get another life. Since I am not yet ready to die, I am afraid I shall have to get a life, for the life I had is now a book.
I began the book with a long narrative account of my transition from Philosophy to Afro-American Studies and the ways in which the experience changed my life. Much of that first chapter has been incorporated into this Memoir. Then I undertook to tell the real story of America, as I had learned it from my colleagues, and to contrast it with the false story embalmed in generations in college American History textbooks. I traced the ways in which those textbooks, edition by edition, slowly altered their narratives to accommodate the pressures generated by the Civil Rights Movement, after which I began again, and told the true story of America as a land of Slavery and Freedom, Bondage and Citizenship.
Ike was very upbeat about the prospects of placing my little book with a commercial publisher, and did his level best to find a home for it, but thirty or more houses turned it down. Hugh van Dusen was still running Harper Torchbooks, and allowed as how my earlier book for him, In Defense of Anarchism, had sold 200,000 copies, but even that was not a good enough reason, apparently, for him to publish this new manuscript. Eventually, Ike sent me a letter formally terminating our contractual agreement. I figured when even your agent gives up on you, it is time to move on, so I put the book on the shelf and went back to having fun.
Several years later, Jennifer Jensen-Wallach urged me to try to find a publisher. I got the addresses of thirty or so academic houses from the library and sent out a host of letters. In that crowd of editors was a philosopher, Tim Madigan, who was teaching at St. John Fisher College in Rochester and serving as the Philosophy Editor of the University of Rochester Press. Tim knew In Defense of Anarchism and decided to take a chance on my Afro-Am book. In due course, it appeared, with a 2005 publication date. Alas, yet another offspring stillborn. Autobiography did only marginally better than Moneybags, though it did finally sell enough copies to justify a paperback edition. It is by no means one of my favorites among the books I have written, but it has some good things in it, besides the stories of my departmental adventures. Still and all, if you are going to read only one work of revisionist American history, I would certainly send you to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States rather than to my little effort.
On November 8, 2003, I returned from one of my regular South African trips. It was six weeks before my seventieth birthday, an event that I had decided to memorialize by throwing myself a dinner at Del Raye, an upscale Northampton restaurant that Susie and I particularly liked. My sister, Barbara, would be there, as well as Tobias, Patrick, and Diana.
Something about the prospect of turning seventy triggered in me a feverish, irresistible need to write my memoirs, and without any hesitation, I sat down at my computer and began to type. It was immediately clear to me that my life fell naturally into three major stages: the twenty-seven years of my childhood, youth, and education, ending when I completed my Instructorship at Harvard and moved to the University of Chicago; the twenty-four years that encompassed my marriage to Cindy; and the final years during which I rediscovered my childhood sweetheart, Susie Shaeffer, and persuaded her to marry me.
I was so seized by the desire to get my story onto the page that I even suspended my viola lessons and practicing while I wrote. Although I had no reason to suppose that anyone, even members of my own family, would have much interest in reading the memoir, it seemed desperately important to me that I complete the first part of it before my birthday party. The only person to whom I showed what I was writing was Jennifer Jensen Wallach, who at that very moment was hard at work, under my direction, on a dissertation dealing with literary memoirs of Jim Crow. Jennifer offered some invaluable advice about the writings of memoirs that I incorporated into my manuscript as I churned out the pages. After four weeks of the most intense effort, I had reached the moment in my life when I set out from Cambridge for Chicago, bringing to a close the first part of my story. The manuscript was almost three hundred pages long. Virtually unaltered, it is the text that I eventually posted on this blog.
To this day, I have no idea what impelled me to pour my earliest memories onto the page. After I was finished, I made a few half-hearted efforts to find a publisher, but I was neither surprised nor really disheartened when I was told, repeatedly, that there was no market for the memoirs of someone neither famous nor infamous. So it joined my other unpublished books on my shelf -- the early deterrence and military strategy book, the two books about my family. As has been the case on five or six other occasions, the writing was itself exhilarating and satisfying. I do not even think I mentioned it at the dinner.
