RIP Roger Ebert

I don’t read movie reviews before I see a movie; I read them afterwards. I don’t like running into spoilers and I dislike the idea of not making up my own mind about a movie. Once I’ve seen the movie, I’ve formed an opinion, which remains relatively impervious to the critiques of others. But still, just as I like to discuss a book with its other readers, reading what someone else thought about a movie I’ve seen remains an activity I often look forward to. But not with too many folks. (Like I said, I have strong opinions about movies.) Over the last dozen years or so, Andrew O’Hehir and Roger Ebert were among the movie critics I read on anything more than a sporadic basis; I used to read Matt Stoller Seitz back when he wrote for the New York Press but lost him along the way. (I’m not counting film theory here, of which I read a great deal a long time ago, and then gave up, frustrated by its inability to resonate with my movie-watching experience.)

Roger Ebert was not, I think, considered a high-brow movie critic by most. He did not, for instance, regularly invoke French new wave cinema, the hallmark of the critic who aspires to high-brow-ness. (The additional hyphen is necessary to distinguish that attitude from high-brownness, which is a ranking that many Anglophone middle-class Indians aspire to.) But he still managed to write wisely, and most importantly, like a fan of the movies. He did not write from a distance, from the lofty perspective of someone interested more in auteurs and the grammar of the cinema, but rather as someone you could imagine lining up for tickets at the local multiplex and arthouse alike, infected by impatient passion and the lust for fantasy and good storytelling that is the hallmark of the movie-lover. (In my graduate school days, a roommate of mine once complained about a movie I wanted to rent that its kind were ‘too narrative’; I cannot imagine Ebert using this as a critical cudgel on any movie.) He wrote about movies with feeling, and was never shy about letting his readers know about the movies that emotionally resonated with him.

I sometimes found him too kind on movies I disliked, and over the years had started to develop an instinct for when we would disagree. I would find myself muttering under my breath, ‘I bet Ebert has given this three stars’ even as I clicked on the review link.  But I put it down to him being older and kinder than me. I’m not being patronizing when I say this; I still cannot describe the basis for these disagreements other than to say that I was more impatient than he was. Conversely, I did not dislike one movie that he absolutely, positively loathed: The Village. I remain mystified by why he hated it as much as he did. I could understand two stars, but one?

A critic is a writer, and Ebert had many good lines, some of them infused with rich wisdom. There is one that I am still fond of quoting to my students when they come to me for advice on writing papers: The muse only visits while you work. This one is for the ages; it’s true and it’s simple. Thanks.

RIP Roger.

Molière on the Modern Healthcare System

There are times, when overcome by irritation at our modern medical system, which is expensive, run by insurance companies and all too often, populated by doctors who seemingly aspire to ever greater heights of corporate efficiency even as they resolutely neglect their bedside manners and care little about outcomes while ordering an array of expensive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, I descend into bitterness, muttering dark imprecations about how far the two professions that I admired as a child–journalism and medicine–have fallen.

At moments like those it is best to comfort oneself with a little Molière on doctors; he seems to have anticipated the modern, insurance-company run medical system too.

From Love’s the Best Doctor, Scene Two:

LISETTE. What do you want with four doctors, master? Isn’t one enough to kill the girl off?

SGANARELLE. Be quiet. Four opinions are better than one.

LISETTE. Can’t your daughter be allowed to die without the help of all those fellows?

SGANARELLE. You don’t mean to suggest that doctors do people in?

LISETTE. Of course they do. I knew a man who used to maintain that you should never say such and such a person perished of a fever or pleurisy but that he died of four doctors and two apothecaries.

SGANARELLE. Be quiet! We mustn’t offend these gentlemen.

LISETTE. Upon my word, master, our cat fell from the housetop into the street a while back and yet he got better. He ate nothing for three days and never moved a muscle. It was lucky for him that there aren’t any cat doctors or they would have soon finished him off. They would have purged him and bled him and –

SGANARELLE. Oh, be quiet, I tell you! I never heard such nonsense. Here they come.

LISETTE. Now you will be well edified. They will tell you in Latin that there is nothing wrong with the girl.

Enter DOCTORS TOMÉS, DES-FONANDRÉS, MACROTIN, BAHYS

….

