Politics and Moral Reasoning (An Argument for and against Myself)

I grew up in a deeply conservative household. Most of my family remains conservative or very conservative. I live in a very conservative state and work on a very conservative campus. Yet some years ago, during one of those wonderfully long conversations you have on road trips, my younger brother observed (in a bemused rather than a judgmental tone) that I was "kind of liberal." I laughed at the absurdity of it, because having just finished my first two years of graduate study, during which I had almost daily experienced direct or indirect disparagement of my conservative and especially my Christian values, I was keenly aware that by liberal standards, I was much more likely to be regarded as "kind of conservative." And so it remains.

It's true that I've moved to the middle, and am, at present, probably a bit left-of-center, whereas at the time of that conversation I was more right-of-center. I am, as my brother perceived before I did, "kind of liberal," and it turns out I kind of always have been. I did not experience my shift toward the political center as a shift away from my core values, but rather a more nuanced and self-determined understanding of their application in the world. What has most changed is that I no longer feel at home among conservatives; nor do I think I will ever really feel at home among liberals. Whereas the attacks on my perceived conservatism that I experience among liberals have been sly and insidious, the attacks on my perceived liberalism that I have experienced within my conservative community have been direct and vicious. As painful and exhausting as this frequently is for me, maybe this inability to belong, politically speaking, isn't entirely a bad thing.

This next paragraph is the only paragraph in which I'm going to mention the presidential candidates by name, and then I'm going to write instead about broader principles, because that's what I want to talk about right now--not which candidate was wronger, or more corrupt. I'm tired of that.

I've read a lot of statements this week to the effect that for democrats (or those who voted for Clinton, not all of whom are democrats), this election was about deeply moral issues, while for republicans, it was largely about the economy, or about preserving their way of life. Of course that's no more true than the inverse would be: that for republicans (or those who voted for Trump,not all of whom are republicans), this election was about deeply moral issues, while for those who voted for Clinton, it was about the economy, or about preserving their way of life. While it's probably true that for a lot of voters, this was about the economy, it's worth noting that regardless of their political ideology, most people believe economic issues are moral issues (and they are), and obviously, so is preserving a way of life. It may be true that some people did vote primarily out of self-interest, but I think that's as likely to be the case for liberals as for conservatives.

However, I've really only seen one side of this political divide argue that voting out of self-interest is at least potentially acceptable, and that's the liberal side. Liberals don't usually argue that they vote out of self-interest. Rather they complain that their political foes are voting against their own interests, and that they must really not understand the fact that they are doing so. The implicit argument is either that conservatives are inherently selfish, and/or that self-interest is a valid reason for political decision making. To the conservative mind it must follow that either liberals themselves vote not out of principle but out of self-interest, or that they regard conservatives with outright contempt.

Which is maybe why conservatives have scoffed at liberal moral outrage throughout this whole election cycle. And who can blame them? Liberals make regular sport of scoffing at conservatives' moral outrage, and justify it in turn because conservatives regard them as morally bankrupt. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

To be clear: I believe that liberals vote out of self-interest no more than conservatives do, but also no less (an assertion that is unlikely to win me friends on either side, so I'll just add that I include myself in this unflattering assessment). That is to say, of course people vote out of self-interest, whether consciously or unconsciously. But however rational a political argument from self-interest might be, or however necessary to healthy political life it might be that we analyze the ways that self-interest plays a role in political decision-making, as a persuasive tool for conservatives it is much worse than a non-starter.

Much has been written about the moral reasoning of liberals and conservatives. It is a truism that conservatives tend to think in terms of moral absolutes, whereas liberals tend to be more comfortable with casuistic moral reasoning. To the degree that such a generalization is accurate, it should be obvious why accusing conservatives of voting against their own interests is sheer folly, if it is not malice.

