Smith on Sympathy and Selfishness in the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapters 1-3

I'm hardly the first person to note that "The Adam Smith Problem"--that apparent contradiction between the sympathy ascribed to humanity in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the self-interestedness ascribed to humanity in The Wealth of Nations--is itself problematic, based as it is on a mistaken premise about what Smith actually argues in these texts. But, revisiting Smith this weekend, I'm struck by the fact that these two texts are more attuned to each other than even mainstream Smith scholarship seems to think. (I say this knowing that, despite relatively wide reading at this point, I still haven't scratched the surface of Smith scholarship...so it's both possible and likely that I've missed a source that takes a similar view to the one I'm about to outline!)

This term, I'm teaching a grad seminar on various conceptual (rather than historical or practical) overlaps between narrative art (especially opera) and economic theory in the 18th century. The purpose of the course is not to ask how the economics of performance or artistic production worked back then, but rather to investigate how the various ideas and preconceptions that gave rise to the birth of economics (especially to Smith's writings) also structured the way various artists were thinking about character, narrative, plot, and psychology at the time--that is to say, how the conceptual structure of early economic thinking enabled a certain kind of artistic output to arise. We've spent the first few weeks of term grappling with various musicological texts on market culture and its effect on the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven especially--but starting next week, we will begin to read Smith. I opted to begin with WN rather than TMS.

My romp through WN this weekend is my second time opening this book. I read it for the first time in 2021, and now I'm rereading portions specifically with an eye to class discussions this term. Reading it the first time, I was overwhelmed by the system of thought it put across, and the encyclopedic completeness with which it communicated this system. It was also the first Smith I had read. Now as I reread it, I have the benefit of also having read TMS, his History of Astronomy, a bunch of his essays (including the excellent writings on music, the imitative arts, etc.), and some of his lectures on rhetoric.

All of this is to say, I'm approaching WN with a vastly different structure of background knowledge from what I had back in 2021. And the experience of reading even the first few chapters is indeed strikingly different from what I recall from two years ago. Here are the things that stand out to me, on the level of argument and rhetoric.

First, and most broadly--and pace all those commentators (such as Russ Roberts, whose How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life is fun, but now seems a bit misleading)--Smith does not begin WN with an appeal to selfishness. There is a famous sentence, quoted by virtually all the commentators I've read, which runs:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love..."

Yes, it's clear that this is the ur-statement of self-interest it is often taken to be; yet I find it significant, upon re-approaching this text, that it is placed in Chapter 2 rather than Chapter 1. Chapter 1, far from promulgating (much less recommending) a view of the fundamental selfishness of people, is all about the seeming-miracle of coordination among those who work together in individual industries. Smith marvels at the productiveness that arises with the division of labor, and implies, both in this first chapter and in Chapter 3, that the mechanism which allows the general increase in prosperity, productivity, and well-being to occur is a result of mutual, imaginative sympathy as much as it might be a result of self-interest. Chapter 1 reads like proto-Hayek on the distribution of knowledge through society (and anticipates, also, the famous "I, Pencil" essay by Leonard Read. Smith portrays the most successful people as those who work together to complement each others' needs, and even in his appeal to the "limit of market power" in Chapter 3, he suggests that an awareness of other people's interests and desires is itself the factor that determines what professions each individual can pursue. In itself, this framing of the first chapter, and the fact that Chapter 2 (with the "self-interest" statement quoted above) is tucked quietly between Chapters 1 and 3, undermines the apparent distinction between the worldview encoded in TMS and that encoded in WN.

There are some other interesting quirks of rhetoric and argument I noted as I made my way through these chapters, as well. For instance, I am struck by the mode of presentation of the division of labor idea. Smith could easily have begun the book with a statement along the lines of what we read in Chapter 2; he could also have begun Chapter 1 with a clear, overarching statement of the idea he will come to by the end of the chapter. Instead, however, he begins immediately with an example. He states that it will be easier for the reader to grasp the overall concept if he begins this way--a bit inductivistic, alas, but unsurprising given the Zeitgeist--but what he actually does, right on the first page, is to make a basic point about invisibility and evidence. He states that the effects of the division of labor are greatest precisely where they cannot be observed directly: in small enterprises, he tells us, it's easy to see people working on individual components of a project, whereas in large societal enterprises the work is so widely distributed that nobody can actually see all of it happen, nor grasp the extent of division it takes to complete it. Reading this passage after having read the History of Astronomy, I'm struck by the fact that this explanation is a concrete manifestation of a point he implies w/r/t the philosophy of science, namely that the task of science is to explain the seen in terms of the unseen. He immediately appeals to, and strengthens, his reader's tolerance for arguments invoking invisible mechanisms. The effect of this is not only to lead up to the famed Invisible Hand (though I think it does that as well!), but to bolster the subsequent arguments and anecdotes concerning coordination and the extent/power of the market, which relies on a sense that an invisible network of sympathies and imaginings connects all of the individual people in society.

Even the statement concerning self-interest, in Chapter 2, is not what it seems when quoted out of context. Smith begins the chapter by distinguishing the behavior of animals from that of humans. Animals have to look cute, he says, and appeal to humans' good nature, if they want a human to pamper them. Humans, he says by contrast, are forced to think rationally about what other people want. The ensuing statement about the self-interestedness of the butcher, baker, and brewer looks on the surface like it defends a view of humanity as intrinsically selfish. But it seems to me that it rather urges people to sympathize more with those around them, for the very mechanism by which we could even imagine the desires of the baker, brewer, or butcher is precisely the sympathetic impulse taken up in TMS. Smith speaks explicitly of self-interestedness, but implicitly gives us an explanatory structure that depends entirely on sympathy, coordination, and an imaginative effort towards fellow-feeling.

Finally, I'll just note a few fun things that occurred to me while reading today. First, Smith anticipates the argument (end of Chapter 1) that it's better to be a poor person in a wealthy nation than a wealthy person in a very poor nation. He puts the point in terms of Britain vs. Africa; but of course what comes to my mind, also, is the quite uncontroversial claim that I'm better off living in middle-to-lower class America in 2023 than I would be if I could change places with even the wealthiest nobleman in 1600. (This point is underscored, also, by my current reading of Katherine Rundell's John Donne biography, which paints a grim picture indeed of many aspects of life back then.) Second, I was struck by Smith's observation that automation generally makes things better for workers--a point anticipating Milton Friedman's argument to the same effect. Friedman said in some lecture or other that the invention, say, of running water did more to alleviate the lot of the poor than of the ultra-rich, since, as he puts it, the wealthy have always had running water (carried on the backs of their slaves or servants), and that it is in fact those carrying the water who are saved from their toil by the advance of technology. For Smith, too, it is the boy who wants to play with his friends who benefits from ingeniously devising a mechanism to do his work for him. This anticipates the Suitsian Utopia laid out in The Grasshopper, in which only those who wish to work need to work, and everyone else is essentially playing games. Finally, I will just gleefully note that Smith, too, treats animals (Chapter 2) as being essentially automata, a point that slots nicely alongside my earlier, cursory musings about Descartes and ChatGPT.

Favorite books and music of 2022

 As the season of "Year in Review" posts comes to an end, I'm thinking not only about the projects I saw through to completion this year (the biggest of which were the final revisions of my book manuscript), but the wonderful array of books and music I've consumed this year. Here's the roundup, along with some comments and observations.