And so the years passed, easily and happily. Our periodic trips to Paris became the high points of each year. Somehow it was decided that when we were in Paris, I would do the cooking, so each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I would take a large shopping bag to the open air market in Place Maubert and buy several quail or half a rabbit or some thon or espadon. Then I would wander from stall to stall, gathering up courgettes, eschallottes, and champignon, perhaps some real butter [which, miraculously, in Paris does not have either calories or cholesterol], and always two or three kinds of fromage. The kitchen of our apartment, although small, is fully equipped, and I have cooked hazelnut encrusted rabbit, quail, dorade royale, and even a full scale absolutely authentic bouef bourguignonne. Susie and I love to eat out, returning often to little bistros and restaurants within walking distance of our apartment, but I especially enjoy the dinners I have cooked myself. We sit in our Philippe Stark chairs at the tiny two-tiered plexiglas table that serves as our dining table, turn the lights low, put some baroque music on the Bose CD player, and sip wine -- red for me, white for Susie.
All my life, there has been a voice in my head telling me that I am not working hard enough, that I am not doing enough. Each time I finish a book, the voice is momentarily silent, but inexorably it reappears. For reasons that are completely mysterious to me, when I am in Paris that voice is stilled. As I arrive in the fifth arrondissement, a great weight falls from me, and I am able simply to enjoy the streets, the shops, and the buildings of Paris. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is our neighborhood church, a block and a half away; the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages is up the street; and the Jardin du Luxembourg is close enough for the two of us to have a picnic on the grass and watch children sail their boats in the circular pond.
On December 22, 2005, Diana gave birth to Samuel Emerson Wolff, my first grandchild. He was followed, two and a half years later, by his sister, Athena Emily. By this time, Patrick and Diana had moved back to San Francisco, so I am able to see my grandchildren no more than two or three times a year, but when I do visit, I can see that Patrick has grown to be a loving and devoted father, delighted by his son and daughter as I was, so many years ago, by him and his brother.
As I was taking my daily walk this morning, turning over in my mind what I would say in this portion of my memoir, a thought occurred to me that, although banal and commonplace, is nonetheless deeply resonant with meaning for me. Chapter Six of this volume makes it evident that I am intensely aware of my relationship with my father's father, Barnet Wolff. I now find myself standing in the same relationship to Samuel and Athena that Barnet stood to me. We span five generations, with me as the pivot between the late nineteenth century world of immigrant socialists in Lower East Side New York, and the twenty-first century world of San Francisco. My fondest wish is that Samuel and Athena will eventually find in my life something of the inspiration that I found in Barnet's. Perhaps the day will come when they will turn the pages of this Memoir, as I turned the pages of my grandfather's letters to my grandmother, looking for a usable past.
In time, the big house and the harsh New England winters grew too difficult for Susie to handle. Her MS progressed slowly, to be sure. There were long periods when her condition was stable, and yet, inexorably, she suffered some loss of mobility. At the same time, I was beginning to think seriously about retirement. With my characteristic braggadocio, I had told my colleagues and students that I would remain in the department, running the graduate program and the personnel committee and the Scholars program until I was eighty. But the truth is that all of these tasks, at first so challenging, had become routine. Susie and I puzzled for a bit over where we ought to move. Florida held no charms for either of us, and both of us felt uprooted when we were on the West Coast, even though Jon and Tamara, Susie's son and daughter-in-law and their children live in Seattle, and Patrick and Diana and my grandchildren live in San Francisco.
Susie had spent many years in Chapel Hill -- it was there that I found her after my marriage to Cindy ended -- and Susie's older son, Lawrence, was now living in Cary with his new wife, not far from Chapel Hill and close to his two sons from his first marriage. We decided that we would relocate to the upper South. Since I had dragged Susie to New England for the first twenty-one years of our marriage, it seemed only fair that we should choose for the next chapter of our life together someplace that was her turf.
2007-2008 was a terrible time to sell a house, of course. The economy was collapsing, prices were plummeting, and houses in Amherst were lingering on the market for 350 days and more before selling. We placed our house in the hands of a hotshot agent at the leading firm in town and turned our home into a showcase, ready to be walked through by potential buyers, if indeed there were any. At that point I had a brilliant idea -- I say this without any false modesty. "Put the word out," I said to our agent, Jackie Zuzgo, "that the real estate agent who succeeds in bringing in the buyer will get a free week in our Paris apartment, with money for plane fare as well." That did the trick. Anyone in a three state area who showed the slightest interest in housing of any sort was wheeled through our house by agents eager for a trip to Paris. Within a month, we had sold our house -- at a loss, to be sure, but we sold it -- and we were free to leave.
