Tag Archives: Richard Posner

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and the Fallacy of the ‘Lone Gunman’

It is worth remembering, the next time you see Trayvon Martin‘s parent’s on television, trying to explain their pleas for justice, that you are looking at human beings who, in the giant totem pole that mankind has constructed of Humans Who Have Suffered Terrible Losses, occupy a fairly high position.

The killing of Trayvon Martin is a classically American nightmare: a suburb somewhere, a dark night, a young black man on the streets, guns in the hands of people who imagine it will make them safer, calls to 911 that provide grim, brief, staccato evidence of a deadly, preventable encounter. And at the end of it all, a dead man, grieving parents, a police force and a city administration making mealy-mouthed responses. When we reach that stage, a sickening sense of deja vu strikes, for we have memorized the rest of the script: a little outrage that soon blows itself out, some protest marches, featuring as usual, some ‘leaders’ of the black community, bland, banal responses from the police force, and a meandering march toward ‘justice,’ which, more often than not, ends in miscarriage.

There is another, well-established trope as component of this recurring tragedy: character testimonials about the killer, about how he could not have been a ‘racist.’ But the fallacy in this sort of defense is in imagining that visible, overt racism must reside in the final cause we identify. But more often that not, the final pull of the trigger, as in this case, was merely the spearpoint of a weapon that had been aimed at Trayvon Martin’s head for a very long time. Zimmerman lives in a society infected by racism; when he finally shot Trayvon, he wasn’t acting alone; he was accompanied by anything and everything that has conspired to make it the case that young black men in this country are taking substantial risks when they venture out alone into a dark street. Zimmerman had been convinced, a long time ago, that the right way for him to assuage his fears of young black men was to work it out, dramatically, with a gun. He would take revenge for all the fear that been visited on him in the past. In his fatal decision to pursue Trayvon with a deadly weapon, Zimmerman was the final instantiation of a set of social forces that had been acting around, and on him, for a very long time.

In Chapter 2 of  Law and Literature, Richard Posner suggests that an entire genre of literature can be read as making the case that the rule of law should replace social systems of revenge. With the Stand Your Ground law, the vigilantism it has sparked, and with the relentless machinations of the NRA to keep firearms in the hands of one and all, it is clear we have pulled off a rather remarkable conjuring trick: we have written violence and revenge back into the law. Or to put it in more simple terms, we have written back ‘taking the law into your own hands’ into the law. Zimmerman was merely the Executive Branch of this legal system.

Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post disagreeing with Katha Pollitt’s claim that (roughly), Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. Pollitt had referred to “columnists and essayists and book reviewers” in her original post, but in my response, I broadened the category to “non-fiction.”

That post triggered some interesting responses. Corey Robin wrote in to say that he disagreed with the small list of “essayists” I had generated (while agreeing with my disagreement with Pollitt):

Arnold, Barzun, Burke, and Bacon are not known and remembered primarily for their essays; they have other bodies of work that we mainly remember them for. You’re right about Montaigne, Johnson, and Sontag, and I’d also throw in Hazlitt, Chesterton, maybe Benjamin, and James Baldwin.

Another commenter, Lauren Hahn, wrote,

The examples you give of essayists who did not write fiction are problematic. Ben Jonson, of course, wrote brilliant plays (Volpone!) and poetry as well as essays. Matthew Arnold wrote brilliant poems. Hitchens did not write plays or poems.

Later, Corey and I also got into an interesting Twitter dialogue with Jeff Sharlet; Katha Pollitt herself showed up to clarify her initial claim (with some interesting examples; do read the comment); and later, Mukul Kesavan suggested, using Borges and the standard New York Review of Books piece as examples, that Pollitt’s claim was correct:

[W]e can be certain that the generic ‘literary’ essay that is the stock-in-trade of the NYRB and its imitators, has the shelf-life of fresh produce. Or fish.

These discussions threw up some interesting points of contention:

  1. The distinction between “essayists” and other “non-fiction writers”; I started too broadly but this was inevitable, given that many writers who wrote essays also wrote other material: philosophical and political tracts most notably. Consider Barzun, who has written many “general” essays but is a historian of ideas and culture and a philosopher of education. Or Burke, who I had down as an essayist, is perhaps most straightforwardly considered a political theorist and philosopher. (Incidentally, in response to Hahn above, I would say that my examples were intended to be not of writers who confined themselves to essays but rather those that we remember primarily for their essays; Sontag, as I noted, wrote fiction too, but I’d be surprised if anyone remembers her writing for that reasons).

    This disagreement in general suggests the category “essayists” is too narrow, and “non-fiction” is too broad when it comes to picking the appropriate target for comparison with “fiction” in reckoning how well one’s writing will endure. I think if a comparison between “non-fiction” and “fiction” is made, the case is hopelessly muddled. But even restricting the comparison to “essays” and “fiction” is hard. Because I don’t think we have great agreement on who an “essayist” is or what an “essay” is. Is this defined by subject matter, writing style, length of piece, forum of publication, or something else? “Essay” is a vague predicate when applied to works of prose, and our categorization of writers as “essayists” is an exercise in classification that will always reveal boundary cases that don’t quite fit in. 

