Learning from Babies

What a baby does best is make the world new all over again. It does so by reminding us how the  ordinary is just the extraordinary taken for granted, how the most elemental facts about ourselves give us the greatest occasion for wonder. They are the commonest creatures of all, with thousands born every minute; you’ve been one yourself, and you’ve seen thousands of them. But to have one growing up close by (like, in your home), is a quite distinctive novelty, one that polishes and waxes the mundane and renders it anew.

A baby demonstrates how the most essential and vital of human activities, sleeping, does not, in fact, come naturally to us, that we might have to be ‘trained’ to learn how to simply fall asleep; it shows us how the simplest of sensations–like drowsiness–if not understood and interpreted appropriately, can be experienced as uncomfortable invasions of our sensory fields, requiring loud and persistent protest in response.  It gives us cause for pride; not the usual one associated with proud parents, but the kind that we experience when we realize that over the years we have mastered the many skills that seem so insuperably difficult for the infant.

A baby is a laboratory in action; one conducting relentless experiments to determine the world’s causal mechanisms and its own perceptual responses to its stimuli. We ensure and create safe spaces for it to conduct its experiments and watch it, slowly, ever so gradually, begin to build up a catalog of regularities and correlations, and consequent expectations. And as we observe a baby and consult the gigantic reams of literature published on its psychological and physical capacities, we are struck by just how little we truly know of the baby’s merkwelt; it is not a member of our linguistic community and does not speak our language; what can we coherently say about its experiences? Does it make sense to describe its actions using predicates and terms that have only acquired meaning among us?

A baby experiencing the world with its own peculiar mix of puzzlement and curiosity reminds us that the world become weekday for us was once a source of perplexity and wonder; a fount of fantasy in which lurked endless material for play. Every turn of its head, every startled look, every grasp and reach is a reminder of this. Its reflexes–the strong grip, the sucking, the startle–remind us of its evolutionary history and ours; they point to our pasts, to our slow, persistent maneuvering into our present ecological niche.

As a baby encounters the world’s textures and contours we are reminded of how elemental these initial interactions with the world are: something gives, something resists, something offers succor, something hurts. We slowly differentiate and distinguish and classify, aided at every step by our fellow travelers, beginning with our parents. These maps we construct finally place us in the world, in a spot made familiar for us by the language that surrounds us, coats the world with meaning and tells us how to interpret the new.

A baby might know little, but to watch it is to learn a great deal.

God as Therapist, Existent or Non-Existent

In ‘When God is your Therapist‘, (New York Times, 13  April 2013) T.M Luhrmann suggests that the evangelical relationship with God often resembles that between client and therapist:

I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.

One way to see this is that the books teaching someone how to pray read a lot like cognitive behavior therapy manuals…. the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts. Cognitive-behavioral therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult, and to practice using different ones…..Warren….spells out thoughts he thinks his readers have but don’t want, and then asks them to consider themselves from God’s point of view: not as the inadequate people they feel themselves to be, but as loved, as relevant and as having purpose.

In many evangelical churches, prayer is understood as a back-and-forth conversation with God — a daydream in which you talk with a wise, good, fatherly friend. Indeed, when congregants talk about their relationship with God, they often sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist who will listen to their concerns and help them to handle them….[F]or [evangelical Christians] God is a relationship, not an explanation….What churches like these offer is a way of dealing with unhappiness.

Luhrmann’s observations on the practice of evangelical Christianity are interesting and instructive. They show how the truth of the various existential claims–about God or evil–that might be made by the faithful in the groups she observes is besides the point: what matters is the efficacy of the therapeutic relationship that is set up with the entity referred to as ‘God.’ This non-realist reading of evangelical Christianity suggests that what grants its doctrines and practices their particular resilience, accessibility and popularity is not their correspondence to some transcendent reality, but their success in catering to the felt and expressed emotional and psychological needs of its adherents.  The ‘faith’ of the evangelical Christians that Luhrmann studies is not a set of epistemically evaluable claims made about the theological domain; rather, it is a set of visible practices and utterances directed towards achieving definite outcomes like greater equanimity in the face of life’s uncertain offerings.  This faith is a set of tools, tactics and strategies that orient the believer in this life; to inquire into its ‘truth’ would be to make a category mistake; its evaluation lies elsewhere, in an instrumentalist assessment of its success in providing a new self-recounted narrative. The imperviousness of the evangelically inclined to the demonstration of the falsity of a substantive theological claim becomes comprehensible; that refutation cannot be accepted so long as the need underwriting the claim continues to be met by practiced belief in its truth.