That still left unanswered the question that was preying on my mind. Ever since 1936, when my parents placed me in the Sunnyside Progressive School as a two year old, I had been in school. Each Fall, for seventy-two years, the world had started anew for me as the next school year commenced. What on earth was I going to do with myself? Barbara, long retired from the World Bank, told me not to try too hard to make plans, because whatever I decided would be changed within six months after I retired. I thought about starting a career as an educational consultant. I saw myself flying Business Class to campuses across America to advise them on how to recruit and keep minority undergraduates, or perhaps how to restructure the Humanities to fit the Information Age. A little time with Google revealed to me that in the real world, "educational consultant" means "someone who can tell you how to get your son or daughter into an Ivy League college."
Since I had long since been forgotten by the world of academic Philosophy, it seemed unlikely that any universities would be calling with invitations to spend a few comfortable years as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. [The original Wikipedia entry on me began "Robert Paul Wolff was ..." That did not bode well.]
What to do with myself? I was talking with Patrick about this conundrum one day, when he said: Why don't you start a blog?" And so I did. I launched The Philosopher's Stone on April 28, 2007, more than a year before I finally retired, but after nineteen posts, I lost interest and suspended it. Then, on June 1, 2008, I returned to the world wide web, posting a steady stream of ruminations, comments on the passing scene, and even the first five chapters of the Memoir I had written four years earlier. In early April 2009, I decided to post the last chapter of my memoir, a segment at a time. Then something remarkable happened.
It came about because Tobias forwarded to me an essay he had read and admired by a University of Chicago Professor of Law and philosopher, Brian Leiter. Leiter, it seemed, runs two blogs, one on law and the other on philosophy, and although I did not know this then, he had become the clearing house for news and information about academic philosophy around the world. I looked him up on the U of C website, found his email address, and sent him a message telling him how much I had enjoyed his essay. [I do this quite often. It has always seemed a pity to me that people reserve their nicest remarks about someone for the funeral.] Leiter responded in very friendly fashion.
My old student Rita Reynolds had figured out how to put a hit counter on my blog, and I had been keeping tabs of the number of people who visited each day. I was averaging about 150, maybe a few more on a really busy day. Suddenly, in a single day, eleven thousand people visited my blog. Leiter had posted a small note about my blog, and I had gone viral. When things quieted down, I was left with two thousand or so folks visiting my blog regularly and reading my stories about the Harvard Philosophy Department back in the late fifties.
I was thrilled. By the sheerest chance, I had re-entered the public conversation. I decided to continue writing my memoirs, posting a segment each day. Thus began the most extraordinary three and a half months of my writing career. I found myself writing morning, noon, and night, pouring words onto the screen and posting them as fast as I could compose them. As I soldiered on, through the Chicago years, the Columbia years, and into the UMass years, I began hearing from people around the world who were reading my memoirs as I was writing them. This was an experience completely different from any I had ever had as a writer. Always before, I would write quietly and anonymously in my study until a book was finished. Then I would publish it and wait to find out whether it had found a readership. But now, people were making comments on each episode, or contacting me by email, the very day that I had written the words.
I heard from old students, former colleagues, and people I had never known who took the time to send me a message. Charles Parsons, my old classmate, graduate student apartment mate, and Columbia colleague, wrote several long, fascinating messages in which he corrected all manner of errors in my memory and typos in my writing. It seems that in addition to knowing everything and being super smart, Charlie is also the world's best copy editor. Andrew Levine, the distinguished political philosopher whose dissertation I directed at Columbia, sent several long, fascinating emails about his own experiences in the Academy and his ideas about what I might turn my efforts to once the memoir was finished. Todd Gitlin, whom I still think of as my student, although he is now an important senior voice on the left, checked in with suggestions for getting the memoirs published [no luck there, I am afraid].