DR. TOMÉS. Well, while we are talking, what is your opinion of the controversy between Dr. Théopraste and Dr. Artimius? It seems to be dividing the whole faculty into opposing camps.

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. I’m on Artimius’ side.

DR. TOMÉS. Yes, so am I. Of course his treatment, we know, killed the patient, and Théopraste’s ideas might have saved him, but Théopraste was in the wrong all the same. He shouldn’t have disputed the diagnosis of a senior colleague. Don’t you think so?

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. No doubt about it! Stick to professional etiquette whatever happens.

DR. TOMÉS. Yes, I’m all for rules – except between friends. Only the other day three of us were called in for consultation with a man outside the faculty. I held up the whole business. I wouldn’t allow anyone to give an opinion at all unless things were done professionally. Of course the people of the house had to do what they could in the meantime, and the patient went from bad to worse, but I wouldn’t give way. The patient died bravely in the course of the argument.

DR. DES-FONANDRÉS. It’s a very good thing to teach people how to behave and make them aware of their ignorance.

DR. TOMÉS. When a man’s dead he’s dead and that’s all it amounts to, but a point of etiquette neglected may seriously prejudice the welfare of the entire medical profession.

American Horror Story’s Asylum: Site of Nightmares

American Horror Story‘s second season always promised to be creepier and more effective than the disappointing first season, which began well, but had devolved into a terrible mess by the time its end rolled around. The second season’s ending had its share of disappointments, but it had many fine moments that came before, the episodic impact of which ensured that despite some incoherence along the way, it managed to deliver a healthy dose of the heebie-jeebies to its viewers.

The key to American Horror Story‘s success in the second season, lies, of course, in its setting: an asylum, which doubles as locale for Mengele-like experimentation on human beings. This ensured that the invocation of standard horror movie tropes, American Horror Story‘s fundamental technique, would work particularly well. In particular the asylum becomes a distinctive site of horror because of the utter helplessness of its inmates: demented human beings, lost to the world and themselves, cast aside into a refuse heap to be prodded, poked and tormented till death mercifully intervenes. The asylum is yet another place where helpless humans can be made the targets of sadistic violence.

The asylum is also home to a classic nightmare: the mentally competent, locked up against their will, and slowly turned into docile vegetables or raving lunatics. The second season invokes this trope without fail: there are straitjackets, the struggles of the innocent, the forced administration of unwanted treatment. And so unsurprisingly, the two most horrifying and disturbing scenes of the second season–for me, at least–were the forced, brutal electroshock treatments administered to Lana Winters and Sister Jude. The horror of these scenes lies not just in the overriding of the patient’s will, or the terrifying convulsions of the victim, but indeed, in our knowledge that this treatment must have been administered to too many, too soon and too often.

Mention of these treatments brings us to the t-word: torture. Too much contemporary horror is rightly described as ‘torture-porn’: painful, systematic, degrading, mutilation being the most favored device to induce terror in viewers. American Horror Story‘s second season flirts with torture too; these moments are terrifying to witness. I had wondered whether the avoidance of torture was possible given the captive nature of asylum inmates’ existence, but the show went even further as its inclusion of a serial killer allowed even greater utilization of torture themes.

Like the first season the second season had its weaknesses: there were too many story lines and too much plot confusion (the invocation of extraterrestrial aliens was particularly pointless and silly). What enabled the second season to transcend them partially in a way the first season was simply unable to do was its atmosphere, which remained unrelentingly grim throughout. (Indeed, the introduction of a jukebox in the later episodes was jarring precisely because it seemed to provide a soundtrack that felt out of place and dispelled a carefully constructed mood.) Lastly, Kyle Cooper’s title sequence was brilliant: it retained the original music and drew upon a new montage of graphic and disturbing images.

Those thirteen episodes went by quickly; I look forward to the third season.

Land, Ownership, Property, and Nationalism

A few days ago, a dinner-time conversation with some friends turned to the matter of property disputes within families. Both my wife and I spoke with some feeling about the fierce passions they evoked, their seeming intractability, and of course, in the context of modern real estate pressures, their ever-increasing ferocity. It reminded me, yet again, of the fascination that ownership, especially that of land, seemingly exerts on the human imagination.

