American Lit II: Ambrose Bierce, aka “Bitter Bierce” and “The Wickedest Man in San Francisco,” was born in 1842 in Ohio, the son of poor farmers. When the Civil War began he enlisted in the Ninth Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, mapping out battlefields as a topographical engineer. He fought at Shiloh, rescued a wounded soldier in the Battle of Rich Mountain, and was wounded in the head during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In her headnote to the Ambrose Bierce selections in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Cathy N. Davidson notes that the soldier Bierce rescued died later of his wounds, giving Bierce “his first taste of ambivalent heroism.”

In 1875 Bierce settled in San Francisco and began writing regularly for the San Francisco Examiner (one of the William Randolph Hearst papers). In both his journalism and his short stories he evinced the no-holds-barred social criticism that earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” His cynicism and his economy of style are best expressed in the definitions that make up his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, which first appeared in 1906. Some samples:

Christian—One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Corporation—An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Pray—To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Vote—The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

In 1913 Bierce went to Mexico, hoping to meet Pancho Villa and gain some insight into the Mexican Civil War. His last known letter is dated the day after Christmas in 1913; after that he was never heard from again. His only peer in American journalism was the equally cynical and even more brilliant H.L. Mencken (popularized as the character Hornbeck in the film Inherit the Wind).

Now for Twain. In “The Mark Twain They Didn’t Teach Us about in School” (International Socialist Review 10 [Winter 2000]: 61-65), Helen Scott reminds us that Twain was “one of the most forthright critics of American ruling-class ideology at the turn of the twentieth century,” a man whose “unpublished writings and speeches are overwhelmingly antiracist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary.” Wrote Twain:

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Scott goes on to describe many of the other aspects of the Twain they don’t teach in school — Twain the union organizer and champion, the religious skeptic, the critic (and victim) of police harassment, the militia deserter, author of books now considered classics but once thought to be “only suitable for the slums,” and vigorous opponent of the Spanish-American War.

Here is Twain himself on his anti-imperialism:

[I used to be] a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

Twain wrote any number of sarcastic critiques of American and European militarism and imperialism (e.g., “The War Prayer”).

Scott does point out that Twain was not too much of a revolutionary to marry into money and invest in schemes he hoped would make him rich. We should consider whether Twain’s “reliance on such wealthy sponsors undermined his independence and compromised his social criticism.” But she concludes that Twain’s is nonetheless

a voice that should be remembered and celebrated: anti-imperialist and revolutionary — this is the Twain of our tradition. If Twain were alive today [Scott is writing in 2000], he would denounce the imperialists carving up Kosovo and killing Iraqis and Serbs in the name of freedom. He would say of Bill Clinton, “When his time comes, I’ll buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake!”

The literary establishment — the modern equivalent of those who scorned Twain — has claimed him for their own. It is up to us to keep alive the other Twain and to fight for the world he wanted. As Twain proposed in 1902, “Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love.”

Does America have anything like a Mark Twain or an Ambrose Bierce today? Do we need one? Read more!

Comm Arts II: In Animal Liberation Peter Singer quotes a pork producer as he explains his pigs’ response to having their tails cut off.

They hate it! The pigs just hate it! And I suppose we could probably do without tail-docking if we gave them more room, because they don’t get so crazy and mean when they have more space. With enough room they’re actually quite nice animals. But we can’t afford it. These buildings cost a lot. (121)

I sense that this farmer would prefer to treat his pigs humanely, if only he could “afford it.” Well, if you’re not rich I’m sure you know what it’s like not to be able to afford something. But does economic necessity justify inhumane treatment? Is there really any such thing as economic necessity? I can’t afford a Jaguar, but that doesn’t make it okay for me to use unethical means to obtain one. It just means I do without.

In the same way, if the only way to profitably raise pigs these days is to torture them, shouldn’t that mean we should simply do without factory-farmed pork? Isn’t the farmer really saying “We can’t afford to raise pigs ethically, so we do it unethically”? And isn’t that the same as my saying, “I can’t afford to own a Jaguar ethically, so I’ve obtained one unethically”? Read more!

American Studies. Carolyn Merchant’s “Reinventing Eden” contrasts two creation stories, both of which turn on the actions of a woman: a Penobscot Indian “Corn Mother” myth that “mov[es] from desert to garden” (leaving humankind in a happy, stable position) and an old Israelite myth that moves from garden to desert (leaving humankind in an unhappy, unstable position it must struggle to rectify). Merchant proceeds to frame all of western culture — at least its patriarchy, Christianity, science, capitalism, and imperialism — in terms of a furious and ongoing attempt to recover the lost garden (132-133). Hence the “recovery narrative” of her subtitle.

Opposed to the main western story, says Merchant, are two counter-stories: feminism and environmentalism. The first opposes patriarchy and attempts to recast Eve as a Corn Mother. The second opposes the capitalist-technocratic-imperialist attempt to transform wild nature into human-friendly garden.