Music

Strangely, my music consumption this year was modest compared to what it's been during previous years. Perhaps I was so absorbed with my various writing tasks, as well as with grant applications, prep for my CD recording in June, and the like, that I just didn't have it in me to engage in the depth of listening to match what I did in 2021. However, there were a few noteworthy albums I enjoyed. In classical music, the biggest discovery was Benjamin Allard's recording of the complete Bach organ works (with a few clavichord performances thrown in). I'm trying to listen to this relatively closely, so I've been slow to progress through the huge set; however, even just judging by the first couple of discs, the achievement is amazing. The playing is spectacular, and the music--much of which is new to me--is really brilliant. I've also been listening somewhat obsessively to the Peabody Trio's recording of Beethoven's Op.70 (these are on modern instruments, but are wonderfully flexible and deep), as well as to Robert Levin's complete Mozart sonata cycle, which I'll be reviewing next year. Outside of classical music, I've really enjoyed Ethan Iverson's jazz album "Every Note Is True" (especially for its large-scale pacing).

Books

But it was a good year for reading! As ever, I've been somewhat lazy about keeping up with academic literature in my field. I tend to think that the bad stuff, which isn't worth reading anyway, will turn out not to have mattered, and that the good stuff will keep rearing up over the coming years, and that if this is true it makes sense to hold off and read things a few years after they're published. Nonetheless, I did enjoy some new or new-ish academic books. Highlights in this category were:

• Matt Strohl, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies (not exactly in my field, but there were enough resonances with my academic interests that I was able to review it for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
• Adeline Mueller, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood (a brilliant and exacting study, the kind that makes me realize just how lazy a historian I actually am)
• Rebecca Cypess, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment
• Mark Ferraguto, Beethoven 1806
• Yoel Greenberg, How Sonata Forms (an excellent book, written in fabulous prose. The hardcore music-theory portions I'm not really qualified to comment on, but the premise, framing, and methodological discussions are revelatory and pertinent)
• Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy
• Tom Beghin, Beethoven's French Piano
• John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity (can't believe it took me so long to get to this!)
• I also read a bunch of Benedict Taylor, whose stuff is pretty amazing (The Melody of Time remains a highlight)

Outside of academic writing, I had a particularly rich year of reading novels. Because I don't tend to keep track of how many novels I read per year, I don't actually know whether there were more than usual in 2022 (and in any case, I'm usually reading some sort of fiction)--but I have the sense that there were. Interestingly, although I didn't explicitly set out to read novels by women (I had tried this sort of thing in 2017 or '18, deciding to read only female novelists for a year), much of what I read ended up being by women, just by accident. There were some revelatory new finds for me:

• I read three novels by the wonderful Tessa Hadley - Free Love, Late in the Day, and The Past. I suspect that The Past may have been, in some absolute sense, the "best" of these; but Late in the Day was the one I found most moving and important, for my own life
• Octavia Butler, Blood Child - I didn't really enjoy this collection, but I'm told that my taste is faulty
• Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black - this was an amazing book, with some of the most beautiful sentences I've read in a long time. I didn't ultimately care for the story or characters, but the truly gorgeous prose was enough to keep me involved
• Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris - spectacular novel. If Mantel's sentences are the most beautiful I've read recently, Bowen is perfection at the level of the paragraph. A gorgeous novel, in every way.
• J.M. Coetzee, Foe - it took me about 66% of the book before I really got into it, but once this happened, it was excellent. And it's interesting to see seeds of Coetzee's trademark terseness in this early book of his. It was less sparse than his mature work, but there were passages of real beauty, where one had the sense that each word had been chosen with astonishing care, and this seemed to prefigure the experience of reading, say, Disgrace or Elizabeth Costello.
• Nabokov, Mary - again, astonishing prose, and remarkable book
• Rachel Cusk, Aftermath - is it fiction, or not? I found it moving but perplexing
• Proust, Swann's Way, in the Lydia Davis translation. This was great, and I tweeted a bit (in May? June?) about some favorite passages. I didn't love Proust when I read the cycle (in the old translation) some years ago, and though I see that this new edition is a big improvement, I still mostly didn't enjoy the text. There were some wonderful, revelatory, moving passages, though! But I found myself thinking back to that quip about Wagner, that there are lovely moments separated by terrible half-hours.
• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow - recommended by a friend. Very easy to read, feels like literary candy. I didn't like the prose style, which felt smarmy and smug...but the last third of the book had some lovely things in it, and the ending was moving.
• Orwell, 1984
• Skinner, Walden Two

I also read some wonderful non-academic nonfiction:

• Russ Roberts, Wild Problems - highly recommended, very humane book with lots of wisdom in it
• Dan Moller, The Way of Bach - also highly recommended, a rare success at turning some detailed philosophical discussions of music and art into a reader-friendly trade book with a narrative arc. A model for what I'm trying to write at the moment, and far smarter, better, and deeper than some other attempts at this genre
• Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch - tons of fun! I was less thrilled with his Discover Your Inner Economist
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

I also read some good academic books from other fields, most notably Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, Aaron Hanlon, A World of Disorderly Notions, Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, and a few others.

All of this probably means that the "Recommended Books" tab on this blog needs to be updated!

Finally, I started and then abandoned a bunch of books that I just couldn't get into, despite (in all of these cases) wanting to be able to get into them. Perhaps my tastes just aren't quite up to the task, or I'm missing something?

• Ali Smith, Autumn
• Susan Blum, Ungrading
• Oliver Roeder, Seven Games (this, for instance, was a book I really wanted to love)
• Larry Lockridge, The Great Cypress Think Tank
• Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine
• Nick Riggle, On Being Awesome
• Laura Kipnis, Against Love
• Agnes Callard, Aspiration
• George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I'm sure there were others as well, but I can't remember them.

And to end, I'll say that what I'm most looking forward to reading at the beginning of 2023 is more Elizabeth Bowen, Anita Brookner, and Maeve Brennan! Another year beginning with female novelists.

Happy new year!

ChatGPT and the animals

 Like most people I know, I've spent the last month+ experimenting with ChatGPT. I've asked it to write poetry; I've asked it arcane questions about various books and articles; I've asked it to create imaginary dialogues, podcasts, arguments, and debates between thinkers I admire from different centuries. And like most people who have put the new platform through its paces, I've come away with a mixed appraisal of its various skills. I've been impressed by its ability to handle requests that generally fall under the banner of what people think of as "creative" tasks; its poetry, for instance, especially within certain constraints, is a particular highlight. And I've enjoyed the dialogues it can come up with, spinning genuinely interesting fictional conversations between historical figures who, in reality, never met. I've been less taken with its logical abilities, which are questionable at best, and at worst make it abundantly clear that the bot isn't actually thinking, but just parroting text back at us. David Deutsch's flying-horse question gives a neat demonstration of this: the bot flatly contradicts itself and misunderstands the question in a way that can only mean it doesn't actually know what it's saying.

Playing with the bot has afforded one kind of pleasure; but nearly as fun and interesting has been to observe various public thinkers' reactions to this new technology. In particular, I've been struck by the far-reaching claims voiced by Tyler Cowen, who for much of this year has been making cryptic references to a coming revolution in AI tech that, he argues, will entirely transform how we use the internet, as well as how we work with and produce ideas. He says that ChatGPT is just the first step on this path--"bread crumbs, not dessert"--and although he could well be right, some of the individual claims he makes seem questionable to me.