I remember an argument, many years ago, between a cousin and another one of my brothers. This cousin could not understand why, given that both my parents are disabled, and this brother is himself disabled, my family tends to vote for politicians who promise to cut medicare, medicaid, and social security. How could it be logically or morally consistent to vote against the very programs on which my family depends just to get by from day to day? But it is absolutely logically and morally consistent to vote against such programs, even if you benefit from them, if you believe (as conservatives do, with a great deal of political philosophy behind them) that they are beyond the proper purview of government. For conservatives, what matters is voting for what is good, not simply what is good for them. Liberal readers will be quick to point out that this is what matters to them as well, and they'd be telling the truth, too. But to liberals (at least to white, middle- and upper-class ones), it often seems that only they have the moral courage to knowingly vote against their own self-interest; they have so much privilege to lose, and they are eager to lose it. We all see through a glass, darkly. Sometimes the glass is so dark it's more of a mirror than a window on the world.

But if conservatives don't believe in casuistic moral reasoning, what right had my parents to take government handouts which they believe it has no right to give? Pretty much the same right that a liberal who votes for strong gun control would have to shoot someone in the face to save the lives of their children. Put in less visceral terms, even the most ardent conservative can't completely avoid casuistic moral reasoning (and I don't believe that, if pressed, many of them would argue that they should), but they prefer a more clear-cut moral consistency. They would prefer a world in which people are free to keep more of their hard-earned money and choose how to bestow it charitably, rather than have the government take it and decide who deserves to have it, and how much, and for how long.

Having been welfare recipients since almost my earliest memory, my family knows better than most how precarious welfare is to rely on, and how unhealthy dependency on it is. The prospects of homelessness and hunger are terrifying, especially when thinking of your children. If a government is in control of your rent and your bread, you are at serious risk of being enslaved by it. A great many conservatives will tell you that this is why a majority of low-income and people of color vote democrat; they even call it "welfare slavery." Of course private charity can be precarious too, can foster unhealthy dependency too. And contrary to conservative protestations, private charity has never in recorded history been adequate on a widespread scale, which is why we have a social safety net in the first place. But given how well-versed liberals are in critiquing the mechanisms of power, is it really so hard to understand that government welfare is a twice-over exercise of alarming force? Is it really so hard to understand why conservatives who rely on it for survival would still vote to abolish it, not out of ignorance or foolishness but as a matter of principle? Is that not exactly what liberals urge us to do by enacting policies that they argue are necessary to abolish systemic racism, sexism, etc.? Is it not more worthy of respect than ridicule? Alfred P. Doolittle was wrong, you see: you are never too poor to afford moral principles.

Ironically, liberal bewilderment at low- and middle-income conservatives "voting against their interests" also makes it hard for conservatives to take liberals seriously when they talk about "the Patriarchy." What is more patriarchal than the assumption that conservative voters do not really know what is good for them? What is more patriarchal than liberal policies which aim to expand dependence on government to provide for basic necessities, rather than affirming that responsibility to provide food, shelter, and health care belongs with individuals, families, and communities? How can it be morally and logically consistent to uphold the right of self-determination (which liberals seem to hold above almost all others) while denying that huge swaths of Americans are capable of exercising it responsibly on their own behalf?

Well, we liberals and "kind of liberals" would answer, it's also pretty hard to exercise self-determination when you're chronically sick and can't get health care; or when you don't have access to a shower and clean clothes and a car so that you can get and keep a job; or when you have to choose between being able to feed yourself and your kids or getting out of an abusive marriage. Expanding the social safety net isn't about expanding dependence on but about expanding access to welfare, with the goal of helping people get back on their feet as quickly as possible, which we assume is what everyone involved wants.

Except it isn't necessarily what everyone wants--and I don't mean the debunked and extremely demeaning conservative myth of welfare queens and the undeserving poor. I mean the principle which both liberals and conservatives believe in: that people with power want to hold onto it. And if you put the power to help people increasingly in the hands of government, it's not really in government's interests for people to stop needing their help. There's a lot more power in giving than in receiving.

Conservatives, for their part, keep voting in ways that put us all ever more at the mercy of the ultra-rich, who are no less likely to do everything in their already terrifyingly considerable power to hold onto it, who are not answerable to the electorate, and who keep on amassing to themselves a greater and greater share of our nation's wealth, which is our only means of "voting" against them by refusing to buy what they're selling. But since most of their wealth now is self-generating via financial market manipulation, and since government demonstrated after the crash of 2008 that it has no interest in curbing their power to continue manipulating said markets, we're all basically screwed anyway, and that, dear readers, is another thing that conservatives and liberals basically agree about. Alas, it's also one of the many things we seem incapable of agreeing about how to solve.

