Schwartz wrote,
> LP and its linguistic phil outliers came apart after 1950 and by 1975,
> Humpty Dumpty was all in pieces. This is when I started college. It was
> exciting; there was a sense we were going to get it right this time.
and then he wrote,
> However, 25 years later, things have rather come apart. There are no
> common doctrines or methods, the territory is pretty well mapped, and
> while there is a lot of sophistication, there is not much progress or
> sense of progress.
and still later he wrote,
> It's called thinking, and it's no more natural to humans than athletic
> achievement. And like athletic achievement, it takes painful work, and
> it isn't for everyone.
Wow! There's a fascinating storyline here. Things fall apart and it's
exciting because we think we have a chance to get it right this time. Then
things fall apart. It may be called thinking, but like athletic
achievement, it is a kind of thinking that isolates and privileges certain
*machine-like* attributes and activities.
Where is the breast-feeding event in the Olympics? The sillyness of such a
question highlights the arbitrariness of the physical qualities -- speed,
strength, agility -- that athleticism privileges *exclusively*. This is
not to say that speed, strength and agility are "bad things". Only that
their glorification constructs a one-dimensional image of the human body.
As for Humpty Dumpty, there are two of them. There's the one in the rhyme
who falls off a wall and can't be put back together again by all the kings
horses and all the kings men. And then there's the one who Alice meets,
the Humpty Dumpty whose words mean whatever he wants them to mean (it
depends on who is to be boss) and who doesn't realize he's holding the sum
upside down. One can well imagine *that* Humpty saying something like,
"It's called thinking ... it takes painful work, and it isn't for
everyone."
I'll gloss over the implicit moral commendation given to the
"painfulness" of the work and go straight to the elitist conclusion. It
isn't that the thinking that isn't for everyone is BETTER thinking; it is
rather precisely because it "isn't for everyone" that it is afforded such
inordinate privilege. It is, then, a way of encoding an arbitrary
privilege as "merit" -- another one of those circular arguments that
affirms the goodness (rigor) of those at the top and the badness
(error) of those at the bottom.
Of course, it is also painful for Alice to be called stupid simply because
the way she looks at the world (right-side up) is not the one that has
been officially sanctioned by Humpty Dumpty. In earlier days, I knew well
how to take "scholastic aptitude tests". I simply suppressed my rage at
the insulting class presumptions underlying what I knew were meant to
be the "right" answers and marked those answers anyway. One can do this in
a three hour exam period and come away with one's integrity unscathed. But
to make a career of it one has to either be an elitist or a hypocrite. Of
course, there ARE exceptions. But they are EXCEPTIONS.
Temps Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