What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art (and Literature)

In ‘What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art‘ (New York Times, April 12, 2013), Eric R. Kandel writes:

Alois Riegl….understood that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture….In addition to our built-in visual processes, each of us brings to a work of art our acquired memories: we remember other works of art that we have seen. We remember scenes and people that have meaning to us and relate the work of art to those memories. In order to see what is painted on a canvas, we have to know beforehand what we might see in a painting. These insights into perception served as a bridge between the visual perception of art and the biology of the brain.

Kande’s focus in his article is on visual art, but these considerations apply equally to the printed word. Here are the passages excerpted above with very slight emendation:

Literature is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the reader  collaborate with the author in transforming two-dimensional printed words on a page into an imaginative depiction of the world, the reader interprets what he or she sees on the page canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the text….In addition to our acquired reading abilities, each of us brings to a work of literature our acquired memories: we remember other works of literature that we have seen. We remember scenes and people who have meaning to us and relate the work of literature to those memories. In order to read what is printed on a page on a page, we have to know beforehand what we might read in the text.

So, we get the collaborative theory of the reader: a literary work is brought to life by the reader, it acquires meaning in the act of reading.  This ensures that the work serves as raw material for an act of active engagement with the reader, who brings a history of reading, a corpus of memories, and thus, an inclination and disposition toward the text. The more you read, the more you bring to every subsequent act of reading; the more you engage with humans, the more varied the archetypes and templates of the human experience you have playing in your mind as you read.

The classic work then, which endures over time and acquires a new set of readers in each successive generation, becomes so because it remains reinterpretable on an ongoing basis; newer bodies of text and human histories surround it and it acquires new meanings from them.  We are still unable to analyze this phenomenon, to determine what makes a particular text receptive to such reimaginings over time; its success is the only indicator it has what it takes to acquire the status of a classic.

Get Your Computer’s Hands off my Students’ Essays

Last week, the New York Times alerted readers to the possibility of computers grading college-level student essays. As with any news featuring the use of ‘artificial intelligence’ to replace humans, reactions to this announcement feature the usual skewed mix of techno-boosterism, assertions of human uniqueness, and fears of deskilling and job loss.

First, a sample of the boosterism:

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

Then, the assertions of human uniqueness.

From the Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment:

Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring. Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.

From  Professor Alison Frank Johnson at Harvard University (Letters Section):

Only a human grader can recognize irony, can appreciate a beautiful turn of phrase, can smile with unanticipated pleasure at the poetic when only the accurate was required.

From Professor Cathy Bernard of the New York Institute of Technology (Letters again), resisting the submit, get feedback, revise, resubmit model (which to my mind, sounds a great deal like a standard iterative writing process):

Writing is thinking, and revision is a slow process, unpredictable and exploratory. A piece of writing, like a cake taken from the oven, needs some time to cool before the revision process can even begin.

Finally, on Twitter, there was ample commentary to the effect that the ‘other tasks’ in ‘freeing professors for other tasks’ would merely be the the revision of resumes as professors looked for work elsewhere, outside the academy, their jobs taken over by the latest technological marvel promoted by the Borg-like combination of corporate rent seekers eager to enter the academic market, and university administrators eager to let them in. Fair enough.

Still, I wonder if matters are quite so straightforward.