For instance, he claims in a recent blog post that ChatGPT's linguistic competence likely narrows the gap between human and animal intelligence. This seems wrong to me--indeed, it's striking that one could make exactly the opposite argument just as plausibly (perhaps more plausibly). Although Tyler doesn't flesh out his version of the argument, I assume his line of thought would run something like this: ChatGPT displays enormous competency without needing to think; the competency approaches that of humans w/r/t language-use; this suggests that we aren't quite as special as we thought, and that other program-running devices like animals (which are like versions of ChatGPT, except they're programmed by evolution rather than by OpenAI) can approach the type of skills we have; thus we differ from them in degree rather than in kind.

However, that argument says much more about Tyler's "priors" than it does about humans or ChatGPT. If anything, to my eyes an argument with the exact opposite conclusion seems even more compelling! Here goes: ChatGPT shows that a program can display enormous competencies without needing to think; animals display enormous competencies, which many people want to attribute to thought; however, we can now see a demonstration that behavior that strikes a casual human observer as thought-like might not depend on thought at all; thus, it follow that animals might not actually need to think in order to perform the tasks they can perform; and if that's the case, the gulf between humans and animals is very likely to be wider than people think!

Of course, the fact that ChatGPT demonstrates that an entity can perform thought-like actions without thinking says nothing about the question of whether some other entity does need to think. So, this argument is purely analytic. CPT's ability to write sonnets doesn't ultimately settle the question of whether rats are conscious. But the version of the argument that I've laid out seems, to me, to increase the plausibility that complex behavior by non-humans can be accomplished algorithmically. Of course, just as Tyler's version of the argument says more about his priors than it does about animals, the same is true for my version. I was already inclined, intuitively, to buy the arguments of philosophers who think that consciousness exists only in people.

Tyler's other claims about the philosophical implications of ChatGPT seem equally stretched. He asks, for instance, why the aliens haven't visited us. Now that we see how easily the trappings of intelligence can be conjured by programmers, surely evolution or some other such force must have created far more intelligence across the universe than we can know? But, to build on Deutsch's point about GPT and the flying-horses, the better conclusion to draw would be that the outward suggestion of intelligent behavior is misleading, and that genuine thought remains rare, on our planet and possibly elsewhere as well.

How to write long texts (without hating yourself) - Part I

This past summer marked the completion of the second long document I've written. In the past few years I've produced a book (approx. 94,000 words) and a dissertation (approx. 100,000 words), plus a bunch of shorter pieces like articles (6,000-13,000 words each) and blog posts.

When I was a full-time professional violinist, I spent a lot of time seeking out all the self-help material I could find concerning deliberate practice and technical efficiency. I've found that the same mindset has been essential for my development as a writer. Writing, like playing the violin, is a technique. And although there may be some irreducible element of inspiration and talent in both, there are ways of approaching these activities that can make them manageable and even pleasurable. The purpose of this series of posts is to gather some ideas, both theoretical and practical, about how such processes can work for the writer of long documents such as books and dissertations.

1. Why is writing hard?

The first step to doing anything difficult is to acknowledge that it's difficult, and to understand that it's ok to experience challenges. The second step is to try to figure out why it is difficult, the better to solve the problems facing you. There are many reasons why writing is difficult--some practical, some technical, some aesthetic--but for now I'll focus on a theoretical difficulty particularly pressing when writing long texts. (My framing of this idea is based on Popper's arguments concerning empiricism, theory, and observation.)

Thoughts can take any number of shapes, and they can connect to other thoughts in any number of ways. To write thoughts down is to translate a set of largely amorphous ideas into fixed, linear form, with specific words, sentence structures, and a set order. This process is an act of interpretation: one that (like all interpretations) is carried out with an overarching theory about how and why the writing should take the shape it does. In other words, when we try to capture ideas on the page, we do not only contend with the ideas themselves; we also adopt some sort of theory about what 'the book' or 'the dissertation' will end up being--and it is this theory that allows us to know how to even begin tackling the ideas in the first place. Every sentence in a document is written with a theory about what the document is. But the difficulty is that with each sentence written, the document becomes better-fleshed-out, diverges in all its messiness from the idealized theory, and, even more important, changes the nature of the theory we might hold about the project as a whole. That is to say, every sentence is both written under a theory of 'the document' and alters the theory of 'the document' that operates in the writing of future sentences. By the time one reaches the end of (say) a 90,000-word draft, one has essentially produced a document in which most of the component parts--the paragraphs, the sentences--are part of about 90,000 different conceptual books or dissertations.

Actually, perhaps this is a simplification. The speed with which theories of 'the document' change will itself be subject to change as the draft unfolds. In my experience, the first 5-10% of the document is written under a highly consistent theory governed by an outline (assuming one is using an outline!); then change accelerates as development occurs, and each sentence/paragraph exerts a bigger pull on the overall theory; and finally, after about 80% of the draft is written, the theory of the document once again becomes more stable. Of course, it's highly unlikely that the stable theory one arrives at for the final 20% of the draft is similar to the stable theory one held while working on the first 5-10%.

So, even in this weaker statement of the problem, the basic point remains that you will probably produce a first draft in which about 80% of the sentences belong to thousands of different conceptual books, none of which is actually aligned with the finished draft, which is necessarily a jumbled mess.

2. What to do about it

This way of framing the challenge of writing may seem needlessly theoretical, but a number of practical points follow directly from it. Here are some extrapolations:

1. First drafts are necessarily awful. Many writing self-help guides (including most famously Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird) acknowledge the awfulness of first drafts. But these guides tend to do so ruefully. We are told that coming to terms with the awfulness of first drafts is a kind of self-acceptance--as though we simply need to acknowledge that we aren't smart enough to write perfect first drafts. I think that this way of framing misses the point. The problem of first drafts, as I see it, isn't that "we're not smart enough to get things right the first time"; the problem is that first drafts are necessarily awful because they are written under a huge variety of mutually-contradictory theories of what 'the document' will end up looking like. In other words, the awfulness of first drafts is inherent, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to escape it. It follows that this awfulness is something to embrace and make friends with.

2. From (1) it follows, in turn, that it's best to write an entire first draft before starting to revise or edit. People take many different approaches to this practical question; and even for me, a hardened embracer of bad-first-drafts, there is always a temptation to try to revise during the initial drafting process, for no better reason than the sheer frustration one feels at producing a 200+ pages of terrible, cluttered, aimless, unpolished prose.

However, there are a few reasons not to give in to the temptation to edit. The first two reasons are practical, and have nothing to do with the philosophical framework I'm outlining. First, the more one writes, the more momentum one gathers. It's often easier to push through the pain to the end of a document when one writes in a single sweep of productivity. Second, the mindset needed to produce words on the page is very different from the mindset needed to revise what's already there. The biggest difference between the two mindsets is that the first requires a real lack of inhibition and a confidence and belief in one's powers of creativity, whereas the second requires coolheaded discernment, self-criticism, ruthless questioning of one's ideas, etc. It's rarely easy to switch back and forth between the two mindsets, so it makes sense to disentangle them, accomplishing as much as possible under the first mindset before adopting the second.