Richard White’s essay is not quite so ambitious. White notes that environmentalism tends to see wild nature as a place for recreation, a place where one goes to play, rather than to work. Environmentalists tend to

equate productive work in nature with destruction. They ignore the ways that work itself is a means of knowing nature while celebrating the virtues of play and recreation in nature. Whereas mainstream environmentalism creates a popular imagery that often harshly condemns all work in nature, this second group is apt to sentimentalize certain kinds of farming and argue that work on the land creates a connection to place that will protect nature itself. (171)

One result of these habits is the familiar conflict between urban middle-class environmentalists and rural working-class people of the sort whose cars bear the famous bumper-sticker that asks, “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” Note how the bumper-sticker implies that if you’re not working out in nature, you’re not really even working. To work is to work outdoors, with one’s hands — not indoors with one’s brain. In this view ranching and logging count as work, but not, say, approving loans or teaching American studies courses.

I’d like you to put these two essays in dialogue. What do you suppose Merchant and White might have to say about each other’s ideas? Also, feel free to provide examples of how their ideas are (or aren’t) reflected in popular culture. Here’s my example: Joni Mitchell’s justly famous song about getting caught up in the “devil’s bargain” of patriarchal-technocratic-capitalist-imperialism and trying to recover the garden, Woodstock. And what the heck — I'll throw in Merle Haggard singing the Working Man Blues. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Now that you’ve all read the “Book of the Machines” chapters in Erewhon, I’d like you to move from Samuel Butler’s 19th-century fantasies to some 21st-century realities, such as the Slugbot and the EcoBot — predatory robots that capture and consume food from their environment, digest it, and turn it into the energy they need to continue operating. According to the Slugbot’s creators, the goal is greater autonomy for the machines:

Most mobile robots are not truly autonomous; most operate in simplified environments. Almost all non-industrial robots still require a helping hand from humans, e.g. battery charging, the odd push if they get stuck, obstacles that are suited to their sensors, etc. The notable exceptions are smart missiles, satellites and torpedoes which carry enough fuel and computational resources to successfully complete their missions. However, we are interested in building robots which will be self-sufficient in terms of decision making and energy — robots which can be left unsupervised to organize their work and nourishment.

The work on energy autonomy in robots is an on-going process. The initial stage looked at the problems faced by a robot predator. It is not only the energy transformation process but the necessary behavior of the robot which we wish to study. This is an important point — the two processes are tightly interlinked. In this case the robot “hunted” slugs. The collected slugs would be fermented to produce biogas in a separate off-board digester unit. The gas would then be passed through methane fuel cell to generate electricity. The electricity would be stored in batteries and could be downloaded to a “hungry” robot. We are currently working on the employment of a different type of “digester” — the microbial fuel cell (MFC). In this type of cell microbes are employed in a special container with a semi-permeable membrane to extract electrons from the nutrient (such as carrot peelings) and pass them onto an electrode. In this way a form of “biological battery” can be made.

The EcoBot II eats flies instead of slugs. What do you suppose Butler might have made of all this? And what about Erewhon’s form — does “The Book of the Machines” make the book quasi-dystopian?

Speaking of dystopia, do you see anything potentially dystopian about the possibility that job interviews might routinely include brain scans? According to a recent post at one of my favorite blogs, Next Nature,

MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam. He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: Let me recap some highlights from class today. The philosophical status of artificial life depends on how we define “life.”We could approach the question by isolating a set of attributes that all life necessarily possesses qua life, and then asking whether these defining attributes could also be possessed by a human-built machine.

Here’s one plausible list of the attributes all life necessarily possesses qua life:

1. Perception and response (living organisms sense and respond to things going on in their environment).

2. Metabolism (living organisms capture part of their environment and turn it into energy).

3. Reproduction (living organisms produce copies of themselves, and the copies are themselves capable of reproduction).

Machines are already quite capable of 1. and 2. The real question concerns reproduction. It’s possible to imagine that at some point in the future artificially intelligent robots might be capable of building replicas of themselves. But Samuel Butler offers a more subtle approach to the problem of machine reproduction. Machines reproduce themselves with our help, as part of a symbiotic relationship. If that kind of reproduction does not count as satisfying criterion 3. above, then what are we to make of the flowering plant that cannot reproduce without the help of the bumble bee? If the plant’s symbiotic dependence on the bee does not disqualify it from “life,” then on what grounds can we rule out the possibility of machine life?

Miscellaneous Note 1: The Very Smart MIT Scientist who believes we’ll be able to upload human consciousness into a computer is Ray Kurzweil. The (IMHO) Even Smarter MIT Scientists who revolutionized robotics are Rodney Brooks and Cynthia Breazeal (check out the bit about her “social robots” here).