First, the assertions of human uniqueness in the domain of reading and writing leave me cold. They do not take into account the possibility that greater exposure to human examples of writing, especially essays graded by human professors–better learning data–will significantly improve the quality of these automated graders, which rely on statistical machine learning techniques. (I’m note sure what ‘realities’ the PAMSSEHSA want us to face; computers can read; you can verify this the next time you enter your name in an online form. As for the lacunae they point out, I fail to see an argument that these are not achievable in principle.)

Second, I note that both Professors Johnson and Bernard are writing from private institutions where, I presume, professors often have teaching assistants to help them with grading. From my vantage position at a severely underfunded public university, I admit to wanting help with grading student assignments. I would be able to assign more assignments–especially in upper-tier core classes–if I could rely on some assistance with grading. In general, as with the discourse surrounding online education, the same fallacy is committed here: comparing the worst of A with the best of B. The original New York Times article features the obligatory story of ‘stupid computers’ fooled by human trickery, and the letter writers wax lyrical about the magic of professors grading student writing. But what about tired, overworked professors who can only provide cursory feedback? Would their students do better with computer grading? Would every human professor always do better than an automated grader?

Bohm and Schrödringer on the World, the Self, and Wholeness

Sans comment, two physicists of yesteryear on matters that might be considered philosophical.

First, David Bohm on ‘the world’:

[T]he world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead, it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical [i.e., Newtonian] limit….Thus, at the quantum level of accuracy, an object does not have any ‘intrinsic’ properties (for instance, wave and particle) belonging to itself alone; instead, it shares all its properties mutually and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts. Moreover, because a given object, such as an electron, interacts at different times with different systems that bring out different potentialities, it undergoes…continual transformation between the various forms (for instance, wave or particle form) in which it can manifest itself.

Although such fluidity and dependence of form on the environment have not been found, before the advent of quantum theory, at the level of elementary particles in physics, they are not uncommon…in fields, such as biology, which deal with complex systems. Thus, under suitable environmental conditions, a bacterium can develop into a spore stage, which is completely different in structure, and vice versa.

Next, Erwin Schrödringer on the relationship between the world and the self:

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense–that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable it seems to ordinary reason, you–and all other conscious beings as such–are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.

….

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only one now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

Note: Bohm quote from: David Bohm, Quantum Theory, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1958. pp. 161-62. Schrödringer quote from: Erwin Schrödringer, My View of the World, Cambridge University Press, 1964. pp. 21-22.

With Trustees Like These, Who Needs Enemies? Part Two

Today’s entry–after yesterday’s union-busting lawyer Peter Pantaleo–in the City University of New York‘s Board of Trustees Roll of Dishonor is  Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld. He is:

[A]n investment banker at Bernstein Global Wealth Management, appointed to the Board of Trustees by Gov. Pataki in 1999. Wiesenfeld’s primary qualification for being a trustee is his loyal service to a string of local politicians, including Senator Alfonse D’Amato, Congressman Thomas Manton, Mayor Ed Koch, Borough President Clair Shulman, and Governor George Pataki.

Like yesterday’s entry in this series, Wiesenfeld’s presence on the Board of Trustees of a public university is especially problematic because:

Wiesenfeld’s primary accomplishment during 13 years on the Board has been to instigate a series of scandals in which he has denigrated local politicians and undermined academic freedom.

Things get worse, of course, because Wiesenfeld has distinguished himself by a not-so-covert racism:

In his role as Trustee, he sought to block the awarding of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner by John Jay College. In his speech at the Boardand in subsequent comments he attacked the Jewish playwright as an anti-Semite and went on to accuse Palestinians who support attacks against Israel of being “non-human.”….In 2007, Wiesenfeld, as part of “Stop the Madrassa,” worked to block the opening of the Khalil Gibran InternationalAcademy and succeeded in ousting its first principal over the use of the word “intifada” on a sweatshirt being sold by a group that supported the school. Wiesenfeld claimed that, “while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists are Muslims.”….[A]ccording to the Daily News, during Wiesenfeld’s conformation process for appointment to the Board there were “allegations that he referred to blacks as ‘savages’ and Hasidic Jews as ‘thieves,’ leading Sen. Daniel Hevesi tospeak out against his confirmation.