In addition to those practical points, there are some theoretical reasons to write the entire first draft before embarking on any revisions. The most important is, simply, that revisions, just like first-draft writing, are carried out under a 'theory of the book'. In order to revise any sentence, paragraph, or chapter, you need to have some idea of how it fits into the whole, and what angle you're revising for, and why; otherwise, you don't know what to keep, what to expunge, what to fix, or how. And it's inherently impossible to know these things without having a complete theory of 'the book' as a whole. And, returning to the initial point, because that theory is changing until near the end of the first draft, revisions can't really happen until then. So it makes sense to put off revising until the initial drafting has taken place.

Note that the idea of writing the entire manuscript before revising does not translate into the process of writing individual chapters. Many people I know attempt to write and polish individual chapters before completing the rest of the manuscript. (This is particularly true of academics, who often use individual chapters as conference papers or articles, and write and polish one-at-a-time.) However, there are a few problems with this approach too. First, it presupposes that you know where in the document each argument or example will belong. In everything I've written, ideas move around significantly during the course of revisions, so that paragraphs that began in (say) chapter 1 might wind up in (say) chapter 5 or 6, or vice versa. Polishing individual chapters makes such moves difficult. Second, even when arguments don't move around between chapters, when individual chapters are polished before the entire draft is complete, it can be difficult to integrate nuances of arguments between the chapters. Finally, on a psychological level, as Ayn Rand points out in The Art of Nonfiction, it can be demoralizing to go from a polished final draft of one chapter to a messy first draft of another, and this can bring its own set of emotional and psychological challenges. Again, better to get all 90,000 words of ideas out of one's system, in all their unpolished messiness, before deciding what to do with those ideas and how to shape the next stage of the document.

3. Edit the complete manuscript in iterations. Editing, like writing, will change your sense of what the document is saying. Therefore, editing should be carried out in multiple stages, since it is unlikely (or impossible) that any one round of editing will create the final version of the document. Rather, the final version of the document emerges from various layers of editing: the revision of chapter 1 will necessitate changes in chapter 6; but those changes in chapter 6 will also cause changes in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which will in turn cause changes in chapter 6. These large-scale processes of bringing the book "into agreement with itself," so that the individual components have ceased to contradict each other or repeat after each other, is a fully absorbing mode of editing--and it's difficult to accomplish it while also tinkering with sentences and word-choice. So, separating out the various rounds of editing can be helpful in making each one as efficient and productive as possible.

How many rounds of editing are needed? This is probably a matter of taste and personal preference. The way I think about the issue is mostly psychological: as Eviatar Zerubavel advises in The Clockwork Muse, the ideal number of drafts is high enough that no individual draft introduces the pressure of getting things perfect all at once, but low enough that the process doesn't seem endless. Of course, these calculations will be different for different people. Zerubavel recommends doing 7 drafts; so far, for long documents I think I'm a 5-draft writer. (By contrast, when I write articles, I typically need only 3 or maybe 4 drafts, since it's comparatively easy to be coherent and integrated when you're dealing with only a single thread of argument.)

My process for going through the drafts looks something like this. First, I write a complete, messy, awful first draft. I attempt to do this as quickly as possible, both because I want to ride the wave of enthusiasm, and because I know that the writing will need a lot of revision anyway, so there's no point in taking even a minute longer than is absolutely necessary to get the awful first draft on paper. I attempt to write approximately 1,000-1,200 words a day during the first draft stage, and I stop myself once I've reached this goal, even if I'm midway through a sentence (especially if I'm midway through a sentence!) because I don't want to exhaust my ideas and have nothing to say the next day. By stopping myself at a given word limit, no matter how excited I am or how well things are flowing, I guarantee that I'll be able to hit the ground running the next day. At the rate of 1,000-1,200 words a day, you can write a 90,000 word draft in approximately two and a half or three months.

Having written the draft, I then take stock. I think about the flow of argument, I think about ways to re-order the pieces, and I think about what might be missing, which sections need to be lengthened or excised, etc. I then write a second draft, moving significantly more slowly than in the first draft. My goal for the second draft is always to make sure the paragraphs and chapters are roughly in the right order. At this stage, I still do not worry about the awful prose. The sentences are a mess, but I try to get the ideas in vaguely the right place in the manuscript. When writing my book, I also experimented with retyping the entire manuscript in a new, blank document from scratch for the second draft (following the advice from Zerubavel). I found this to be extremely helpful for two reasons: first, because printing the MS and retyping it from scratch gives me simultaneously a written, fixed first draft to work on as well as the freedom of a blank document. I feel safe making changes and trying experiments knowing that I won't lose work I've already done. Second, it allows me to (subconsciously) revise some of the sentence-level prose as well, since it's very difficult to retype a terrible sentence without making tiny tweaks that improve it. Although fixing the prose isn't my goal at this point, I can make little changes in the process of typing the new draft that I probably wouldn't think to make (and perhaps wouldn't even notice) if I were just picking through the same document as the original first draft.

Having written the second draft and gotten the ideas vaguely in the right order, I then repeat the process at the level of the prose. First I take stock; then I retype the entire document once again.

For drafts nos. 4 and 5, I no longer retype the document; at this point, the main ideas are in the right place, and my goal is to make the prose flow as well as possible.

To be continued, with thoughts on outlining, stamina, and other aspects of the process of writing long documents.

Utopia and its discontents

What comes to mind when we hear the word "Utopia"? Perhaps a particular set of texts, mostly from the worlds of philosophy or political theory. More likely, we think of a place--one that is Edenic and flawless, a paradise for its inhabitants, albeit one that is impossible to actually construct. But what I've always found strange about the idea of Utopia is the divergence between these idyllic associations that the noun-form of the word has accumulated, on the one hand, and on the other, the negative associations called up by its adjective, "Utopian." Popper and many of his followers in the tradition of classical liberalism leveled this term as a criticism against Marxism. Someone who engages in Utopian thinking chases fantasies of societal perfection while subjecting actual people to all manner of injustices. Indeed, one of the problems with Utopian pursuits is that they seem to offer a blank check to those held in their sway; since if one is pursuing what one genuinely believes to be an infinite good end, then any means needed to achieve that end will come to seem justifiable.

These critiques of Utopianism apply to a surprising number of dystopian worlds--not only the Marxist societies that were the subject of Popper's arguments, but the Sparta-like police-state described in Plato's Republic (a subject of different discussions by Popper!) as well as the fictional Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, encountering these dystopias, we may be struck by the fact that they are Utopian for at least some of their inhabitants (for instance, for those who directly benefit from the societal structures, i.e. those at the top of the ladder who are able to maintain power by controlling the thoughts and actions of others). And even some ostensibly Utopian fictions--for instance, Skinner's Walden Two--may easily come to seem distinctly dystopian when viewed from another angle--say, in the case of Walden Two, when viewed as something akin to what Oceania might feel like to its happier, Big-Brother-touting inhabitants. (Even if we dismiss this particular possibility for Walden Two, and claim that the society described in those pages actually is "perfect" in some sense, the fact would remain that it seems like an incredibly dull place to live, and thus would be Utopia only for a people with specific personalities....)

