Just Say No

Siger wished to remain a professing Catholic, and to safeguard his faith he had recourse to the celebrated theory of the two truths: what is true in philosophy may be false in religion, and vice versa.
—“Siger of Brabant” New Catholic Encyclopedia. 1914. 

If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices.
—Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles. 

“The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas Over Averroës”  Benozzo Gozzoli        (1420-1497)

“Let no one,” read the sign over Plato’s Academy, the famed school of ancient Athens, “ignorant of mathematics enter here.” To Plato, understanding mathematics was prerequisite to the discussion of other topics, including politics. During the 1880s, however, some professors in the German university system (like Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey) divided knowledge into what they called “geisteswissenschaften” (“human sciences”) and “naturwissenschaften” (“natural sciences”), so that where Plato viewed mathematics as a necessary substrate in a vertical, hierarchical relation with other fields, the Germans thought of that relation horizontally, as if they were co-equals. Today, that German conception is best exemplified by what’s known as “science studies”: the “institutional goal of” which, as Mark Bauerlein of Emory University observed some years ago, is “to delimit the sciences to one knowledge domain, to show that they speak not for reality, but for certain constructions of reality.” (Or, as one of the founders of “science studies”—Andrew Ross—began a book on the matter back in the early 1990s: “This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them.”) Yet, while it may be that the German horizontal conception (to use Plato’s famous metaphor) “carves nature at the joint” better than Plato’s vertical one, the trouble with thinking of the mathematical, scientific world as one thing and the world of the human, including the political, as something else is that, among other costs, it makes it very difficult to tell—as exemplified by two different accounts of this same historical event—the story of George Washington’s first veto. Although many people appear to think of the “humanities” as just the ticket to escape America’s troubled political history … well, maybe not.

The first account I’ll mention is a chapter entitled “The First Veto,” contained in a book published in 2002 called Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution. Written by law professor Michael Meyerson of the University of Baltimore, Meyerson’s book is deeply influenced by the German, horizontal view: he begins his book by observing that, when he began law school, his torts teacher sneered to his class that if any of them “were any good in math, you’d all be in medical school,” and goes on to observe that the “concept of mathematics can be relevant to the study of law seems foreign to many modern legal minds”—presumably, due to the German influence. Meyerson writes his book, then, as an argument against the German horizontal concept—and hence, implicitly, in favor of the Platonic, Greek one. Yet Meyerson’s work is subtly damaged by contact with the German view: it is not as good a treatment of the first presidential veto as another depiction of that same event—one written long before the German distinction came to be dominant in the United States.

That account was written by political scientist Edward James of the University of Chicago, and is entitled The First Apportionment of Federal Representatives in the United States: A Study in American Politics. Published in 1896, or more than a century before Meyerson’s account, it is nevertheless wholly superior: in the first place because of its level of detail, but in the second because—despite being composed in what might appear to contemporary readers as a wholly-benighted time—it’s actually far more sophisticated than Meyerson on precisely the subject that the unwary might suppose him to be weakest on. But before taking up that matter, it might be best to explain just what the first presidential veto was about.

George Washington only issued two vetoes during his two terms as president of the United States, which isn’t a record—several presidents have issued zero vetoes, including George W. Bush in his first term. But two is a pretty low number of vetoes: the all-time record holder, Franklin Roosevelt, issued 635 vetoes over his twelve years in office, and two others have issued more than a hundred. Yet while Washington’s second veto, concerning the War Department, appears fairly inconsequential today, his first veto has had repercussions that still echo in the United States. That’s because it concerned what’s of tremendous political importance to all Americans even now: the architecture of the national legislature, Congress. But it also (in a fashion that may explain just why Washington’s veto does not receive the attention it might) concerned that basic mathematical operation: division.

The structure of the Congress is detailed in Article One of the U.S. Constitution, whose first section vests the legislative power of the national government in Congress and then divides that Congress into two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Section Two of Article One describes the House of Representatives, and Clause Three of Section Two describes, among other things, just how members of the House should be distributed around the nation: the members should, the clause says, “not exceed one for every thirty Thousand” inhabitants. But it also says that “each state shall have at Least one Representative”—and that causes all the trouble.