I have had an indirect encounter  with Wiesenfeld. In February 2012, in my capacity as Faculty Associate at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, I organized a reading group of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. The selection of this book for reading and discussion resulted in an angry outburst from Professor Mitchell Langbert, protesting the choice of the book, and who, in reading from the Alan Dershowitz playbook, demanded ‘balance.’ Langbert also alerted Wiesenfeld to the subversive act of reading a book on campus, who then wrote in an email:

This is the curse of academia: no honest debate. Just shut your opponents down. Ahhh…but if political islamists come along, the liberalls[sic] cower. Nothing like implied or real threats of violence to take campus control. Checkpoints and BDS conferences anyone?

Mention of BDS conferences reminds us, of course, of:

Wiesenfeld played a similar role in trying to block the BDS event at Brooklyn College. He accused the Political Science Department of staging a racist, anti-Semitic, and “Nuremberg- type event.” He again worked closely with Dov Hikind, who organized a protest outside the College gates, attacking the rights of faculty to co-sponsor the event. Some of those involved, including City Council members, went on to write letters threatening the College’s funding, a position Wiesenfeld has never publicly denounced.

So, we have a racist ideologue who sits on the Board of Trustees of a public university with one of the most racially and ethnically diverse student bodies in the nation. A perfect fit.

With Trustees Like These, Who Needs Enemies? Part One

The City University of New York is a public university. Presumably, its Board of Trustees is staffed by those who have the interests of their constituency–students and teachers–first and foremost. Not so. As faculty and students find out, the Trustees includes many members whose qualifications for this job appear radically antithetical to this university’s mission. The staff union for the City University, the Professional Staff Congress, has started to publish a series of articles on their blog, detailing these folks’ backgrounds, careers, and achievements, all of which make for very sobering reading. I intend to link to these posts and post excerpts here.

Some background:

The CUNY Board of Trustees has 17 members, including two ex officio members: the head of the CUNY University Student Senate, and the head of the University Faculty Senate (who cannot vote).  The other members are appointed by either the Mayor or the Governor. Eight members were initially appointed by Pataki, four by Bloomberg, and one each by Giuliani, Patterson, and Cuomo. They serve seven year terms and can be reappointed for additional terms. The Chairman of the Board is Benno Schmidt, the only educator appointed to the Board, though his interests in for-profit education and corporate led “reform” movements will be discussed in a later post. Official bios can be found at http://www.cuny.edu/about/trustees/board.html.

Now for today’s exhibits. First up, a ‘union-busting lawyer’, Peter Pantaleo:

Democratic Governor David Paterson appointed Peter S. Pantaleo, a top professional in the lucrative field of anti-unionism. The Board of Trustees website (http://www.cuny.edu/about/trustees/board.html.)  identifies Pantaleo as a “Partner at DLA PIPER,” adding: “Mr. Pantaleo represents both domestic and international employers in labor, employment, and civil rights matters. While he has substantial experience litigating cases before courts, administrative agencies, and arbitration panels, the principal focus of Mr. Pantaleo’s practice is advising employers in complex, politically sensitive labor and employment matters.”

DLA PIPER is the largest law firm in the U.S. by attorney headcount, reportedly representing half the Fortune 500. Its website includes a “Labor and Employment Alert” giving employers step-by-step instructions on how to use a recent decision of the anti-labor NLRB to “prohibit use of email for union organizing purposes.” This is remarkably similar to what happened at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College, which banned faculty from using email to discuss union business until this gag rule was defeated by the union. http://archive.psc-cuny.org/Clarion/LAGCCfreespeech.pdf.

Pantaleo has worked for the Las Vegas MGM Grand hotel during its campaign to stop a unionization drive (New York Times, 10 March 1997). His old firm Pantaleo, Lipkin & Moss represented Las Vegas bosses at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) who banned three workers from handing out pro-union leaflets at the entrance to a casino/hotel complex.