The fact that utopianism can so easily seem like the other side of the dystopian coin makes me wonder: is there a deeper attribute that all of these imagined societies share? I think the answer is yes--and that attribute is: these are societies entirely devoid of problems. In the case of the worlds that are supposed to look like utopias (Republic, Walden Two, and so forth), the problem-free environment is meant as a "feature"--one that will make life easy and pleasant for the inhabitants. For the worlds that are supposed to look like dystopias, the problem-free environment, tenaciously enforced through (in Orwell) torture, brainwashing, Newspeak, the rewriting of history, the erasure of truth, and so forth, is precisely what makes the fictional societies look so bleak. But, despite the different valence these and other authors give to their worlds, the underlying logic is the same. A superficial form of "contentment" is maintained by preventing people from seeing problems and trying to solve them. The enforced avoidance of problems may be well-intentioned, yet whatever the rulers' intentions, the picture that emerges is of a static society, in which growth, discovery, novelty, excitement, and further exploration and understanding are impossible. This underlying logic is why the very idea of Utopia as it is frequently understood is, in fact, so dark.

There is a twist. If dystopias (and dystopic "Utopias") aspire to be problem-free worlds, then it would follow that an actual Utopia--not a society simply called that, but a society that actually does allow for flourishing in its fullest sense--would be full of unsolved problems, which the inhabitants would pursue freely and as they pleased. This dovetails with Robert Nozick's view, described in the final part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, of Utopia as not a single kind of place, but a "meta" world in which vast numbers of different societies and associations, each tailored to the different interests of different kinds of people, would emerge. Nozick's Utopia, too, is full of problems, both for those individual societies (whose task, he says, is partly to facilitate the discovery of what good societies might look like--thus implying that this is not yet known, and thus can't be perfectly instantiated even in principle) and for the meta-Utopia, whose problem will involve, for instance, the peaceful interactions and integrations of its constituent societies. Of course, most importantly, the problems that arise in such a meta-Utopia and its constituent Utopias would also exist on the level of individual inhabitants, who, unlike the inhabitants of the Republic, Oceania, Walden Two, and so many other "Utopian" worlds, would be free to imagine different, perhaps better worlds, and thus would be faced constantly with the personal problem of how to reshape their circumstances in pursuit of those dreams.

Of course, one cannot help but be struck by how decidedly unglamorous this account of Utopia sounds. Indeed, a "society full of problems, in which people go about trying to solve their problems" sounds not only unglamorous, but downright mundane. No wonder fictionalized false-Utopias and Dystopias seem to outnumber fictionalized real-Utopias.

However, here too, there is a twist. Yes, there are a handful of actually-optimistic Utopian fictions (some Le Guin comes to mind); but, there is also a sense in which most fiction is Utopian in the positive meaning of the term--that is, most fiction is about everyday people with lots of problems trying to do stuff that will make their lives better. In this view, the genuine champions of the Utopian vision are novelists like Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose characters may "rest in unvisited tombs," but who nonetheless show us a model of striving in which problems are present, but problem-solving is not thwarted by some oppressive autocrat. Indeed, perhaps this explains my abiding love of rom-com movies, whose plots tend to track the same processes. Rom-coms often highlight the problems and dissatisfactions of individual people, yet they also do so in a way that is fundamentally comic, and in which the overcoming of those problems is allowed even as success is never guaranteed.

Perhaps this is also why my intuitions about works like Così fan tutte or Into the Woods diverge from the intuitions of other listeners with whom I've compared notes. Many over the years have been tempted to see in these narratives a fall from grace--a loss of perfection and a confrontation with the tarnished reality of human life. And yes, that is one view: no character in these two works survives unscathed. But in both cases, what we witness is a process in which problems denied in Act I are recognized in Act II--and, in both cases, the end of Act II brings a loosening of authority and control, and with it a sense that, perhaps, problem-solving in the future will be possible for the characters. In Così, Don Alfonso steps back and allows the lovers to pursue their problem-filled lives without interference. Perhaps, after the end of the opera, the lovers' relationships will grow into authenticity. And in Into the Woods, the narrator is, literally, vanquished, as are the Witch's meddling, supernatural powers. What we are left with at the end is, in some sense, a fallen world. In another sense, however, it is a world that, for the first time in the musical, will allow its inhabitants to "just pursue [their] lives." That their strivings will never come to an end--that Cinderella begins to say "I wish..." even as the music stops--is itself a point of hope for the nascent, optimistic Utopia we see taking shape.

Moving to Substack?

After maintaining this Blogger page for about 8 years (though posting only sporadically during that time), I'm thinking of finally making the switch to Substack. Although I very much enjoy the Blogger interface, I suspect that this site is simply too difficult to find, and I hope that posting to the same app where people read other essays might help bring these musings to a larger audience.

One thing I appreciate about the idea of a personal blog is that it can appeal to a niche audience - in this case, really, an audience of one, since I'm both the writer and the main reader. This helps me feel free to post essays without wondering whether anyone else will find them interesting. It also helps me feel free to post on a very wide range of ideas without worrying that I'll alienate readers who only want my content on a single topic. I don't know how to think about this last point in particular in relation to Substack, where the idea of building a "brand" seems more salient than just exploring personal interests.

I'll keep this site alive for now, though I'm starting to migrate the archives over to Substack.

And I invite anyone who reads this to join me there! Visit dorianbandy.substack.com.

What's Wrong with Don Giovanni?

My colleague Patrick Hansen, director of Opera McGill, recently wrote a blog post discussing the challenges of producing Mozart's Don Giovanni - a retelling of the Don Juan story - during the era of #MeToo and other related social movements. Patrick makes the following points: 1) watching a serial seducer take advantage of women is no longer ok, though it might have seemed less obviously objectionable in previous centuries; 2) defending the character on the grounds that he sings beautiful music is also impossible; and 3) the quality of the opera's music overall is so high that the work cannot simply be jettisoned from the repertory.

Patrick's solution, demonstrated during this weekend's staged productions of the opera, was to set the story as a vampire tale, turning Giovanni into an actual monster who kills rather than sleeps with his victims. This strikes me as ingenious, for two reasons: first, it meets Patrick's explicit aim of forestalling objections to the nature of the story, by making it very clear that the production is in no way lionizing the actions of this character (after all, even if some old-fashioned types might be inclined to condone Don Giovanni's sexual exploits, none will praise him if he is a murderer rather than a seducer); and second, because it retains some elemental links with the character's sexual frenzies as depicted in the original plot. As is often pointed out, "undead" characters such as vampires embody aspects of Freud's conception of libido, which is both impossible to satisfy and impossible to kill. By setting the opera as a vampire story, Patrick is able to have it both ways, giving us a title character who is not-a-sexual-predator and yet still infused with many layers of archetypal sexual implications.

Although I appreciated and wholly support Patrick's solution to the "Don Giovanni problem," his discussion of the problem itself got me thinking. I'm always sad to hear people say that recent social or political movements have rendered an old and great artwork unsuitable for modern-day consumers - especially when the piece in question features such excellent music. So, in this case, I found myself wondering whether the opera is, in fact, as problematic as people often suggest it is. There are a number of viable arguments in favor of Don Giovanni - and, as far as I can tell, only one strong argument against it.