In Thirst for Love (Berkley Publishing, New York, 1969), Yukio Mishima, in introducing Etsuko’s father-in-law Yakichi Sugimoto, writes:

It was as if Yakichi were owning land for the first time. Before this he had been able to own building sites. This farm, in fact, had seemed to him only another such piece of property. But now it had come to be land. The instinct which held that the concept of ownership has no meaning unless the object owned is land came to live again in him. It seemed as if for the first time the achievements of this life were firm and palpable to hand and heart. It now seemed that the disdain in which he as a rising young man held his father and his grandfather was entirely attributable to their failure to possess so much as one acre of land.

What is the ‘instinct’ that Mishima speaks of above? It is a heightening of the sense that ownership and property are best understood in terms of relationships to tangible and concrete objects, that the concreteness of the objects owned makes the tenuous nature of the property relationship–an intangible one created and propped up by law and convention–more substantial, and thus, that among those things that might be considered viable objects of ownership the most concrete of them all, the ground beneath our feet, terra firma itself, is the bedrock, the ideal, the paradigm of the owned object. Other objects come to be and pass away; only the land endures, only it can serve as adequate underwriter for systems of property. All other property relations find themselves assessed in comparison to the ur-land-owning relationship.The ideologue of the property relationship reassures himself with the solidity of land. To really own something you must own land.

The ‘instinct’ that Mishima speaks of might find modern expression in the incredulity that some direct at the notion of ideas, creative and artistic techniques, stories, and the like being ‘owned’ by anyone. Far more problematically, It might have found expression in the historical anti-Semitic distrust directed at the roving Jewish diaspora; those that did not own land lacked the appropriate allegiance and grounding in concrete affiliations to the nations they made their homes in (and thus lacked loyalty towards). This suggests too, that nationalisms that stress permanent, written-in-blood relationships to the soil as the basis for their viability share a great deal with the discourse of property: they both seek to render their own ideological roots, their tendency to vanish into the thin air, invisible by pointing to the substantiality of the thing related to.

Lohocla, The Killer Drug

An  extended discussion on Twitter this morning reminded me of a post I once wrote on the Usenet newsgroup alt.drugs. Back in 1990. It’s pretty weak stuff, but I was just having fun then. Here you go:

US Government officials are gearing up for might be this country’s worst drug epidemic, rivaling the devastation caused by crack in its inner cities. Officials at the Federal Drug Administration announced today that a new drug ‘LOHOCLA’ is gaining widespread popularity across the nation and that emergency measures are currently being evaluated.

Lohocla is a clear liquid with a distinct aroma to it. It is consumed either in its concentrate form or is mixed in with slightly more pleasant tasting beverages so as to diminish the bitterness of its taste. Its immediate effects are to introduce a lessening of inhibitions in the user, slight loss in motor skills and a gradual dizziness often referred to in street terms as being a “buzz”. when consumed in large quantities it brings about varying reactions. Some users report feelings of hostility, others a greater sense of content and some users have reported a tendency to become embarrassingly verbose. Whatever its effect on human behavior, there is no disputing the damage caused to human physiology. Cirrhosis of the liver, increased ALT levels, exacerbation of viral hepatitis are some of the damaging effects reported by the National Institute of Health. When consumed in excess quantities, it has caused vomiting, blindness, nausea, blackouts and death.

Drug Czar William Bennett was quoted as saying today:” Lohocla users need to be shown that their usage of this extremely dangerous drug will not be tolerated in a society like ours. We are currently evaluating measures to punish those users caught in the possession of more than 16 oz of any lohocla derivative, since it is obvious that larger quantities can only be intended for distribution” Officials at the FDA say that they might have underestimated the dangers of Lohocla when its availability first became apparent.

Russ Hill’s case is a graphic reminder of the dangers created by lohocla. A 23 year old computer science major at Cordobia University, Russ started using lohocla more than 6 years ago when still in high school. When senior year pressure coupled with unsympathetic stepfather got to be too much, Russ turned to lohocla as a means of forgetting about his problems. ‘It was great, I used to come home and have about four or five hits of akdov (a derivative of lohocla) mixed with orange juice and forget all about my hassles in life.’ Soon, Russ was consuming upto ten hits a day of reeb, the most popular derivative of lohocla. This coupled with his consumption of akdov in the evenings led to a steadily worsening of his health. On March 23rd, Russ stepped out on the street in front of his house, intoxicated on akdov and stepped right into the path of a car going by. He was taken to the local hospital where doctors amputated his right leg. To this day, Russ cannot remember the events of that evening: ‘It’s like a blackout, nothing comes back to me now.’