In May 1998 Pantaleo co-authored an article in Gaming Law Review describing strategies for “lessening the power” of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.  Another Pantaleo piece, from 2004, tells employers in non-union workplaces how to use a NLRB rulings to prevent employees from having a coworker present during “investigatory interviews” (Monday Business Briefing, 5 July 2004).

 So in sum, we have a trustee appointed to the board on the basis of his experience in attacking unionized workers. The staff of the City University are unionized; this trustee’s role is a purely antagonistic one toward them. How reassuring.

In tomorrow’s post, we will consider another stellar member of this elite group. Stay tuned.

On Being Mistaken for a ‘Worker’

Variants of the following situation have, I think, occurred in many people’s lives here in the US. (I have been on both the giving and receiving end, so to speak.)

You walk into a store (or perhaps a restaurant), perusing its offerings. You do not find what you need; you are confused; you need assistance. You see someone standing around, unoccupied; they are not wearing a uniform or anything like that. For whatever reason, you assume this person is a store employee, and ask for direction or assistance. You are mistaken. This person is not an employee.  Matters now get interesting.

Your respondent tells you, sometimes curtly, sometimes politely, ‘I don’t work here.’ You react as if poked with a cattle iron and electric prod combined, even as your hand flies up to cover your mouth in dismay: ‘I’m sorry!’ And you rush away, mortified, determined to never commit that particular faux pas again. The person you have dared assume was a store employee might also move away quickly from the locale of his embarrassment, wondering what accursed luck had led to this confusion, wondering what they had done wrong. Did they look slovenly or unwashed? Do they look servile?

(In my description of these kinds of encounters, I do not think I have exaggerated excessively. Some twenty or so years ago, I went with a girlfriend to an Indian restaurant for dinner; she was wearing a sari. As we waited for our table, a young man walked up to my girlfriend and asked her for a table; she politely, and with a grin on her face, replied she didn’t work there. You would have thought the lad had been shot, the way he almost doubled up with pain, flushed red, apologized and quickly walked away.)

This species of especially embarrassing social encounter has led to multiple safeguards to prevent its recurrence: in more established commercial enterprises, employees wear name tags or uniforms, and conversely, their customers have learned to be more cautious, prefixing their questions with a very (very!) tentative, ‘Excuse me, do you work here?’

No one it seems, likes being mistaken for a worker. And no one likes to be in the business of mistaking a non-worker for a worker. We worry that we might offend someone by mistaking them for a lowly employee of the business we are patronizing, and the targets of our putative scorn are offended that someone has dared confuse them with those who are there to serve them. The primary sin here is class confusion: our class has been mixed up with someone else’s.

We live in a society that ostensibly aspires to, and sometimes achieves in some limited domains, an egalitarianism of sorts; we supposedly ascribe ‘dignity’ to labor, to wage work; we supposedly recognize that today’s lowly are tomorrow’s esteemed. For isn’t the road to the top available to anyone and everyone? But, I think, these little run-ins show us we’ve got a long way to go till we are ready to accept being confused with a ‘worker.’

The Non-Existent Fourth Estate

In his review of W. Sydney Robinson‘s Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W. T. Stead (‘The Only True Throne’, London Review of Books, 19 July 2012), John Pemble writes

‘Nothing like being an editor for getting a swollen head,’ the Fleet Street veteran A.G. Gardiner wrote in his memoirs. He must have had W.T. Stead especially in mind, because no editorial head was bigger than Stead’s. In the 1880s, first as deputy editor then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he’d been able (he said) to ‘wreck cabinets [and] let loose a tide of war upon helpless populations’. He was responsible – in his own words – for ‘ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, bills transformed, estimates remodelled, acts passed, generals nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither, war proclaimed and war averted’. It’s no wonder he had such a high opinion of himself: Victorian journalists were always being told how important and powerful they were. Bulwer-Lytton’s lines of 1838 – ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great/The pen is mightier than the sword’ – coined a proverb, and by common consent no pen was mightier than that employed by ‘the press’. This 18th-century term, originally used to refer to periodical literature in general, by early Victorian times meant first and foremost the daily papers. In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’