The argument against Don Giovanni is, in brief, that the mere depiction of a sexual predator renders the opera unsuitable for modern-day audiences. (Either on the grounds that some viewers might be triggered by them, or simply because depiction, even when ironic or skeptical, may be seen as a kind of approbation.) Many of my own arguments in support of the opera involve the idea that this work, or any, can show behavior without condoning it: that, in other words, the stance the artwork takes towards its own characters, plot, or moral content should structure the way we interpret and engage with that content. This, in turn, rests on the idea that the mere "facts" of the plot do not capture the full extent of what is ultimately being said - a proposition that I take to be largely self-evident, but that many do not. I appreciate that there are legitimate reasons people may wish to avoid an opera with this kind of plot. Although I disagree with them, I think this basically comes down to personal preferences, and I don't expect my arguments to change many minds. So, although I don't personally buy the depiction-is-bad-in-itself argument, I recognize that anything I say in support of the opera will seem a non-sequitur to someone who does buy it.

Nonetheless, here are some ways of thinking about the plot of Don Giovanni that make it seem less problematic than is often assumed. I'm not sure all of these are persuasive, but they should at least give us pause before we reject the original plot as being immoral.

1. Perhaps what is said about Giovanni, including Leporello's valorizing account of his exploits in the "Catalogue Aria," is simply false. To put it plainly, the first possibility is that Giovanni simply isn't a serial seducer. Consider the events of the opera. Over the two acts, we witness: a botched attempt to seduce Donna Anna (so botched that it culminates in a murder, which we need to assume is not Giovanni's normal strategy, since either the law or previous angry family members and their friends would have intervened in the past); a botched attempt to evade an angry ex; a botched attempt to seduce Zerlina (although it has been argued, including by me, that her imitation of his melody in their Act I duet is proof of her willingness - so perhaps this is the one successful seduction in the opera); a botched attempt to re-seduce Zerlina during the Act I Finale; and a botched attempt to exchange clothes with Leporello and seduce Elvira's maid.

If we are to believe what Leporello claims about his master during the Catalogue Aria, then Giovanni can't afford to have off-days like this one. If we take the day portrayed in the opera as a representative episode from the Don's life, then Leporello's account is false, and we'd be watching not an actual serial-seducer but simply an incompetent wannabe. I recognize that this conjecture is problematic, since it still leaves open the possibility that the characters, especially Leporello, think of serial seduction as a goal worth aspiring to. Though maybe this is softened by my next point:

2. Perhaps the opera itself condemns the Don. This seems to me the obvious choice in defending the opera: it's clear that although the plot depicts his (attempted) sexual conquests, in fact the opera is about his punishment. Indeed, "Il dissoluto punito" - "the dissolute man, punished" - was the title at the work's 1787 premiere, with "Don Giovanni" as the subtitle. On the level of plot, I think it's misleading to say that the opera depicts the actions of a serial seducer. More accurate is that what's on display is the intentions of a serial-seducer, plus the punishment meted out to the seducer. The musical structures confirm that this is, indeed, how we are meant to take in the work. The fact that Mozart introduces the statue's music as the first section of the overture is his statement that we are not watching, unbiased, as the Don pursues his various activities on stage, but rather watching with the knowledge of the supernatural censure in which his activities will result. Imagine if the Don Giovanni overture more closely resembled the Figaro overture, without any hint of the ombra music. Were this the case, the moral outlook of the opera would feel very different, since our starting-point would be in the less judgmental comic world, and we would watch the Don operate in a related, non-judgmental frame of mind. In reality, however, the opera introduces itself with the immediate announcement that what follows will be a story of judgment and damnation.

Of course, the fact that the Don is condemned by every other character, including ultimately by Leporello during Elvira's attempted intervention in the Act II Finale, also counts. Even Leporello's support throughout the opera, felt perhaps most keenly in the Catalogue Aria, is flimsy: the servant tries many times to denounce the master's lifestyle and quit his service, but is never allowed. The opera thus makes it clear that the Don's actions are bad both by terrestrial and celestial standards. Given that this point is so self-evident, I'm surprised that people who are on board with recent social movements haven't more enthusiastically embraced the opera, which, like Figaro, can be read plausibly as a statement of feminism avant la lettre.

3. Perhaps the opera is not really about sex. This final possibility may seem counterintuitive given...the actual literal contents of the libretto. But in much 19th-century criticism, including Kierkegaard's extended analysis of the opera in Either/Or, it is pointed out that the Don's sexual needs are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and that perhaps the point of his character is to represent not sexuality, but rather the extreme limits of appetite as such - free of any particular impulse. (This reading also meshes nicely with Patrick's vampire theme, since with vampires, too, the fact of the appetite itself is far more salient than the particular need to which it is drawn.) Many authors have approached Don Giovanni from this angle. Nicholas Till, in Mozart and the Enlightenment, sees the piece as an essay both on Christianity and early theories of liberalism, particularly given the paean to freedom in the Act I Finale (Viva la libertà!). Karol Berger, too (in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow) sees it as a tract on freedom, on transgression, on politics, on the nature of individuals vs collectives in society. Indeed, so much does Berger take it for granted that sex is of no real importance to the opera's meaning, that he spends a chapter likening Giovanni to Faustus, a character for whom the pursuit of knowledge rather than physical pleasure is the abstracted, undead drive. Others, meanwhile (most famously Wendy Allanbrook) liken Giovanni to an Odyssean "No-Man": a symbol rather than a human figure. In all of these readings, even where the authors diverge on particulars, we find a shared conviction that Giovanni is not so much a sexual predator as a transgressor of normative moral values, and that sex simply serves as the plot-device through which Mozart and Da Ponte explore these bigger societal and human questions.

If listeners find at least one of these readings to be plausible, then the opera deserves to be accepted on its own terms, even with stagings that depict the actions described in the original libretto. At best, detractors who think that #MeToo poses a fatal problem for Don Giovanni should find that the opera takes an anti-Giovanni position and defends modern-day social values. And those motivated not specifically by #MeToo but by broader moral concerns should find that the opera's condemnation of this character is decisive and unambiguous.

Sondheim's most underrated show?

I've always been obsessed with Sondheim's musicals. In general, however, my fascination is entangled with broad features of his technique and aesthetic vision, rather than with any particular work. In the former category, I love the clarity with which he discusses the details of his craft. He often stated in interviews and lectures that writers/composers should be able to defend every word of their librettos and every note of their scores, and this is an ideal he certainly pursued - and indeed, this self-awareness is something that unites all of the artists in my pantheon, especially Mozart. In the second category, I resonate particularly with the ambivalence so many of Sondheim's characters experience, as well as the philosophical acuity of his shows (something I wrote about at the end of last year). 

Nonetheless, even if my intellectual interest in Sondheim is bound up with aspects of his technique and vision that apply to all of his shows, I can't help but have developed favorites. These works, to which I return again and again, are, perhaps unsurprisingly, beloved in mainstream culture as well. I find Sweeney Todd to contain some of Sondheim's best musical storytelling; I find Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods to be his most philosophically stimulating and meaningful shows (even compared with the rest of his extremely meaningful output); and I love the musical classicism of A Little Night Music, the verbal brilliance of Follies, and the cleverness of Pacific Overtures. None of these choices is unusual; none cuts against the cultural grain.