As this frightening menace sweeps across American cities, parents, educators and health administration officials have combined in an effort to encourage the government to take harsher measures against lohocla dealers and users. As a lone voice, The National Organization for the Reform of Lohocla Laws (NORLL) has called upon the government to legalize the possession and use of lohocla, saying that its continuing illegality is unlikely to reduce consumption in any manner and could only lead to steady deterioration in the current law and order situation. William Bennett calls their approach ‘ridiculous’ saying that,  ‘Its only too clear to me that they have no idea of the dangers associated with the drug. We have cases daily of people dying from this drug and they want to legalize it?’

Woody Allen’s Guide to Civil Disobedience and Revolution

Today is Easter Sunday. Jesus was a Jew and a rebel. So, on this great day in Jewish history, and in honor of Jewish rebellion, here is Woody Allen on civil disobedience and revolutions.

In perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be flexible about time and place but if either faction fails to attend, the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly. In the Chinese Revolution of 1650 neither party showed up and the deposit on the fall was forfeited.

The people or the parties revolted against are called the ‘oppressors’ and are easily recognized as they seem to be ones having all the fun. The ‘oppressors’ generally get to wear suits, own land, and play their radios late at night without being yelled at. Their job is to maintain the ‘status quo’, a condition where everything remains the same although they may be willing to paint every two years.

When the ‘oppressors’ become too strict, we have what is know as a police state, wherein all dissent is forbidden, as is chuckling, showing up in a bow tie, or referring to the mayor as ‘Fats.’ Civil liberties are greatly curtailed in a police state, and freedom of  speech is unheard of, although one is allowed to mime to a record. Opinions critical of the government are not tolerated, particularly about their dancing. Freedom of the press is also curtailed, and the ruling party ‘manages’ the news, permitting the citizens to hear only acceptable political ideas and ball scores that will not cause unrest.

The groups who revolt are called the ‘oppressed’ and can generally be seen milling about and grumbling or claiming to have headaches. (It should be noted that the oppressors never revolt and attempt to become the oppressed as that would entail a change of underwear.)

Some famous examples of revolutions are:

The French Revolution, in which the peasants seized power by force and quickly changed all the locks on the palace doors so that the nobles could not get back in. Then they had a large party and gorged themselves. When the nobles finally recaptured the palace they were forced to clean up and found many stains and cigarette burns.

The Russian Revolution, which simmered for years and suddenly erupted when the serfs finally realized that the Czar and the Tsar were one and the same person.

It should be noted that after a revolution is over, the ‘oppressed’ frequently take over and being acting like the ‘oppressors.’ Of course by then it is very hard to get them on the phone and money lent for cigarettes and gum during the fighting may as well be forgotten about.

As always, in the best comedy, there is enough truth to make our laughter just ever so rueful.

Note: Excerpted from ‘A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience’ in Without Feathers (Warner Brothers, New York, 1975), pp 111-112.

The Twenties: A Rush to Judgment Would Be Premature

In ‘Semi-Charmed Life: The Twentysomethings Are Allright’, (The New Yorker, January 14 2013) Nathan Heller writes:

Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties….Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

A few months after I turned twenty, I left India and moved to the US for graduate school. Three years later, armed with a graduate degree in computer science, I began my first serious nine-to-five job. My place of employment was glamorous; my work was not. I grew bored and despondent; I wanted out. I left for graduate school again, changing majors from computer science to philosophy. I began my doctoral program at the age of twenty-six, and when my thirtieth birthday rolled around, I was in that curious no-man’s land that is situated between the written qualifiers and the oral examination. Thus ended my twenties.