These months have been a grand international conversation. The quality of the comments has been extraordinarily high, and the generosity of those who have commented means more to me than I shall ever be able to say. In all, well over one hundred people from every part of the world have joined the conversation sparked by my memoires and stories. Here they all are, in the order in which they appeared [and my apologies if I missed anyone]:
Corey McCall, NotHobbes, Ahmed, PhiloDemos, Kenosser, Bob, Ajrosa, Jacob T. Levy, David, mew123, Andrew, Ann Davis, Graeme Wood, Steven, Todd Gitlin, Bryan, Mohan Matthen, Aaron Garrett, Tombo, David Pilavin, Emily, John S. Wilkins, Matt, Benjamin, Brenda, Andrew N. Carpenter, Warren Goldfarb, Jeff Englehardt, Aliyah, Michael Zhou, David Berry, Velicia MacKay, Pranay, Ryan Dischinger, M, Aaron Preston, wj, flying scotsman - Graeme Forbes, Jeff House, David Berry, Roberto Loja, sbrown 07 - Ken Brown Cal Poly, Brian Leiter, Blanca Macelroy 1230, Margaret, The Rooster, Kristina, Buck, John M., raistlin7000, Jim, Brenda, Tobias Wolff, Charles Parsons, Enzo, Meat Sounds, Michael, Adam, a student, Patrick, Interlocuter, Philosophy, Allen Hazen, hilde, Konigsberg Walker [a favorite of mine, that one], Noumena [another favorite], Laurence B. McCullough, Jonathan, rvincent63, Ian J. Seda Irizarry, Ter@LV - Thomas Ryckman, Bob Unwin, Ionnis, Simon Halliday, Enzo Rossi, Eric Schliesser, Steve_Strasnick, analyticphilosopher, gwern, Anna, marinus, KWH, Al Cyone, aman, wj, andy, tom, Mr. Lonely, JP (Smits), Pat (Greenspan), Dorothee (Benz), Robert Viennau, Charles, Aleph, Carissa, Steven, Angus, Chad, C, Wade, Awesome, Chris, Oboe 316, andrEw, J. Vlasits, Liviu, Kristina, CW, and Philip Kovacs,
In addition, forty five of you took the time to send me email messages. Here you all are: Charles Parsons, Ann Davis, Patricia Greenspan, Todd Gitlin, Andrew Levine, Warren Goldfarb, William Polk, Boram Lee, David Pilavin, Ernest Sosa, Tobias Wolff, Kenneth Wray, David Kane, Douglas Quine, Kevin Hall, Andrew Flynn, Mack Sullivan, Amato Stuart Nocera, Dick Schmitt, Jerome Doolittle, Alex Rose, Srivatsa Monthi, James Klagge, Andrew Lugg, Kenneth Winkler, Pranay Sanklecha, Roman Bonzon, Rita Moss, Allan Silver, Eddie Goldman, Michael Ruse, JP Smits, Andy Jones, Arthur Danto, Rosa Cao, Chris Byson, Gail Rodney, Rita Reynolds, Andrew Rosa, Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Deborah Haar, Lloren Foster, Barbara Searle, and Kim Leighton.
What is it like to write one's memoirs? I am reminded once again [see Volume One, Chapter Four] of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired on June 1, 1992 -- "Planet Kataan" -- the twenty-fifth episode of the fifth season. The Enterprise, you will recall, encounters a beacon in deep space that emits a signal which knocks Captain Picard unconscious. While lying on the floor of the flight deck of the Enterprise, he imagines himself marooned on planet Kataan, which is going to be destroyed by the explosion of its sun. Picard lives an entire life on Kataan, marrying, having children, growing old, having grandchildren, absorbing the culture and history of Kataan. When Dr. Crusher manages to bring him back to consciousness, he finds that he has been out for only half an hour, but there remain in his mind a lifetime of memories. In these past four months, since early April, I have been in a fugue state, reliving at a frenzied pace the entire seventy-six years of my life. It would not be accurate to say that my life has flashed before my eyes, as is often said to happen when one faces death, for that is a passive experience, something that happens to you. Rather, I have, with a remarkable urgency and intensity, recreated my life in my words.
There is a certain inexorability about writing one's memoirs. As one goes on, one gets closer and closer to the present day until, abruptly, not exactly unexpectedly but certainly with a considerable measure of regret, one runs out of life to write about. At this point, it seems I have only two options: to die, or to get another life. Since I am not yet ready to die, I am afraid I shall have to get a life, for the life I had is now a book.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)