Miscellaneous Note 2: You might want to watch the “birth of technology” clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can find it here. Read more!

American Lit II: Early in The Age of Innocence Ellen Olenska says, “I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American again” (41). Part of the irony here is that her New York social circle seems to consist of “complete Americans” only in the sense that they were all born in America. They don’t strike us as “American” in any more fundamental sense. If anything they venerate Europe so much they seem more European than the Europeans. They’re aristocratic instead of democratic. Rather than making their own way in the world (like, say, that ur-American, Benjamin Franklin) they live off of inherited wealth. They even go to the opera, for crissakes.

Deepening the irony is Newland Archer’s claim that as Ellen’s lawyer “his business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all he represented — and abhor it” (49). But wait. What if Beaufort — with his willingness to take risks, his rejection of petty social morés, and his bold marriage to the lower-caste Fanny Ring — in fact represents all the can-do independence, forthrightness, and freedom we typically think of as American? Then what Archer is vowing to do is to teach Ellen to abhor America itself.

What other ironies do you see in this novel? What would you say are its plot and theme? Read more!

Comm Arts II: In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer basically calls the pioneering “chicken tycoon” Frank Perdue a lying sack of crap. Well, that’s my paraphrase. What Singer actually does is tell us Perdue’s claim “that the chickens on his ‘farm’ are pampered and ‘lead such a soft life’” (105) does not match reality. Singer lets us draw our own conclusions about the man’s honesty.

Do you think Singer has treated Perdue fairly? Or did he let him off too lightly? Are you confident that Singer is right about Perdue? (Checking Singer’s use of his sources here would make for a great essay, BTW.) If Singer is right, what would have been the most rhetorically effective way to call Perdue on the carpet? Read more!

Senior Seminar. As I mentioned in class, I think Samuel Butler’s treatment of religion in Erewhon makes for pretty thin satiric gruel and might as well have been left out of the book altogether. I think he gets a lot more mileage out of the “Birth Formulae” and “World of the Unborn” chapters. As is so often the case — especially in the brilliant “Book of the Machines” chapters — Butler manages to be both satirical and prescient at the same time. In this passage, for instance, Butler prefigures a key element in the political philosopher John Rawls’ influential theory of “justice as fairness”:

First, [the unborn] must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take them, such as they are, for better or worse — neither are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire; they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is their business to find and pester until they adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.

As part of his theory of justice, Rawls concocted a now-famous thought-experiment which asks us to imagine ourselves being born into the world from an Original Position, in which we view our future condition behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing whether we’ll be white, black, or brown, male or female, gay or straight, etc. It is from this original position that we should create the social contract under which we all should live.

Your question: what do you see as some of the philosophical implications of Butler’s parody in these chapters? Does Butler’s treatment of Erewhonian beliefs about the unborn help us figure out whether the book is an anti-utopia? Read more!

American Studies. With his now-classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon introduced the field of environmental studies to postmodernism. He did so by problematizing the seemingly straightforward concept of wilderness. To problematize a concept is to question the fundamental premises that lie beneath it and demonstrate that it’s not as simple as everyone had been used to thinking — to show, as Cronon puts it in the case of wilderness, that it “is not quite what it seems” (69).

In the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness denotes “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” “Untrammeled by man” means something like “not significantly altered by humans.” The Wilderness Act’s definition (which has the force of law) is problematic because in fact, as environmental historians have demonstrated conclusively, many of the landscapes we think of as wild have been significantly altered by humans, in particular by Native Americans, who for thousands of years had been deliberately altering the ecosystems in which they lived — by hunting animal species to extinction, by setting fires to clear out underbrush and foster the growth of certain kinds of trees, and so on.

To point out such historical facts is not exactly to deconstruct wilderness, however. Cronon comes closer to actually deconstructing wilderness when, first, he reviews just how decisively the term has been shaped by centuries of changing ideologies of nature and, second, when he analyzes the binary oppositions (human-nonhuman, artificial-natural, impure-pure, etc.) in terms of which wilderness has been defined.

Cronon argues that the deconstruction of wilderness has practical implications. He argues that environmentalism’s near-deification of wilderness has left us with a tendency to value pristine landscapes at the expense of the “impure” landscapes in which most of us actually live. (And what happens when people discover that those pristine landscapes are not really so pristine after all? Will they cease to protect them?) And, because wilderness by definition is a place where humans do not live, our idealization of wild nature makes it difficult for us to think clearly and creatively about how we should fit ourselves into the rest of nature, as inevitably we must do.