So, one transcontinental move, one graduate degree, one full-time job, sixty credits of doctoral coursework. That’s one way of jotting up the twenties’ achievements. Or I could list travel: a few trips back to India, some brief visits to Europe. Perhaps girlfriends? That’d be too crass. Perhaps I could list some losses, but those would be too painful to recount here. Or I could talk about lessons learned, but to be painfully honest, I would have to talk about lessons that I started to learn in the twenties; I don’t think I’m done learning them. There was a journey in there somewhere, of course. I started my twenties in a place called ‘home’, left it, and ended them in a city I had started to call home; I started them with imagined focus, and ended them with no illusions of any.

It’s hard to know how to assess a decade, how to rank it among the decades that make up one’s life. Were the twenties more important, more formative, than the thirties or the still-ticking forties? Dunno. I don’t quite know how I could make that determination now. Susan Sontag once said the best way to write an autobiography was when life was complete, from beyond the grave. I doubt I’ll be able to pull that off, but at the very least, I’m going to resist the temptation to make any hasty judgments about the formativeness of a particular time-span.  Especially as I’m not done becoming just quite yet.

Returning to Writing (And How It Sucks)

On Wednesday, I resumed work on a philosophy book project that has been on the back-burner for a while. More precisely, I have not worked on it since July 2012. (The fall semester of 2012 saw me teaching three classes, all of them essentially new preparations, and then, like, a baby was born.) Back in the summer of 2012, I had recommenced work on my draft notes after a gap of more than year, for I had taken a hiatus from them to finish my cricket book (essentially all of 2011). All of which is to say that I returned to work on a book on which my concerted efforts have been spread out over a period of almost three years. In the summer of 2010, I had engaged in a frenzy of note-making with little attempt to organize them beyond extensive annotation at some points, and in the summer of 2012, I had taken more notes and added some annotations. There are some skeleton arguments in there, some suggestive points to be developed, and so on. In short, it’s one big mess, awaiting clean-up, consolidation, and whatever it is that you are supposed to do when you try to grow a collection of notes into a book.

This week’s experiences, in returning to this shambolic mess, have been an eye-opener.

On Wednesday, I spent my entire editing session adding annotations to a skimpy section of notes. There were many little scribbles which still seemed suggestive and enticing, and invited elaboration from me. Writing went easily; I wrote over fifteen hundred words and then feeling tired and euphoric, called it a day.

On Thursday, I returned to my notes, and attempted to impose some structure on them. Unlike Wednesday, I added very little to no new content, but simply spent all my time reading and re-reading sections–if you can call them that–of my notes and tried to figure out how they hung together, and how they fitted into the outline that I have had in mind for some time now. This was frustrating, tedious, and anxiety-inducing; I cut and pasted and moved some sections, imposed new headings, all the while struggling with panic as I would encounter one mass of disorganized thoughts or notes after another. I ended my writing with traces of anxiety still lingering in me.

Today’s session was a disaster. As I trawled through my notes, I found many small sections that seemed simply irrelevant to my thesis; why on earth had I ever imagined these to ever be useful or illuminating? I opened up a ‘bit bucket‘ file and began deleting material from my notes file and moving it there. When I was finally done, some five thousand words had been moved. I also continued Thursday’s work  of trying to find and impose structure.  When I ended my writing for the morning, I was in a black mood; the self-doubt and fear of failure that seems to be a persistent, painful companion to any writing that I have done was back in full force.

My writing process remains the same as it ever has: I make a lot of notes and then I work them into shape. I have never worked with outlines. This has always meant that the intermediate stage of my writing–from notes to a draft–is acutely anxiety-and-panic provoking. I am now in that phase; a long, unpleasant journey lies ahead. I can only console myself with the reassurance that this one, like the others before it, will find a reasonably happy ending.

Marriage: It Ain’t a Religious Thing

Last year, I wrote a post on same-sex marriage, or rather, on Barack Obama’s evolving views on it. In that post, I handed out some unsolicited advice to the President, suggesting he view marriage in its social and economic context, and noting that there were too many similarities between the explicitly institutionalized racism of the past and the current strains of homophobic opposition to same-sex marriage to permit any vacillation on his part when it came to affirming support for it.