I've offered a handful of examples of liberals and conservatives arguing from principles (some of them the very same principles) to reach very different conclusions, both of which are (sometimes, sometimes not) based on facts as well as moral reasoning. I assure you, I could offer more, but a thorough enumeration isn't my goal. My goal was to prove to myself, if not to the few people who occasionally read my blog, that it really is possible to find common ground between liberals and conservatives, on principles if not on policies. That ground is where I try to live.

I don't offer any solutions. Perhaps I ought to try, but I don't know what they are, and right now I'm too tired from having to defend my moral principles and my political choices from every direction. A lot of people seem to think that being moderate (like voting third-party) is a cop out, the most morally inconsistent position of all. Maybe sometimes it is. But it's also really hard. It's lonely. At least in the trenches you have lots of comrades to guard your back. It's pretty exposed out here in no-man's-land, and this war doesn't seem close to a cease-fire anytime soon.

So I'll just end this post with a meme that's been making the rounds recently among both my liberal and my conservative social networks. I don't know where the image came from; I wasn't able to track it to its source, but if anyone can point me to it, I'd love to give proper credit.

On Memes: A Linguistic Complaint

Yes, I'm aware of the irony. I EAT IRONY FOR BREAKFAST (it helps with my mild anemia).

I'm a linguistic descriptivist and not a prescriptivist, which means that I'm more interested in studying and describing how language is used by various groups and how it changes over time than I am in enforcing language "rules." However, there is one linguistic development that especially saddens me, and it is the narrowing of the usage of the word "meme" to almost exclusively mean "image macro." It's as if people had started using "technology" to only mean "smartphone" (please nobody point out to me that some people already do that).

According to those who coined the word and further developed the concept, a meme is, very simply put, an idea that acts like a virus, getting stuck in your head and spreading from person to person. Some ideas are more contagious than others.

Religions are memes. So are fashion trends, manners, jokes, selfies, mass shootings, genres, and linguistic innovations. An image macro is a picture with text superimposed on it. As a genre, the image macro is an extremely effective meme. It has nearly taken over Tumblr, for instance, and every six months Mormons on social media are subjected to a massive outbreak of the image macro meme, largely via the #LDSconf hashtag (hashtags are also a meme, btw).

Why does it matter that people call "image macros" simply "memes," when they are really a kind of meme? Because the concept of memes, properly understood, is so useful, and it's useful to have a word we can use to discuss it. If, when I say "meme," all you think of is a picture of a grumpy cat with the word "NO" on it in impact font, it makes it harder to have a conversation about why some ideas are stickier than others.

Alas, the idea of ideas as viruses is apparently less sticky than the idea of pictures with pithy phrases on them. I have little hope that the original meaning of "meme" can be reclaimed.

Writing Metaphors

One of my favorite teaching activities for the first day of class is to have students write a metaphor or simile for their writing, or for themselves as writers. Lately I've also had students add an image that represents their metaphor. The activity is a way to introduce some concepts and practice some technical skills right off the bat, but more importantly, it's a quick way for me to get some insight into how my students think about writing.

Here is the example that I made tonight:

Observe, Think, Write, Reflect, Repeat. Not Necessarily in That Order.

I finished my first round of conferences with my ENG 215 students this week. Their first project is what we might call a "demi discourse analysis" of a scholarly and a popular source on the same topic. It's time-consuming but I like giving feedback in conferences a lot more than I like just collecting drafts, writing feedback all over them, and handing them back. It was an especially fascinating, exciting, and exhausting three days for me, as it's the first time I've taught this project and I was both nervous and eager to see, in my students' drafts, what they'd learned in the past few weeks about discourse analysis and, though their analyses, about the discourses of the fields they're majoring in. As usual, when I talk with my students about what they're writing and why, I learn a lot not only about my own teaching, but about their prior writing experiences.

