explanations & exclusions

A common mistake: to suppose that a satisfactory explanation must exclude all others. So, for example, if a man’s aesthetic response to female beauty can lead, via sex, to reproduction, it is supposed that human beauty, and our response thereto, only exists in order to propagate the species. Or if, afflicted by the spectacle of a friend’s suffering, we relieve his need, the only explanation for generosity is that it makes ourselves feel better; that if we could get rid of our empathic distress by taking a pill, we would do that instead. By this rather weird and grotesque logic, the people who cry at funerals do so because they feel sorry for themselves, as one sociopath claims here:

It is like weeping at a funeral. Are you crying for the deceased or for yourself?
Obviously for yourself. What is that?
Self-indulgent.
It is akin to stamping your foot and throwing a temper tantrum because mummy won’t take you to McDonalds.

This reminds me a little of a documentary i saw about Mugabwe’s youth training camps, which systematically brutalised generations of children. One chap, who had raped the young girls as they came into the camps, was asked if he felt any remorse. With the same disconnection from any recognisably human reality, he said calmly, “No, I only took the pretty ones.”

As Nietzsche observed, reason is pre-determined by character. So a true sociopath could see, for example, a man crying because his wife is dead and pronounce coldly “self-indulgent”, or quite honestly deny any remorse for raping young women because, after all, he “only took the pretty ones.”

My response to an argument, whether in conversation, email, blogging, or a book, isn’t so much to do with the logic as the tone. Thus i acknowledged the intelligence and many virtues of Stanley Fish’s How Milton Works while deeply disliking the authorial voice and reacting against him at every turn. It took me a while to understand my response: the key is in the title – ‘How Milton Works’ – there is something mechanistic and deadening about Fish’s mind; he offers the definitive, final account of Milton, as if the poet is a piece of clever machinery taken apart and analysed. Fish has figured out how Milton works, the end.

My favourite works of literary criticism, by contrast, have a generosity and spaciousness which encourage thought and interpretation. Thus i have read Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon three times over the last decade, and am planning a systematic & no doubt joyous re-read of my George Steiner library this autumn. i would never, ever, touch How Milton Works again and if i were trapped in a lift with Fish i would intimidate him with my waistcoat.

i don’t think the kind of writing i like need be wishy-washy or unsure of itself; but it doesn’t pretend to be absolute and final, because, after all, as a human being neither am i absolute or final. My explanations are not the only ones, just the ones that make sense to me at the time. Those who aim for a monolithic righteousness, their opinions to be taken as unanswerable verdicts, make themselves somehow inhuman; thus the sociopathic note in the funeral comment above.