But in the course of revisiting much of Sondheim's work over the past few months, I've started to wonder whether Merrily We Roll Along could be his most underrated work. It was commercially unsuccessful (though this isn't saying much, since by this standard most of his output is criminally underrated). But my impression is that Merrily is also underrated by many critics and musicians. I had certainly dismissed it for most of my life, as had many of my family and friends. I've never seen it performed live, nor have I seen a theatrical recording that seemed to do it justice. Thus, I can't speak to the overarching effect of the show as a piece of theater. However, from the point of view of the songs, it has some of the best and most impressive writing I've encountered in Sondheim's oeuvre. These are better than much of Follies and Pacific Overtures, and Night Music, at least, and I could imagine that the show as a whole might be better in some ways than Sweeney or Into the Woods.

Performances of three particularly good songs:

"Not a day goes by" (it's amazing how much Sondheim can do with a simple minor triad, not to mention the power of the text and the extraordinary performance):

"Opening doors" (one of Sondheim's epic puzzle songs, complete with a joke about Stravinsky in the middle, here sung by the original cast at the 20-year reunion - an easier rendition to follow than in their earlier studio recording):

"Our time":

The fact that Merrily strikes me as being underrated also raises the (related) question of whether some of his other shows are overrated. In general, I don't think that this is the case; Sondheim's work is so good that even now it's probably, on the whole, a bit underrated. (And I'd also guess that even many of his devotees don't realize just how great he was, and thus that he's in that sense underrated, even by those who do love his shows.) Nonetheless, I suspect that some other of his shows have received more attention than they deserve in comparison with Merrily. For instance, Pacific Overtures does have some nice moments, but its score isn't as consistently great as Merrily's; and Night Music has wonderful music, but the play is extremely shabby both in conception and especially in execution.

Reading the Foreword to "Ungrading"

Following my "Experiments in Grading" post of a few weeks ago, a colleague suggested that I peruse the newish volume Ungrading (ed. Susan Blum; West Virginia University Press, 2020). I haven't yet gotten far in the collection, and in any case I don't expect to read the book cover-to-cover, since not all of the topics are equally applicable to my interests or pedagogical problems. However, I had some reactions while reading the Foreword by Alfie Kohn. I'll record a few of these thoughts here, and follow up with future posts as I read more of the book. (I'll also continue to edit and expand my earlier post on grading.)

In general, in the Foreword (and, from what I can tell, perhaps the rest of the volume as well), the case against grades is vastly overstated. Kohn describes nine steps along the path from grading to ungrading--and although I have followed some parts of this path myself, my underlying rationale is almost always very different from the reasons stated here.

Kohn's first step:

We start by worrying about grade inflation before gradually coming to realize the real problem is grades themselves.

I certainly have worried at times about grade inflation...but what about the second part of that sentence? I would frame the issue not as "the real problem is grades themselves," but rather as "grades are problematic." In my previous post, I outlined a number of reasons why I think that grades are problematic, mostly involving the conceptual overburdening of grades, and attendant practical issues that arise as a result. I stand by this, yet it doesn't necessarily follow that grades themselves are "the problem." Grades do accomplish at least some useful purposes, including signaling. Indeed, if Bryan Caplan is correct that signaling is the overarching aim of academia and schooling, then some form of grades are inevitable, since the system wouldn't be able to function unless something facilitated this basic end. Of course, as I also acknowledge elsewhere, to the extent that grades serve as signals, they are imperfect signals, not least because they don't usually carry any explanatory detail. To outsiders who want to know whether a student is competent, grades only indicate the barest outlines of an answer; and to students receiving grades without an accompanying explanation, no real learning can take place because the feedback implied by grades is too diffuse to provoke any particular improvements. But, be that as it may, some version of this problem will be replicated in virtually any system for signaling quality that goes short of actually describing, in real detail, individual skill-sets. For this reason, some system like grades is probably a necessary part of life. It isn't clear that this system or any other is itself "the problem".

Kohn's second step:

...We make sure that everyone can, in theory, get an A. Only then do we realize that rating, too, is a problem, even if a less egregious one than ranking. We've eliminated the strychnine of competition, but there is more to be done if we're still dispensing the arsenic of extrinsic motivation.

This is an extension of the previous point: ratings are inevitable. But, I think it must be added, they are in some cases beneficial. The only way to improve is to receive feedback on one's abilities and performance, and although I agree that grades aren't the best way to deliver feedback (an objection I raised earlier), it isn't the fact of rating that is the problem, but the fact that the system of rating involving grades ends up, in its purest form, delivering ratings without explanations. The solution here could be very robust rubrics, or detailed commentary. About extrinsic motivation, this doesn't strike me as being obviously problematic. Students are individuals, and as such will be motivated by any number of different considerations; who am I to tell them that only intrinsic motivations matter?

Kohn's third step:

...We stop using letters and numbers to rate what students have done and instead use descriptive labels such as "needs improvement," "developing," "meeting/exceeding expectations," "proficient," and "mastery." Step two: we realize these labels are just grades...by a different name and that we need to get rid of them too.

This is the first point at which my disagreement becomes serious. Such labels are not grades by a different name; they are partial explanations of why a student has succeeded or failed at a particular task, and in what ways. Unlike a straight-up letter grade delivered without accompanying commentary, these explanations do, or at least can, make clear what needs work, and what kind of work would be best. They aren't perfect, of course; and crucially, they leave room for imprecision that can, in the wrong pedagogical hands, end up being just as useless to students as grades themselves often are. But what would remain of education if we got rid of the possibility of telling a student that work needs improvement?

(Incidentally, I also find labels such as these useful when they are applied by editors to my own professional work. One of my own intuitive measures of how useful a particular comment might be to a student is my sense of how helpful the comment would be if an editor voiced it while working through one of my manuscripts. I want to know what doesn't work, what could be better, and, ideally, what steps I might take to make the necessary improvements. Likewise, I assume that students at least want to have the option of hearing similar thoughts from me--and these comments are a baby-step in the right direction, even if they do not end up saying enough.)

I agreed with Kohn's fourth through seventh steps, which advocate for more precision and description in feedback to students--though, again, not because I think grades themselves are bad (which is Kohn's ultimate point) but because I think they are often overburdened or poorly applied, and one of the ways to remedy this is to be more explicit about what the grades are supposed to accomplish.

However, in step 8 we encounter "ungrading" in its most usual form: "we meet with students individually and ask them to propose course grades for themselves, while reserving the right to accept their suggestions." Step 9 is simply an intensified version of step 8: students choose their own final grades, and we reserve no right of refusal.

One problem with this approach is that it places undue psychological pressure on the students. Students find themselves in the position of second-guessing what we professors think about them, and trying to weigh this against what they then think we might think when we see the grade they propose...and I imagine that such mental calculations are ultimately pretty harmful--more harmful, certainly, than what I think they experience when I just go ahead and give them a (probably decent) grade along with some constructive feedback.

Another problem is an extension of what I have already mentioned. Grades do serve a purpose in the culture as a whole (even if mainly for outward-facing signaling), and to strip them of that purpose--which would surely occur if every prof left grading entirely in the hands of students, since external bodies would no longer think of grades as a reliably "objective" standard--would most likely lead not to the abandonment of rating systems altogether, but simply to a new kind of rating system: a different version of the same thing...and here I would invoke the classic argument from conservatism. Why fly to ills we know not of? When you don't yet know what the new system will be like or what further problems it may bring, it's important to make changes that are cautiously incremental rather than radical. It should follow that the best way to deal with the problems posed by grading as it's currently practiced is not to tinker with the culturally-shared elements of the grading system, but to experimentally tweak those aspects that can be safely adjusted within the comparatively private context of one's own syllabuses.