Here's one thing I noticed:

A lot of my students focused at least in part on "credibility markers" as a significant discourse feature. Most of them reduced "credibility markers" to "citations" and many proceeded to not only describe the type and frequency of citations, but to make evaluative claims about the trustworthiness of the sources based solely on that. What I inferred from this: we tout peer reviewed sources as the "gold standard" for academic writing in FYC, and our students have bought into it heavily, and mostly uncritically. This is a problem.

I am pleased to say, however, that some of my students did hesitantly, haltingly, apologetically push back against their own parroting of this narrow FYC-induced view of credibility, which opened up a neat learning space for us to think and talk about how we construct credibility in a more nuanced way. In the future when I assign some version of this project, I'll be sure to spend class time exploring this before drafts are due.

Another (related) thing I noticed:

It's genuinely hard for my students to describe discourse features without also passing judgment on them--regardless of how often I've pushed back against the idea that any particular discourse feature or convention is objectively, universally better or worse than another. I'm not sure if this is because of prior academic writing instruction (I suspect so, at least in part, but I think it might also be a cognitive development thing; as Andrea Lunsford said at an IHR seminar I attended last week, composition studies needs to pay more attention to neuroscience) but it seems to me that in teaching "critical thinking" we might be putting a little too much emphasis on the "critical" and not enough on the "thinking"--and definitely not enough on observing--an essential part of the process that is totally elided by the term itself. I'm reminded of Samuel Scudder's classic essay, "Learning to See." Are we so concerned with teaching our students how to write arguments (that is, to make claims and support them with reasons and data) that we're neglecting to teach them to really, really look at the data, and to think about it deeply, before deciding what to say about it?

These problems are, of course, partly the result of the absurd impossibility of having to teach "college-level writing" to a couple of dozen students in sixteen weeks or less. No curriculum is going to be able to do it all, and even if we could strike a perfect balance in a given semester, we can't necessarily control what skills and concepts and notions about writing our students carry with them once they leave us behind.

OK, two more things, really quick:

Thesis statements often have to be revised, sometimes significantly, after a draft is written. This surprises and troubles my students, until I tell them it always works that way for me, too. We don't just write to report what we think. We write to learn what we think.

Writing a conclusion is hard. Really, really hard. And no formula or procedure I've ever heard or ever given has ever actually worked at all consistently. There are as many ways to write a conclusion as there are papers. Possibly more. If you think I'm wrong--if you have a foolproof method for writing conclusions, please, please share it. I will thank you and so will my students. And so will our readers.

Image Source: ASU Writing Programs. Tag, you're it!

Episteme, Techne, Phronesis (AcWriMo Update)

Having a schedule of specific times for writing every day is helping, though I missed Tuesday entirely, had to bump my writing time to later in the day on Monday because of a doctor's appointment, and seriously overslept on Friday. It is challenging to change from a habit of fitting my writing time around everything else in my life, to fitting everything else around my writing time. Still, other than Tuesday I did spend at least 2 hours writing, or doing writing-related reading every day this week, and as a result I have written 1300 more words for my first portfolio paper--not even remotely close to my goal, but progress nonetheless. I have also written about 3700 words of annotations for the books and articles I read this week. The balance of writing should really have been be the other way around, but at least my extensive annotations will help me when it comes time to study for my comprehensive exams.

One of the things I'm trying to do with my revision is to construct a new theoretical framework from which to make sense of my data, and in fact to make new sense of the entire project. When I say "make new sense," I mean that it already makes a kind of sense. I know what happened, and even a good deal about the chain of cause and effect that led to the point I'm at now--the point of having a mess of data that I need to write something meaningful about. I'm not exaggerating when I say mess, by the way. It's such a mess that I've spent the better part of the past five months in a cyclical pattern of anger, anxiety, and avoidance over what to do with it. This, my colleagues and advisor assure me, is not uncommon and does not mean I am a total failure as a researcher. So they say.

To make new sense of my research means to go from merely knowing what happened, to constructing particular meaning from it, meaning that will be recognized as meaningful by the community of scholars I'm trying to join. To do that, I needed a theory, grounded in the discipline, which would not only help me interpret the data but also the ultimately quite haphazard method by which it was obtained. To find it, I went all the way back to Aristotle, mainly by way of Janet Atwill and Joseph Dunne.