It’s fine to preserve wilderness landscapes as human-free zones, as places we visit but do not inhabit, but we still need to live our everyday lives somewhere, and the ideology of wilderness doesn’t tell us how best to do so. Wilderness ideology grounds an environmentalism for our vacations, but how are we to live the rest of the year? “Our challenge,” writes Cronon,

is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. (89)

Cronon’s essay, and the other essays collected with it in the anthology Uncommon Ground, provoked angry reactions from biologists convinced that, by deconstructing wilderness, a bunch of scientifically illiterate know-nothings in the humanities were denying the seriousness of environmental crisis and the very reality of nature itself.

A counter-anthology, Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, was put together by Soulé and his colleague Gary Lease and published as a response to the essays in Uncommon Ground. It was touted as a refutation of the postmodern position, but many of its essays turned out to be pretty postmodern themselves and could have just as easily have been included in Cronon’s volume (see, for example, Lease’s “Nature Under Fire” and David Graber’s “Resolute Biocentrism”).

One exception was Soulé’s contribution, “The Social Siege of Nature,” which claimed not only that the idea of nature as a social construct is wrong, but that it amounts to a “social assault” that justifies the exploitation of nature (137). Basically he was saying that people like Cronon (and me) were collaborators with the bad guys.

Given its thesis, you might expect Soulé’s essay to cite instances where developers justified their environmental destruction with the idea that nature is socially constructed. If you’ve read the essay, however, you’ll notice that Soulé never quite gets around to doing that. I’ll go over this essay’s many shortcomings in class; for now, it suffices to say that Soulé lost and Cronon won.

Here’s your question: What are some of the human values you’ve been taught to associate with wilderness? Can you provide examples of wilderness ideology or imagery in popular culture? Read more!

American Lit II: Talk about family values — here’s Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, on the farewell dinner Newland and May host for Ellen Olenska: “There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.” At this point, Newland doesn’t know the half of it.

But as the evening wears on he’s sure going to find out! Chapter 33 is dedicated to his gradual awakening to a number of unpleasant facts, among them just how completely he has underestimated his wife. And the reader, perhaps, begins to understand just how hard society makes it for one to be a truly free individual, even if one does happen to be a wealthy white male aristocrat living in the Sweet Land of Liberty.

By chapter’s end Newland will know that his family, conspiring to save May’s marriage by exiling that troublemaking countess, Ellen, has played him like a chump. The final image, before the novel fast-forwards 26 years, is of Newland looking up at May “with a sick stare” of realization while May looks down at him with “blue eyes wet with victory.”

Game over. Society 1, Individual 0.

As Newland sits down to dinner that evening he is aware that he is engaged in a “deadly silent game,” but at first he believes “the trumps were still in his hands.” What a dope! Why would he think such a thing? Because he’s the man of the house? You can easily imagine Wharton at her typewriter, tapping out this chapter and snickering about the way men think they’re in charge.

A few pages later, Wharton allows the light to begin to dawn over the benighted landscape of Newland’s understanding:

As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators…. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything…. Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.

Newland winds up disillusioned, trapped, forever dispossessed of his One True Love, and with his “inner devils” laughing at him. As May says, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?” Wharton’s humor is subtle, but it’s wicked.

Your assignment today is to compare and contrast The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! Let’s see how many similarities we can find, and how many differences. (Don’t neglect the obvious — e.g., they’re both novels.) Bonus points if you indicate which novel you think is better and explain why.

P.S. The scene in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence where May triumphs over Newland is so nice we had to watch it twice. If you’d like to watch it a third time, you’ll find it here. Read more!

Comm Arts II: I spent most of class Friday lecturing on the concept of spontaneous order as part of a broad shift in thought that touches on everything from biology to economics to linguistics. A spontaneous order is any kind of organization that emerges on its own out of chaos, through some unplanned and undirected process of self-organization. Probably the most famous example is biological evolution, in which complex, highly organized, and seemingly designed life forms and ecosystems evolve naturally, without the help of any outside direction. (Compare evolution-by-natural-selection to the process of selective breeding, which does depend on outside direction, namely, that provided by the animal breeder.)

Other examples of spontaneous orders include the modern market economy, the human brain, and, most important for this class, language.

Just like a market economy, a natural language is not planned or designed by any individual authority or designer. The meanings of its words, the rules of its grammar and syntax, and the conventions of its writing emerge naturally out of the zillions of judgements and choices made by the many people who use the language.

Why do I stress this fact? Because it’s crucial to understanding the debate over prescriptivism and descriptivism. I won’t try to explain these concepts here; if you missed my “prescriptivism and descriptivism” lecture in class you’ll have to get yourself up to speed by perusing the links I’ve provided. (If you’re feeling particularly intellectually adventurous, read this famous Language Log essay, Everything Is Correct Versus Nothing Is Relevant.)

Here’s your question — and it’s not an easy one to answer. To what degree do you think our society should try to standardize its language and try to stop it from evolving? To what extent do you think we should let it evolve naturally? What implications does your answer have for the teaching of writing in the schools? Read more!