“At the heart of the dispute,” as Meyerson remarks, is a necessarily small matter: “fractions.” Or, as James puts it in what I think of as his admirably direct fashion:

There will always be remainders after dividing the population of the state by the number of people entitled to a representative, and so long as this is true, an exact division on numerical basis is impossible, if state lines must be observed in the process of apportionment.

It isn’t possible, in other words, to have one-sixth of a congressman (no matter what we might think of her cognitive abilities), nor is it likely that state populations will be an easily-dividable number. If it were possible to ignore state lines it would also be possible to divide up the country by population readily: as James remarks, without having to take into account state boundaries the job would be “a mere matter of arithmetic.” But because state boundaries have to be taken into account, it isn’t.

The original bill—the one that Washington vetoed—tackled this problem in two steps: in the first place, it simply divided the country, whose population the 1790 Census revealed to be (on Census Day, 2 August 1790) 3,929,214, and divided by 33,000 (which does not exceed one per 30,000), which of course gives a product just shy of 120 (119.067090909, to be precise). So that was to be the total number of seats in the House of Representatives.

The second step then was to distribute them, which Congress solved by giving—according to the “The Washington Papers” at the University of Virginia—“an additional member to the eight states with the largest fraction left over after dividing.” But doing so meant that, effectively, some states’ population was being divided by 30,000 while others were being divided by some other number: as James describes, while Congress determined the total number of congressmen by dividing the nation’s total population by 33,000, when it came time to determine which states got those congressmen the legislature used a different divisor. The bill applied a 30,000 ratio to “Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia,” while applying “one of 27,770 to the other eight states.” Hence, as Washington would complain in his note to Congress explaining his veto, there was “no one proportion or divisor”—a fact that Edmund Randolph, Washington’s Attorney General (and, significantly as we’ll see, a Virginian), would say was “repugnant to the spirit of the constitution.” That opinion Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson (also a Virginian) shared.

Because the original bill used different divisors, Jefferson said that meant that it did not contain “any principle at all”—and hence would allow future Congresses to manipulate census results for political purposes “according to any … crochet which ingenuity may invent.” Jefferson thought, instead, that every state’s population ought to be divided by the same number: a “common divisor.” On the one hand, of course, that appears perfectly fair: using a single divisor gave the appearance of transparency and prevented the kinds of manipulations Jefferson envisioned. But it did not prevent what is arguably another manipulation: under Jefferson’s plan, which had largely the same results as the original plan, two seats were taken away from Delaware and New Hampshire and given to Pennsylvania—and Virginia.

Did I mention that Jefferson (and Randolph and Washington) was a Virginian? All three were, and at the time Virginia was, as Meyerson to his credit points out, “the largest state in the Union” by population. Yet while Meyerson does correctly note “that the Jefferson plan is an extraordinarily effective machine for allocating extra seats to large states,” he fails to notice something else about Virginia—something that James does notice (as we shall see). Virginia in the 1790s was not just the most populous state, but also a state with a very large, very wealthy, and very particular local industry.

That industry was, of course, slavery, and as James wrote (need I remind you) in 1896, it did not escape sharp people at the time of Washington’s veto that, in the first place, “the vote for and against the bill was perfectly geographical, a Northern against a Southern vote,” and secondly that Jefferson’s plan had the effect of “diminish[ing] the fractions in the Northern and Eastern states and increase them in the Southern”—a pattern that implied to some that “the real reason for the adoption” of Jefferson’s plan “was not that it secured a greater degree of fairness in the distribution, but that it secured for the controlling element in the Senate”—i.e., the slaveowners—“an additional power.” “It is noticeable,” James drily remarks, “that Virginia had been picked out especially as a state which profited” by Jefferson’s plan, and that “it was […] Virginians who persuaded the President” to veto the original bill. In other words, it’s James, in 1896, who is capable of discussing the political effects of the mathematics involved in terms of race—not Meyerson, despite the fact that the law professor (because he graduated from high school in 1976) had the benefit of, among other advantages, having witnessed at least the tail end of the American civil rights movement.

