Monday, July 5, 2021

Streams of Story

Unidentified illustration from the Brittanica article on the 11th-century Kathāsaritsāgara ("Ocean of the Streams of Story") by Somadeva.

Frank Wilhoit showed up in the comments yesterday with some criticism I'd partly take issue with, but which forces me to note that the original post was a real soggy bloggy mess, structurally, about too many things at once, and I feel I really ought to pull it apart a little bit, to clarify.

Wilhoit wrote:

Dismissing Brooks has by now become a deeply-ingrained reflex. To be sure, he has earned that; but if you are going to quote him and try to refute him (which I have previously diagnosed as a poor use of your time), then at least spot his key words. This time the key word is "stories": and he has stumbled over something much too large and important for his limited comprehension.

"Stories". Not philosophy; not pseudophilosophy; not propaganda; not "lies": stories. Think that through, right to the bottom.

As far as Brooks goes, I'll say it again: I get a few different things out of playing with Brooks that I wouldn't want to give up, though I've slowed way down in recent years as his well gets dry. One of these things is just fun: because he's such a bad writer and bad researcher, it's easy to make fun of him, and satisfying because his social status is or used to be so high. 

But there's generally more to it than that, and I almost never mean to be actually writing about Brooks at all, but about the subjects he wants to discuss. Like anyone who writes, I write largely in order to find out what I think, and to inform my thought through the process, and I'm interested in a lot of things I'm not very well informed about at all. So is Brooks! Though not interested in the same way—mainly in elevating his status as a pandit or universal expert over the widest imaginable range of material, and too lazy to learn much of anything or to learn any of it right.

So in my first years of blogging, I followed him really faithfully, twice a week, guided by the assumption that whatever he said was going to be wrong, and almost always got a reasonably funny post out of it, and often learned quite a lot about the thing he was passing himself off as an expert in. And I thought of it as a kind of five-finger exercise as in piano practice: twice a week, instead of having to come up with an idea of my own, I could just improvise, riffing off of him.

But this Friday's column was a weird coincidence. I'd been working for days on "critical race theory", and was in the middle of a Twitter battle with some misinformed idiots whitesplaining what that is, and how it might be taught, which would be more or less like the bad teaching they'd experienced in their own schools, one-way teacher-centered lectures telling kids about how racism is an "inherent" characteristic of whiteness and so on, as I told Jordan:

All this discussion misses something important about the pedagogical style, which is exactly the opposite of an authoritarian fundamentalist class in history or whatever.

In CRT-informed pedagogy, especially in lower grades, students aren't spoonfed a quantity of "material" but guided to collaborate in teaching each other how to talk about their own experience. There are no tests and no wrong answers. Teachers work to ensure that students of all races feel safe. (The child-centered approach is in itself an extremely "progressive" one, no doubt, but it's important that it's as open-ended as possible; not mandating a set of correct views.)

In fact, as you see from the bolded bit, it was coming to me that the CRT-informed pedagogy was working, in Ryle's terms, to impart not propositional knowledge-that but procedural knowledge-how. So that when I saw the Brooks column pulling out some of the same terminology, I knew I'd have to write about that.

The object isn't to end up with a quantity of information, declarative knowledge, right or wrong, but with practical tools for dealing with situations, procedural knowledge, and I guess ultimately finding out how you would prefer to go about changing society. I'm probably going to say something more later on this because David Brooks is relevant today.

Only Brooks had mangled it so badly that I couldn't stop myself from giving it the extended treatment, which led, as it sometimes does, to a discovery that really interested me, the classification of "knowing a story" as acquaintanceship or "knowing-of" knowledge, which I thought was really interesting. 

I mean, I know the Iliad (hardly, but I could entertain a bunch of 10-year-olds with a 10-minute version of the plot, I bet, and probably Dr. Google and I could work up a quick critique of what's wrong with that Brad Pitt movie), Brooks knows the Iliad (he could offer a summary of the way 5th-century Athenians derived their moral code from it in a way that would be completely wrong from start to finish), Boris Johnson knows the Iliad (he can still recite the first 100 lines in Greek as he memorized them at Eton, but I am absolutely sure he can do fuck all with them, in spite of his upper second–class Classics degree from Balliol), but none of us knows very much and none of us knows the same thing. This is probably why this type of knowledge is not much studied by epistemologists, because it's really not a very useful concept. But it's also why Brooks thinks he knows a lot. It's because he's heard a bunch of stories. That would explain a great deal.

But in any case, while I feel I did have plenty to say about the weirdness of Brooks's concept of "story"

Hence my headline, and the paragraphs on "narrative knowledge" consisting of propositions whose truth value is mostly false or unknowable, and the paragraph just before the Bouie tweet, in which I draw a conclusion on the relation between stories and democracy.

This is one of his most constant preoccupations, and the one, perhaps, that gets me most exercised, maybe because of the implicit Straussianism (the masses must be fed on stories, fabulae, emotional rather than factual constructs, which will "unify" them and yes, Brooks did sit in on Allen Bloom's classes in Chicago, though he didn't become a disciple), and I write about it all the time; I think I got the best version down in 2017 https://yastreblyansky.blog.... though there's this other piece I'm pretty proud of from 2013 https://yastreblyansky.blog... where I was just figuring it out and the word "story" didn't actually come into it.

it may have seemed backgrounded. 

And I feel I gave short shrift, for that matter, to the ideas about critical pedagogy I came in planning to focus on. For the record, some of the relevant Twitter argumentation, with a pretty irritating liberatarian-type troll:

He wasn't looking at the material I was sending him, of course, so he had no idea what I was talking about, but I went on:

Henry dropped in too:

Anyway that's how that effort has been going. I deleted some of my failures to be polite.


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