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JUST_NOT_THE_FACTS
December 18, 2012
As if I didn't have enough against
Dwight Macdonald already, he has a
long essay sneering at people who are KICKING_SELF_IMPROVEMENT
obsessed with the facts-- supposedly
to the exclusion of values and
judgement, though it's unlikely you'd
find many fact-o-philes to plead
guilty to that.
This is another case where one wonders what
the hell he was complaining about... back
in the 50s, a substantial chunk of the
middle class wanted to know stuff. Did I'm afraid this is
Macdonald really prefer they be happy another example of
ignoramuses who just go with their gut? the great inferiority
If only he'd lived to see the Naughts... complex among the
humanities.
He dismisses C.P. Snow's argument that he'd
be better of learning some science with an TWO_CULTS
assertion that he knows he's not going to
get anything out of it. Macdonald is, however,
generously willing to
How you know that in the absence of admit that there are other
learning anything about it is quite a people who do find value
trick, and it takes some balls to in science.
assert in public that you've called
this right when actually there's no way
you can know. This stance against what he
calls "The Triumph of the Fact"
One might wonder how much is literally where he starts
Macdonald would've appreciated the essay, but he continues
someone who just knew they in other directions.
weren't going to get anything
out of studying literature, or There's a long aside about the
someone who just knew that success of Joe McCarthy
socialism was bunk, or someone concludes with an attack on
who just knew that they were The NY Times for reporting on
better off delving into matters McCarthy's claims, and burying
of fact rather than reading the analysis showing that they
Macdonald's quasi-informed were wrong. Here Macdonald
whining. salvages his claim by
adjusting his thesis to fit
The fact that someone like the ground, and by choosing
Dwight Macdonald could go definitions of "fact" to suit.
around posturing like this and
still be taken seriously as a When lies are sold as fact,
"New York Intellectual" is it is indeed a tribute to
something of an inditement fact, and I would not hold
against the whole class. it against the factual.
He goes off complaining of
some rather minor,
contemporary stories where
character's talk about
technical details, but then
has to back up and conceed
that writers like Balzac,
Zola, Flaubert and Melville
all did interesting things
in this direction.
Actually, this long discursion has a
lot of interesting material in it:
o the connections between the success
of science and the rise of literary
realism
o the way close attention to the real
can become a kind of existential
worship, perhaps a path to some
higher, deeper consciousness...
This is all well worth reading-- for
it's factual content. You need
to ignore MacDonald's incessant
opinionated evaluations.
"Balzac and Zola aspired to nothing
less than to re-create, in all their
minute factual details, the different
occupational and class worlds of their
times; the former succeeded better than
the latter precisely because he relied
on inventive passion rather than
scientific method-- as Joyce succeeded
in 'Ulysses', for the same reason."
--Dwight Macdonald,
"The Triumph of the Fact",
p. 219, _Masscult and Midcult_.
That's it: inventive passion.
Your path to success!
But maybe Taleb wrote
that one already.
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