The post formerly known as: Is "Bad Music Love" Equivalent to "Bad Movie Love"?

In mid-January 2022, I wrote a somewhat informal blog-review of Matthew Strohl's excellent, recent book, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. As it happens, I ended up reviewing the book a few months later for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism - and once I had signed the journal's publishing agreement, I needed to remove the blog post, which overlaps a great deal with my review. When the review is officially published, I will place a link on this page; however, in the meantime, I have deleted any passages that made it into my review...and am leaving whatever passages are unique to the blog post. Although the material that remains is probably fairly impossible to understand, I wanted to preserve these thoughts, since they seem interesting and relevant to other ideas (even if they remain in a somewhat incomprehensible state when isolated like this).

---

The best book I have read so far this year is Matthew Strohl's recently released Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. Granted, the year has only just begun; yet I think this is probably the best book on the philosophy of art I've read in a long time. The writing is spectacular; the arguments are convincing; and most of all, the sheer love of film conveyed throughout the book is wonderful. Strohl accomplishes in a breezy 194 pages what many other philosophers require many hundreds of pages to do.

Strohl's book is ostensibly about movies; but in fact, it is a defense of the good life. The argument he builds is, initially, focused only on film. He begins by defining a stance of aesthetic appreciation for bad movies, termed Bad Movie Love. It goes like this. When saying that a movie is "so bad it's good,"

"'Good' is being used in the final sense while 'bad' has a special meaning. ...One recognizes that there is some limited sense in which the movie is bad, but...one ultimately judges it to be aesthetically valuable, in part because it's bad in this limited sense." (p.4)

This is a fine place to start, though at first the idea seems like it might veer into question-begging, since even if a bad movie is judged aesthetically valuable, it isn't initially clear why we'd want to dwell on bad movies when there are so many good movies around. I agree with Strohl that Batman and Robin is "so bad it's good"; but for a decent portion of the book I don't yet see why such a film is more worthy of my time than Vertigo, which, let's face it, is "so good it's good". (Or In the Mood for Love, or Adaptation, or Mad Men, or any of the other good-good things I've watched or re-watched recently.)

....

I'm fully convinced by this. I now feel personally liberated to enjoy some of my guilty-pleasure films. Indeed, I'm not only convinced by the arguments, but inspired by them.

It's natural to ask, though, particularly in light of my other interests, whether these arguments apply equally to other areas of aesthetic pursuit. Being both a musician and an avid reader, I can't help but wonder whether Bad Music Love (or Bad Novel Love) is as permissible as Bad Movie Love.

My guess is that, at least in the case of music, the answer is: no. Bad Music Love might be far, far worse than Bad Movie Love. Why? First, the disclaimer: I don't think that I'm biased by being a musicologist. True, my professional work demands that I have discerning musical tastes, and do I spend a lot of time trying to articulate why various compositions are good or bad. And I recognize that my general disposition may seem to place me in the same category as Strohl's imaginary "Professor Stuffypants". But I don't think these biases impinge on my reasoning about this particular point (though my friends might say otherwise...).

My hypothesis involves both the relative quantity of bad music vs. bad movies, and the relative quality of bad music vs. bad movies. I suspect that there is far more bad music in the world than there are bad movies, and that the bad music is infinitely badder than the bad movies.

...

I could write a bad piano sonata today, alone in my apartment, with no money or resources beyond some paper and a pencil. (I don't even need an eraser! This is supposed to be bad; why bother revising?) I would have a harder time making a bad movie. Perhaps I could pull it off with my phone and a selfie-stick...but this would not be the kind of bad movie Strohl would watch, since it would have no reliable distribution, and thus would be unlikely to make its way to his TV. This question of distribution raises another point: it isn't only that bad movies take more time and effort to make than bad music, but that their chances of being preserved and distributed is relatively low. Anyone can write bad music on a manuscript leaf and find that, a couple hundred years later, it will be digitized in the Duben Collection or in the Dresden State Library, awaiting discovery by zealous archivist period-performers who want to play bad music; but not so for bad movies.

The barriers to the distribution of bad movies are not the only salient considerations. Movies (even bad ones) require more people to make than music. This also has its effect. Except in some exceptional cases in which a bad filmmaker has unchecked power (cf. Strohl's discussion of Plan 9 from Outer Space), most movies are made with the involvement and input of more people. This alone almost guarantees the presence of error-correcting mechanisms, since even a bad director may collaborate with people who end up improving the final product. For this reason, I suspect that even most "bad movies" aren't really all that bad--a suspicion corroborated by Strohl's book, which argues that many of these movies, even the Twilight films, are actually rather good. Bad music, on the other hand, can be profoundly bad. Often, no external ear has been engaged to criticize and correct the final product; it is the composer's own intuitions, errors and all, that features in what we end up hearing. (Incidentally, this has changed in the modern era of pop music, where songs are very often written by a performer in collaboration with others behind the scenes...and it's probably for this reason that the percentage of competent pop songs I encounter is far higher than the percentage of competent non-Mozart/non-Haydn 18th-century symphonies I encounter.)

Does any of this change what I make of Strohl's arguments? I suspect so. Perhaps his defense of bad movies is not really a compelling defense of bad movies, but a defense of medium-bad or even pretty-good-but-not-great movies. The movies Strohl discusses are, ultimately still worth our time. We may not be in the mood to ingest Vertigo (just as we may not be in the mood to follow Bach fugues or parse a Schoenberg piano sonata); but in Strohl's hands many movies that seem superficially bad can still contribute much to our life. This is more than I would say of most musical compositions I encounter.

...

Perhaps the saving grace in the case of novels is that, as with film, books require the involvement of multiple people along the path from manuscript to published edition, and thus present opportunities for improvement and error-correction. Much of the art-music produced over the past 700 years survives only in manuscript, or in early published editions, and is thus hit-or-miss in a way that may not apply to published novels or professionally distributed films. Of course, according to Sturgeon's Law, most work in any given domain is bad--and this applies everywhere, including to published novels and professional films. But the error-correcting processes in these media nonetheless seem to function reasonably well in improving overall quality.

One final--contentious--possible explanation for the general high quality of film in comparison with older music and older texts is that aesthetic standards overall have improved over the past century, and thus that art-forms invented more recently have the benefit of having developed within a context of greater artistic and aesthetic understanding. The fact that composers like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven figured out how to write reliably great music during the 18th century is, when you think about it, completely remarkable considering just how little progress had yet been made in many other areas of cultural, technological, scientific, and philosophical life. That they did succeed where so many of their contemporaries failed is testament both to whatever progress had occurred during and just before their lifetimes; and to the intellectual labor each one of these artists did in improving aesthetic knowledge. (There was probably also a lot of luck involved.) Yet as more general cultural and scientific knowledge improved, so too did artistic standards: thus, my experience suggests that there is a very high likelihood that an unknown, non-canonical piece of music written after around 1850 will be pretty decent; whereas I can't say the same for the period 1750-1800. That film was invented in the 20th century may be at least a partial explanation for the fact that, as Strohl shows, even bad movies can be aesthetically valuable.