All that said, I don’t know just why, of course, Meyerson feels it possible to ignore the relation between George Washington’s first, and nearly only, veto and slavery: he might for instance argue that his focus is on the relation between mathematics and politics, and that bringing race into the discussion would muddy his argument. But that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? Meyerson’s reason for excluding slavery from his discussion of Washington’s first veto is, I suspect at any rate, driven precisely by his sense that race is a matter of geisteswissenschaften. 

After all, what else could it be? As Walter Benn Michaels of the University of Illinois at Chicago has put the point, despite the fact that “we don’t any longer believe in race as a biological entity, we still treat people as if they belonged to races”—which means that we must (still) think that race exists somehow. And since the biologists assure us that there is no way—biologically speaking—to link people from various parts of, say, Africa more than people from Asia or Europe (or as Michaels says, “there is no biological fact of the matter about what race you belong to”), we must thusly be treating race as a “social” or “cultural” fact rather than a natural one—which of course implies that we must think there is (still) a distinction to be made between the “natural sciences” and the “human sciences.” Hence, Meyerson excludes race from his analysis of Washington’s first veto because he (still) thinks of race as part of the “human sciences”: even Meyerson, it seems, cannot escape the gravity well of the German concept. Yet, since there isn’t any such thing as race, that necessarily raises the question of just why we think that there are two kinds of “science.” Perhaps there is little to puzzle over about just why some Americans might like the idea of race, but one might think that it is something of a mystery just why soi-disant “intellectuals” like that idea.

Or maybe not.

All Even

George, I am an old man, and most people hate me.
But I don’t like them either so that makes it all even.
—Mr. Potter. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).

 

Because someone I love had never seen it, I rewatched Frank Capra’s 1946 It’s A Wonderful Life the other night. To most people, the film is the story of how one George Bailey comes to perceive the value of helping “a few people get outta [the] slums” of the “scurvy little spider” of the film, the wealthy banker Mr. Potter—but to some viewers, what’s important about the inhabitants of Bedford Falls isn’t that they are poor by comparison to Potter, but instead that some of them are black: the man who plays the piano in the background of one scene, for instance, or Annie, the Bailey family’s maid. To Vincent Nobile, a professor of history at Rancho Cucamonga’s Chaffey College, the casting of these supporting roles not only demonstrates that “Capra showed no indication he could perceive blacks in roles outside the servant class,” but also that Potter is the story’s villain not because he is a slumlord, but because he calls the people Bailey helps “garlic eaters” (http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1846). What makes Potter evil, in other words, isn’t his “cold monetary self-interest,” but because he’s “bigoted”: to this historian, Capra’s film isn’t the heartwarming story of how Americans banded together to stop a minority (rich people) from wrecking things, but instead the horrifying tragedy of how Americans banded together to stop a minority (black people) from wrecking things. Unfortunately, there’s two problems with that view—problems that can be summarized by referring to the program for a football game that took place five years before the release of Capra’s classic: the Army-Navy game of 29 November, 1941.

Played at Philadelphia’s Franklin Memorial Stadium (once home of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and still the home of the Penn Relays, one of track and field’s premier events), Navy won the contest 14-6; according to Vintage College Football Programs & Collectibles (collectable.wordpress.com [sic]), the program for that game contains 212 pages. On page 180 of that program there is a remarkable photograph. It is of the USS Arizona, the second and last of the American “Pennsylvania” class of super-dreadnought battleships—a ship meant to be, according to the New York Times of 13 July 1913, “the world’s biggest and most powerful, both offensively and defensively, superdreadnought ever constructed.” The last line of the photograph’s caption reads thusly:

“It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts, no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.”

