5 I believe this is what is known in the nonfiction industry as a transition. We are now starting to poke tentatively at “Best,” which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover.
6 Can I assume that some readers are as tired as I am of this word as a kneejerd a coverk derogative? Or, rather, tired of the legerdemain of collapsing the word’s neutral meaning—“preference, inclination”—into the pejorative one of “unfairness stemming from prejudice”? It’s the same thing that’s happened with “discrimination,” which started as a good and valuable word, but now no one can even hear it without seeming to lose their mind.
7 Example: Roger Scruton is an academic, and his “A Carnivore’s Credo” is a model of limpid and all-business compression, which is actually one reason why his argument is so valuable and prizeworthy, even though parts of that argument strike me as either odd or just plain wrong (e.g., just how much humane and bucolic “traditional livestock farming” does he believe still goes on in this country?). Out on the other end of the ethicopolitical spectrum, there’s a weirdly similar example in Prof. Peter Singer’s “What Should a Billionaire Give?” which is not exactly belletristic but certainly isn’t written in aureate academese, and is salient and unforgettable and unexcludable not despite but in some ways because of the questions and criticisms it invites. May I assume that you’ve already read it? If not, please return to the main text. If you have, though, do some of Singer’s summaries and obligation-formulas seem unrealistically simple? What if a person in the top 10 percent of U.S. earners already gives 10 percent of his income to different, non-UN-type charities — does this reduce his moral obligation, for Singer? Should it? Exactly which charities and forms of giving have the most efficacy and/or moral value — and how does one find out which these are? Should a family of nine making $132,000 a year really have the same 10 percent moral obligation as the childless bachelor making $132K a year? What about a $132K family where one family member has cancer and their health insurance has a 20 percent deductible — is this family’s failure to cough up 10 percent after spending $40,000 on medical bills really still the moral equivalent of valuing one’s new shoes over the life of a drowning child? Is Singer’s whole analogy of the drowning kid(s) too simple, or at least too simple in some cases? Umm, might my own case be one of the ones where the analogy and giving-formula are too simple or inflexible? Is it OK that I think it might be, or am I just trying to rationalize my way out of discomfort and obligation as so many of us (according to Singer) are wont to do? And so on… but of course you’ll notice how hard the reader’s induced to think about all this. Can you see why a Decider might regard Singer’s essay as brilliant and valuable precisely because its prose is so mainstream and its formulas so (arguably) crude or harsh? Or is this kind of “value a stupid, PC-ish criterion to use in Decidering about essays’ literary worth? What exactly are the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value supposed to be? Whose moral values ought to get used in determining what those connections should be? Does anyone even read Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” anymore?
8 Hence, by the way, the seduction of partisan dogma. You can drown in dogmatism now, too — radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print — but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about — or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence.
9 You probably know which essay I’m referring to, assuming you’re reading this guest intro last as is SOP. If you’re not, and so don’t, then you have a brutal little treat in store.
1 Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here, let’s all just agree that we generally know what this term connotes — open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency… the whole messy democratic roil.
2 (The phrase is Lincoln’s, more or less.)