The ancient Greeks loved knowledge, and they loved to classify and systematize absolutely everything--including knowledge itself. They recognized, and had words for, many kinds of knowledge: nous meant first principles, which must be apprehended since they cannot be derived from observation or logic; episteme, or theoretical knowledge, is logically demonstrable truth; sophia is the power of both apprehending first principles and demonstrating theoretical knowledge; phronesis is practical knowledge, or the virtue of wise action; and techne is productive knowledge--that is, the power of rational creation, or of knowing how to intervene in specific cases in order to bring about a desired end. Whereas episteme is universal, techne and phronesis are particular, and whereas phronesis constitutes a mode of being, techne is about accomplishing specific ends. Though there is some ambiguity about the boundaries (and even the legitimacy) of some of these definitions of knowledge, the ancient Greeks as well as modern theorists generally agree that rhetoric is a type of techne. Atwill, however, gives an account of rhetoric that seems closer to phronesis. Even Dunne admits that the distinction between the two is ambiguous; his whole book is a project of teasing out the difference.

Anyway, the problem I had with my portfolio paper is that I wanted my research project to yield episteme. I wanted to be able to construct a rational account connecting my data to universal principles as unambiguously as possible. It couldn't possibly have worked--not only because I am such an amateur when it comes to designing and conducting such a study, but because the subject itself is one of particulars and not of universals. What I need--and what I ought to be seeking, is not theoretical but practical or productive knowledge, a rational but highly flexible way to deal with inherently messy and largely uncontrollable situations, ideally in order to increase the likelihood of bringing about specific ends. In order to be a techne, that way has to be teachable: it can't just work once, or only for me. As Charles Bazerman explains, "We consider theories successful when we do better with their guidance than without, when we accomplish more of what we wish when following their accounts than when following any or no other account. When considered this way, theories can be seen as heuristics for action" (103). Really though, I'm not sure that what I have--an application of Kenneth Burke's "comic frame"--amounts to a techne, or is more a type of phronesis. In any case such a heuristic would not only help me make sense of the data at hand but also make sense of the larger process of doing this research and writing project--and, I hope, future projects.

If you've actually read this far, congratulations! You're a giant nerd. Here's a cookie. 

...What's that? Aristotle ate your cookie! What a jerk. No, no, it totally wasn't me. It was Aristotle. Check out that guilty look on his face! Well, you know what they say about gifs bearing Greeks.

Source of images: Wikimedia commons.

Portraits of the Savior

Tonight I had the privilege of hearing Howard Lyon speak about his art. Lyon's commercial work has been primarily in the world of fantasy illustrations, RPGs, and video game art direction. He is also, like me, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he has painted a number of religious works, including the portrait of Christ above, titled "Light of the World."

Brother Lyon spoke about how important it is to him that his portraits be as accurate as possible--he uses friends and family members as models in much of his work. When painting the Savior, however, verisimilitude presents a challenge because no one really knows what Jesus looked like, and there are so many different representations of him already, in an incredible range of styles. If he were to ask a chapel full of people which painting of Christ was their favorite, he said, he would likely get at least twenty different answers. Because of these things, it's very difficult to create a portrait of Christ that will feel "accurate" to everyone. In painting "Light of the World," then, Brother Lyon decided that he would focus on accurately representing the way the Savior made him feel. 

That got me thinking about my own favorite portrait of Jesus, and by extension, those of others. I wondered what our favorite representations of Jesus might say about the Savior makes us feel, how we feel about the Savior. It has struck me in the past how within the LDS church (and probably in cultures generally) over time different paintings of Jesus seem to go in and out of popularity, and how that might reflect or influence on a cultural level what our personal preferences might reflect on an individual level. That might be an interesting research project for another time, but for now I just want to share a few of my favorite pictures of Jesus and meditate a little bit, and ask my readers to meditate, on how these representations of Christ reflect aspects of our relationship with Christ.

"Christ and the Rich Young Ruler" by Heinrich Hoffman. 

Under US Copyright law, this work is in the public domain.