Slightly more than a week later, of course, on a clear bright Sunday morning just after 8:06 Hawaiian time, the hull of the great ship would rest on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, along with the bodies of nearly 1200 of her crew—struck down by the “air enthusiasts” of the Empire of the Sun. The lesson taught that morning, by aircraft directed by former Harvard student Isoroku Yamamoto, was a simple one: that “a saturation attack by huge numbers of low-value attackers”—as Pando Daily’s “War Nerd” columnist, Gary Brecher, has referred to this type of attack—can bring down nearly any target, no matter how powerful (http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/). (A lesson that the U.S. Navy has received more than once: in 2002, for instance, when during the wargame “Millennium Challenge 2002” Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Riper (fictionally) sent 16 ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf with the creative use of, essentially, a bunch of cruise missiles and several dozen speedboats loaded with cans of gasoline driven by gentlemen with, shall we say, a cavalier approach to mortality.) It’s the lesson that the cheap and shoddy can overcome quality—or in other words that, as the song says, the bigger they come, the harder they fall.

It’s a lesson that applies to more than merely the physical plane, as the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift knew: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after,” the author of Gulliver’s Travels wrote in 1710. What Swift refers to is how saturation attacks can work on the intellectual as well as physical plane—as Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein (who, unfortunately for the warmth of my argument’s reception, endorsed Donald Trump in this past election) argued, in Partisan Review in 2001, American academia has over the past several generations essentially become flooded with the mental equivalents of Al Qaeda speedboats. “Clear-sighted professors,” Bauerlein wrote then, understanding the conditions of academic research, “avoid empirical methods, aware that it takes too much time to verify propositions about culture, to corroborate facts with multiple sources, to consult primary documents, and to compile evidence adequate to inductive conclusions” (http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/PR2001V68N2/HTML/files/assets/basic-html/index.html#226). Discussing It’s A Wonderful Life in terms of, say, the economic differences between banks like the one owned by Potter and the savings-and-loan run by George Bailey—and the political consequences therein—is, in other words, hugely expensive in terms of time and effort invested: it’s much more profitable to discuss the film in terms of its hidden racism. By “profitable,” in other words, I mean not merely because it’s intrinsically easier, but also because such a claim is much more likely to upset people, and thus attract attention to its author: the crass stunt once called épater le bourgeois.

The current reward system of the humanities, in other words, favors those philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “foxes” (who know a great many things) rather than “hedgehogs” (who know one important thing). To the present defenders of the humanities, of course, such is the point: that’s the pro-speedboat argument noted feminist literary scholar Jane Tompkins made so long ago as 1981, in her essay “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of American Literary History.” There, Tompkins suggested that the “political and economic measures”—i.e., the battleships of American political discourse—“that constitute effective action for us” are, in reality, merely “superficial”: instead, what’s necessary are “not specific alterations in the current political and economic arrangements, but rather a change of heart” (http://engl651-jackson.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Sentimental+Power.pdf). To those who think like Tompkins—or apparently, Nobile—discussing It’s A Wonderful Life in terms of economics is to have missed the point entirely: what matters, according to them, isn’t the dreadnought clash of, for example, the unit banking system of the antebellum North (speedboats) versus the branch banking system of the antebellum South (battleships) within the sea of the American economy. (A contest that, incidentally, not only did branch banking largely win in 1994, during Bill Clinton’s administration, but a victory that in turn—because it helped to create the enormous “too big to fail” interstate banks of today—arguably played no small role in the crash of 2008). Instead, what’s important is the seemingly-minor attack of a community college teacher upon a Titanic of American culture. Or, to put the point in terms popularized by Silicon Valley: the sheer BS quality of Vincent Nobile’s argument about It’s A Wonderful Life isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.

There is, however, one problem with such tactics—the same problem described by Rear Admiral Chuichi (“King Kong”) Hara of the Imperial Japanese Navy after the Japanese surrender in September 1945: “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor—and thereby lost the war.” Although, as the late American philosopher Richard Rorty commented before his death in his Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, “[l]eftists in the academy” have, in collaboration with “the Right,” succeeded in “making cultural issues central to public debate,” that hasn’t necessarily resulted in a victory for leftists, or even liberals (https://www.amazon.com/Achieving-Our-Country-Leftist-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674003128). Indeed, there’s some reason to suppose that, by discouraging certain forms of thought within left-leaning circles, academic leftists in the humanities have obscured what Elizabeth Drew, in the New York Review of Books, has called “unglamorous structural questions” in a fashion ultimately detrimental not merely to minority communities, but ultimately all Americans (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/american-democracy-betrayed/).