    I suspect “essay” is often reserved now for a piece of prose that is intensely personal (i.e., there is an element of autobiography in it); even the quasi-philosophical piece can become an “essay” then if the writer makes explicit that his view is not from “nowhere” but from his personal standpoint. I’d be interested to hear from folks on what they would include in the category and what they would leave out, and how a line would be drawn between different kinds of writing so that we could more accurately classify writers as “essayists” or something else.

    I think if nothing else, this discussion made me realize the original comparison between different kinds of writers’ ability to earn posterity’s recognition is not a very interesting one if “essayists” is restricted too narrowly.

  2. The “popular” and “serious” distinction. In the discussion that Robin, Sharlet and I had on Twitter, the central disagreement was about my rather loosely-worded claim that “Well, fiction is always more likely to reach a broader market than the non-fiction a writer puts out.” Sharlet contested this point, and he was right. The implicit suggestion in this claim of mine was that “fiction” is somehow “popular”, while “non-fiction” is “serious” and the greater accessibility to markets comes about because of the “pop” nature of fiction. This conflation of “fiction” with “popular fiction” was careless on my part. Sharlet later suggested that by my examples, I was attempting to point out “exceptions to the rule” but he’d suggest rather, that “nonfiction is the new rule.” When I asked if this meant that in the modern context, “nonfiction writers and fiction writers stand equal chance of access to markets of readers”, Sharlet replied, “my understanding is except for a few stars, nonfiction far outsells fiction now.”

    The question then remains: What kind of non-fiction? Essays? Reportage? Political tracts? Literary criticism? Another interesting question this prompts is why this might be the case now. Have fiction markets become saturated? Is there an expressed preference for the consumption of “non-fiction” now? Have bloggers had something to do with this?

  3. Why might it be the case that fiction ensures greater enduring fame? Now, I think the original discussion, and the examples of Montaigne, Johnson and Sontag, show that even with “essayists” there are some counterexamples to Pollitt’s claim. But why might Pollitt and Kesavan think that fiction ensures greater fame? The facile answer to this is that fiction is not a creature of its time in the way that essays might be. Some fiction can speak to universal themes that span space, time and cultures. But other pieces of fiction are, of course, hopelessly parochial in those same dimensions. And when one considers the category “essays” to include political tracts or philosophical speculation, those can often cease to be confined by temporal boundaries as well. It isn’t a conceptual feature of fiction that it will always be less parochial.

    But where fiction does come off best is in comparison with those pieces that are necessarily creatures of their time: journalistic pieces (see my post on “Essays and Expiry Dates”); book reviews; some kinds of travel writing (not all; see for instance travel writing that has now become an important historical sources in its own right); topical political commentary (like the tedious modern pieces of election analysis).

    In general, I’m not sure that a general sort of claim can be made about how well some kinds of writing endure based on their fictionality as a parameter. Rather, when it comes to assessing enduring fame or a place in posterity, there is only one way to do it: keep checking over time. In Law and Literature, Richard Posner suggested that coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be judged a “classic” was a doomed exercise and that the best way to exercise that judgment was to see how long it continued to be read. I agree.

Posner on Occupy Wall Street

Over at the Becker-Posner blog, Richard Posner (finally?) turns his attention to Occupy Wall Street. By and large, other than little quibbles about phrasing that accommodates Posner’s extreme market-friendliness, there is little to disagree with here: OWS was inspired by the Arab spring, depressions lead to demonstrations, social media makes organizing easier, the police tactics were tactically flawed, that OWS’ central complaints were “income inequality, lack of jobs, and the baleful influence of the banking industry.” I disagree that occupying public spaces was a mistake; au contraire, there was a vanishingly small chance OWS and its related occupations would have attracted a fraction of the press coverage they did had the protests been limited to sporadic marching and online bluster. A fixed, visible presence capable of acting as the locus of activist energy was always critical in elevating OWS’ profile; without it OWS would have lacked its distinctiveness as a political movement.

But then, at the end, after offering us as reasonable a take as one might expect from the champion of the economic in human affairs, Posner splutters:

Railing against income inequality, job loss, and banking abuses is thus understandable, but it doesn’t do any good. The “Occupiers” are anarchic and disruptive, and the solid middle of American society, which rejects the Tea Party because of its goofy ideas, is likely to reject the Occupy movement because of its style, while broadly sympathetic to its antipathies. But if the movement attracts charismatic leaders amidst a stagnant or worsening economy, it may become a force in American politics

This is a depressingly familiar, reductive, and not very deep summing up of political action: don’t bother protesting because it won’t do any good; good, “solid” people don’t like noise; come back when you have a “charismatic leader.” That is, channel your “anarchic and disruptive” forces into attracting the “solid middle” all the while making sure you march under the flag of that old rescuer of politics: the charismatic leader. So much for changing the political conversation.

OWS should take heart though, from Posner’s contention that they have found sympathetic resonance with the “solid middle” when it comes to their shared “antipathies.” Perhaps even if there is disagreement about prescription and treatment one should be heartened by agreement, on diagnosis and prognosis, across the political and intellectual divide that separates Posner and OWS.

Hope. Eternal. And All That.