The image above is Heinrich Hoffman’s “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler”. It's been my favorite portrait of Jesus for many years, and a copy of it hangs on my bedroom wall. The story comes from Mark 10:17–25, in which an earnest young man asks Christ what he must do to inherit eternal life. In the discourse that follows, we learn that this young man has scrupulously kept all the commandments throughout his life. Jesus tells him that the only thing he still needs to do is to give all his worldly possessions to the poor, and "take up the cross, and follow me." The young man leaves sorrowfully, and passes out of the record--we never learn whether or not he was ultimately willing to follow Christ.

Whenever I hear this story or see this painting, I'm reminded of another story, from the Book of Mormon. In Alma chapter 22, we read of a missionary named Aaron, who went to preach among the Lamanites, his hereditary enemies. In the course of time he meets with the king of the Lamanites, who, after being taught about Christ, asks Aaron, just as the rich young man asked Jesus, what he must do to inherit eternal life. When Aaron tells him that he must repent and call upon God in faith, the king offers this prayer:

"O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee."

My love for Hoffman's portrait is partly aesthetic. Though he wasn't a Pre-Raphaelite, it bears a similarity of style, and that style has always appealed to me. I love the warmth of the colors, the way the lines suggest gentle movement, as Christ beckons the youth to follow him. Christ's expression is one of profound compassion. Perhaps, also, I love it because it represents a powerful teaching moment. When I see it, I'm moved to ask myself what I wouldn't give to know God.

Another favorite is "Christ in Red Robe" by Minerva Teichert. Teichert is among my favorite LDS artists. Her style is rather unlike that of most other LDS painters, who tend more toward realism. She's also the only really prominent woman artist in the church that I know of, and her subjects often feature women, as in this painting of Christ, in which you can see two women reaching toward Christ at his second coming.

Walter Rane is another of my favorite LDS artists. His painting, "Jehovah Creates the Earth," really moves me in its depiction of Christ's majesty and power.

"Jesus the Christ" by Del Parson

Owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

May be used for personal, noncommercial use 

This last painting, by Del Parson, isn't really one of my favorites (though I do like it), but I feel I should include it because it is arguably the portrait of Christ most commonly associated with the LDS church since 1983, which is about as far back as my memory can stretch. It's certainly the picture of Jesus I recall seeing the most as a child. There's even a Mormon urban legend about it, but I won't go into that (except to say that, not surprisingly, it isn't true). This painting is definitely part of my instinctive image of the Savior.

Do a Google image search of "Christ" and you will see an enormous range of images; from downright kitschy to some of the greatest works in the history of art; you will see Him depicted in attitudes of torment, sublimity, serenity, and even mirth; in periods of His life from infancy to the cross; and while most portraits of Christ look distinctly European, if you dig a little further you will see a wider range of ethnicity represented. Ultimately, however, it matters much less how we represent Jesus in our art than how we come to reflect His image in our own countenance.

Writing on writing

This is going to be longish, folks--I've got some catching up to do on my word count. And since I'm having trouble thinking of what to write about, I'm going to do what any self-respecting scholar would do: I'm going to go meta, and write about writing.

The first human writing was primarily numbers, for record keeping. Wikipedia tells me that the first writing of language occurred in at least two times and places, independently: in ancient Sumer around 3200 BCE, and Mesoamerica around 600 BCE. The Sumerians, humanity's earliest known writers, wrote using a stylus on clay tablets, and their writing was initially used for bookkeeping.

The Egyptians, who may or may not have developed their hieroglyphic writing system due to the influence of the Sumerians, used writing not only for economic but also for religious and military purposes. Semitic workers developed an alphabet in Ancient Egypt around 1800 BCE. These "Proto-Semites" wrote graffiti and "votive texts" on Mount Sinai.

The Ancient Chinese wrote divinatory texts on bones and turtle shells. And the earliest known writers in the Americas, the Maya, likewise initially tended to employ writing for sacred purposes.

Eventually people started using writing not only for economic or devotional purposes, but also to record ideas and poetry. I sometimes wonder whether those early writers ever struggled to think of what to write.