This week, as the Supreme Court debates the constitutionality of same-sex marriage I won’t repeat that same argument. (Besides, it seems to me, from my biased perspective, that the cases at hand are easy ones; the rulings are only a matter of suspense because the present Supreme Court contains ideologues like Scalia.)  Rather, I want to briefly note that marriage as a social institution opened itself up to the kind of abuse we see perpetrated by opponents to same-sex marriage the moment it sought divine sanction. Or rather, once a pair of human beings decided that the best way to signal to society that they were in a committed, enduring, sexual relationship, entailing extensive companionship, home-building and the rearing of children was to seek permission from a religious body, book, and ritual, the game was up. The path had been cleared for abuse of that social institution, and the means prepared for its ideological distortion.

Once marriage became a religious ritual, once marriages were made in heaven, much of the nonsense that has underwritten opposition to same-sex marriage became possible. But not just that; it also allowed the abuse perpetrated on women in ‘traditional marriage’–much of which was the target of feminists’ ire in days gone by (and today). Once marriage ceased to be a human, social institution, it ceased to find its grounding in particular social, economic and romantic contexts and became associated with things not of this earth, with transcendent realities. Those unsurprisingly, provided ample, powerful, cover for marriage’s utilization in a host of repressive political strategies: that the divinely ordained roles for women were procreation, child-bearing and housekeeping or that only certain kinds of people could marry.

The proper place for marriage is the secular; the religious sanctification so beloved of many should have been a supererogatory choice; those that were religious and were not reassured by the promises of the here and now, who didn’t feel their own emotional, financial and temporal commitment was enough, who doubted the resilience of human pacts which depend only on the profane, could have sought a religious ritual if they wanted one. The separation we have now, so that those who want to marry have the choice between a religious ceremony and one that is exclusively secular should always have been possible, should always have been built into the notion of a marriage. The move to make marriage into an institution requiring sanction by the state was a partially correct, albeit problematic move; it injects the state into the personal and institutionalizes marriage as the only kind of social signal for the commitments mentioned above. But it did move marriage out of an exclusively religious sphere.

The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is correct for moral reasons; it also moves marriage closer to its true secular place.

Academic Arguments, Sports, and Urban Policing as ‘War’

In the introduction to The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking writes:

Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that plague contemporary intellectual life. I will continue to employ those labels, from time to time, in this book, for my themes touch, in myriad ways, on those confrontations. But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable, more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are….Wars! The science wars can be focused on social construction. One person argues that scientific results, even in fundamental physics, are social constructs. An opponent, angered, protests that the results are usually discoveries about our world that hold independently of society. People also talk of the culture wars, which often hinge on issues of race, gender, colonialism, or a shared canon of history and literature that children should master—and so on. These conflicts are serious. They invite heartfelt emotions. Nevertheless I doubt that the terms ‘‘culture wars,’’ ‘‘science wars’’ (and now, ‘‘Freud wars’’) would have caught on if they did not suggest gladiatorial sport. It is the bemused spectators who talk about the ‘‘wars.’’

Two quick responses. First, Hacking is correct to note that the invocation of ‘gladiatorial sport’ in the recounting of academic debate is an integral part of the rhetorical arsenal deployed to describe academic debate. This is presumably meant to indicate the extent of the disagreement extant between the parties in the debate, but over time it has come to characterize debate itself in too many disciplines. In philosophy, as I’ve already noted–much to the detriment of women philosophers–this has become the norm. An argument is an opportunity not to move toward discovery and edification but to destroy a putative opposing position. The conquest of one’s intellectual ‘opponent’ becomes our primary, normatively assessed responsibility.

Second, Hacking is also correct in indicting the usage of the language of ‘war’ to describe academic disagreement: it simultaneously trivializes war while dangerously lowering the standards of discourse in academic debate. In general, wherever the language of ‘war’ and ‘battle’ is thrown around freely, the standards of behavior in that domain decline.  Consider sport, where the all-too frequent reliance on military tropes results in the condoning of illegitimate play and questionable sportsmanship, and more generally, the attitude that games, like wars, must be won by any means necessary. Or consider urban policing, where the constant reference to ‘war zones’ results in a ‘shoot or be shot’ mentality that takes the lives of innocents each year. The trigger-happy policeman is already convinced he is a soldier on patrol, well behind enemy lines, surrounded by hostiles ready to take him out. The outcomes that result are grimly foretold.