What Drew was referring to this past August was such matters as how—in the wake of the 2010 Census and the redistricting it entailed in every state in the Union—the Democrats ended up, in the 2012 election cycle, winning the popular vote for Congress “by 1.2 per cent, but still remained in the minority, with two hundred and one seats to the G.O.P.’s two hundred and thirty-four.” In other words, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives got, as Katie Sanders noted in Politifact in 2013, “50.59 percent of the two-party vote” that November, but “won just 46.21 percent of seats”: only “the second time in 70 years that a party won the majority of the vote but didn’t win a majority of the House seats” (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/19/steny-hoyer/steny-hoyer-house-democrats-won-majority-2012-popu/). The Republican advantage didn’t end there: as Rob Richie reported for The Nation in 2014, in that year’s congressional races Republicans won “about 52 percent of votes”—but ended “up with 57 percent of seats” (https://www.thenation.com/article/republicans-only-got-52-percent-vote-house-races/). And this year, the numbers suggest, the Republicans received less than half the popular vote—but will end up with fifty-five percent (241) of the total seats (435). These losses, Drew suggests, are ultimately due to the fact that “the Democrats simply weren’t as interested in such dry and detailed stuff as state legislatures and redistricting”—or, to put it less delicately, because potentially-Democratic schemers have been put to work constructing re-readings of old movies instead of building arguments that are actually politically useful.

To put this even less delicately, many people on the liberal or left-wing side of the political aisle have, for the past several generations, spent their college educations learning, as Mark Bauerlein wrote back in 2001, how to “scoff[…] at empirical notions, chastising them as ‘näive positivism.’” At the same time, a tiny minority among them—those destined to “relax their scruples and select a critical practice that fosters their own professional survival”—have learned, and are learning, to swim the dark seas of academia, taught by their masters how to live by feeding upon the minds of essentially defenseless undergraduates. The lucky ones, like Vince Nobile, manage—by the right mix of bowing and scraping—to land some kind of job security at some far-flung outpost of academia’s empire, where they make a living entertaining the yokels; the less-successful, of course, write deeply ironic blogs.

Be that as it may, while there isn’t necessarily a connection between the humanistic academy’s flight from what Bauerlein calls “the canons of logic” and the fact that it was so easy—as John Cassidy of The New Yorker observed after this past presidential election—for so many in the American media and elsewhere “to dismiss the other outcome [i.e., Trump’s victory] as a live possibility” before the election, Cassidy at least ascribed the ease with which so many predicted a Clinton victory then to the fact that many “haven’t been schooled in how to think in probabilistic terms” (http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/media-culpa-the-press-and-the-election-result). That lack of education, which extends from the impact of mathematics upon elections to the philosophical basis for holding elections at all (which extends far beyond the usual seventeenth-century suspects rounded up in even the most erudite of college classes to medieval thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who argued in 1434’s Catholic Concordance that the “greater the agreement, the more infallible the judgment”—or in other words that speedboats are more trustworthy than battleships), most assuredly has had political consequences (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/nicholas-cusa-catholic-concordance?format=PB&isbn=9780521567732). While the ever-more abstruse academic turf wars between the sciences and the humanities might be good for the ever-dwindling numbers of tenured college professors, in other words, it’s arguably disastrous, not only for Democrats and the populations they serve, but for the country as a whole. Although Clarence, angel second class, says to George Bailey, “we don’t use money in Heaven”—suggesting the way in which American academics swear off knowledge of the sciences upon entering their secular priesthood—George replies, “it comes in real handy down here, bub.” What It’s A Wonderful Life wants to tell us is that a nation whose leadership balances so precariously upon such a narrow educational foundation is, no matter what the program says, as vulnerable as a battleship on a bright Pacific morning.

Or a skyscraper, on a cloudless September one.