Plato's Socrates (really the only Socrates we know, since he never wrote anything himself) was suspicious of writing. He argued (quite correctly, as it turned out) that writing would destroy memory and cause people to profess knowledge they did not actually possess. Memory and knowledge meant something rather different in oral cultures than they do now, of course. It is true that, if you can write something down, you don't have to commit it to memory--and that a memory recorded externally is qualitatively different from a memory etched in the mind. Our memories are not what they were.

The problem with writing, Socrates said, was that you can't ask it questions--or at least you can, but it can't explain itself; it can only repeat the same words again and again. And that is why it doesn't count as knowledge--to know something means to be able to explain and re-explain how you know it. Writing doesn't "know", it just "is," but it enables people who can read it to pretend to knowledge they haven't "earned"--they haven't worked it out for themselves, but just gotten it from a book. So, with writing, something was lost, but something was also gained.

I wonder how often Plato struggled to find words for his ideas. I wonder how often he struggled to find ideas for his words.

The problem of what to say (or write) and how is one of the two primary concerns of rhetoric (the other is analyzing what's been said and how). Classical rhetoric broke the problem down into five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Scholars continue to argue about which of the canons deserve the most attention, but since I've started this blog, invention has been on my mind.

For ancient rhetoricians, invention was all about the topoi--the topics, or places to find things. But they weren't really talking about things to write about or places where ideas could be found--such a catalogue, being potentially infinite, could never be completed, and Aristotle, the great systematizer of ancient rhetoric, did something much more clever. His topoi represent "basic categories of relationships among ideas". And the ways we can construct relationships among ideas turn out to be rather more manageable.

Anyway. Those who know me, know that I am rarely at a loss for something to say. But having something to write seems to be quite another matter. And having something to write about every day seems positively daunting. Aristotle reminds me that it isn't so much having something to write about, but about making connections.

Audience is another problem. Not only do I have to think about who might be reading this blog, but also who might read it in the future. Like everyone, I have multiple identities: sister, daughter, friend, colleague, scholar, teacher, student, Latter-day Saint, woman, Latter-day Saint woman (yes, those are three distinct, though never separate identities), Doctor Who fan, roommate, among others. Many of those identities overlap, but they are sometimes in tension with one another (scholar and Latter-day Saint, for instance, are often perceived by others as being in tension, if not generally by me--but that perception itself generates a tension). And new identities arise over time.

When I write this blog, which "me" am I? And which of "you" am I writing to? Perhaps, in writing this, I am calling forth new identities for myself and my audience. All of these identities and the tensions between them are, of course, sites of rhetorical invention--they represent potential relationships among ideas, as well as actual relationships between people.

The stakes are not trivial. It may be that I will never have more than a handful of readers. Perhaps only family and friends, but potentially also future employers, colleagues, federal agents, and the odd web-crawling AI. I hope, at any rate, that my readers will be friendly, or at the very least, kindly disposed toward the "me" that is embodied in the words that I write.

The full title of this blog, generously supplied by my good friend Nancy, is "Rebeccaland: where everything is just like it is in my head." That title was a bit too long for Blogger to display properly, so I shortened it, but in shortening it, something was lost. Indeed, I've been meditating on this very interesting title for the last few days. Nancy loves layers of meaning--I mean, loves them even more than I do, and that's saying a lot. She's a Joyce scholar.

The title is both the product of invention, and a new site of invention. It is the product of the particular relationship among the ideas that I have of Nancy and she has of me and each of us have of what blogging is or can be--among other things. It also represents the potential range of topics this blog might contain, and suggests a certain attitude toward them (an attitude which is tied to that complex of interpersonal perceptions I just talked about).

Basically, I think that this blog isn't so much going to be like the inside of my head (which is really full of a great many things that ought best to stay inside my head; they won't stand for being shoved onto the front stage of a blog), as it is like what Nancy thinks the inside of my head is like--a bit like Disneyland, only without the commercialism, and with more books. So, like a cross between Disneyland and a library. Or, to put it another way, it will be full of random happy geeky things with a generous side of pondersomeness (and the odd neologism sprinkled in here and there).



Word Count

Friday: 221
Saturday: 1893
Running total: 3815
Day 3 target: 5001