Does the ‘press’ still rule? Can editors still claim the powers that W. T. Stead claimed for himself? It depends, I think, on what we take the referent of ‘press’ to be. If by ‘press’ we are referring to the gigantic media conglomerates that are the result of a never-ending process of corporate mergers of television, newspaper, magazine, and now digital services, then the answer is perhaps still ‘yes.’ The presidential candidate most likely to be elected is the one who can buy himself the most television time; the legislation most likely to pass is that which has been hawked the most successfully by its proponents on that same medium; wars are more likely to be declared if the press can be counted on, as in the case of the Iraq war, to faithfully parrot the talking points of the warmongers; a media frenzy over a politicians scandalous behavior can still bring end an career; a press conference remains the obligatory performative ritual for a disgraced leader; and so on.

But a great deal of what I’m describing above does not sound like what Macaulay had in mind in his ‘Fourth Estate’ formulation. All too often the media behemoth does not monitor the political process as watchdog, but rather manipulates it as active interested partner. How could it be otherwise given its monopolistic nature and corporate ownership?

Note: Pemble’s summation of the non-existence of the Fourth Estate, even in W. T. Stead’s time–unfortunately behind a behind a paywall at the LRB–makes for interesting reading: ‘the political weight of the press had declined as its circulation increased’ i.e., as it became subject to market forces.

Do Sancho Panzas Trump Don Quixotes?

In Stendhal‘s The Charterhouse of Parma, the Conte says to ‘our hero’ Fabrizio:

A half brainless individual, but one who keeps his eyes open and day in day out acts with prudence, will often enjoy the pleasure of triumphing over men of imagination. It was by a foolish error of imagination that Napoleon was led to surrender to the prudent John Bull instead of seeking to escape to America. John Bull, in his counting-house, had a good laugh over that letter of his in which he quotes Themistocles. In all ages, the base Sancho Panzas will, in the long run, triumph over the sublimely noble Don Quixotes.

The Conte’s opening claim is a familiar one: the practical, the grounded, the concrete, the earthy, trumps the idealistic, the wild and woolly, the speculative; the force of the practical can fill the sails of the sluggish and race them past the bold; the worker ant equipped with a superior work ethic will find greater rewards than a brilliant, but lazy, genius; the giant, like Napoleon, can be brought down by an army of determined and united midgets.  The Conte does not specify the domains to which his remarks apply but the open-ended way in which  he makes them suggests a generality extending across the political, the creative, and the artistic.

Sports fans, of course, are used to these sorts of judgments: the histories of many games are littered with stories of dazzling stars whose flashes of brilliance ensured several glorious moments in the sun, but no extended success, while journeymen weekday performers, persistent to the point of dullness, racked up numerically superior careers and thus dominated the recordbooks. Thus, the endless debates about whether statistics lie, whether the greatness of a sportsman should be judged by a cold table of numbers or by the pleasure brought to viewers. But sports at least offers a temptingly objective standard for comparison because of its statistics. (These have not ended debate however, but rather, sparked an efflorescence of ever more baroque statistics with which to wage these endless battles.)

Matters are perhaps more complicated elsewhere. How are we to assess the truth of the Conte’s remarks in  creative domains such as writing or the arts? Are the rewards for the worker ant to be measured in terms of monetary gains or recognition by peers or posterity? There are no objective statistics here to rely on. Might one dazzling, Supernova-like novella, featuring one display after another of verbal pyrotechnics and piercing insights into the human condition, written by a dissolute Quixote, outweigh an entire corpus of stolid prose written by a persistent Panza? Is the worth or the importance of the artist measured by a body of work–and its corresponding influence in its domain–or by an outstanding production that by virtue of being an outlier skews the scales in its favor? Answers to these questions are not easy for they often bring us into contact with one of the oldest and most intractable of all questions in the arts: What is it that makes a work a classic over and above its persistence and endurance through time?

Note: Excerpt from Penguin edition (1958); translated by Margaret R. B. Shaw