Month: June 2019

The Sacred Band of Thebes and gays in the military

I’ve never read Plutarch cover to cover–just the parts relevant to the topics and people I teach or write about. And I’ve tended not to read much about Thebes. Still and all, I think it’s embarrassing that I didn’t know about the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Plutarch (CE 46-120) talks about them relative to the Battle of Leuctra (July 371 BCE), a battle between Thebes and Sparta. Paul Davis’ 100 Decisive Battles (a really fun read, btw) says that the “Theban victory broke the power of Sparta” (23) and, perhaps more important, “the prestige of the Spartan army had been broken” (26).

This is what Plutarch (CE 46-120) has to say about the Sacred Band of Thebes (this is a 1917 translation, so bear with me–if you really can’t stand it, just skip the long quote):

“This battle first taught the other Greeks also that it was not the Eurotas, nor the region between Babyce and Cnacion [that is, Sparta] which alone produced warlike fighting men, but that wheresoever young men are prone to be ashamed of baseness and courageous in a noble cause, shunning disgrace more than danger, these are most formidable to their foes.”

The sacred band, we are told, was first formed by Gorgidas, of three hundred chosen men, to whom the city furnished exercise and maintenance, and who encamped in the Cadmeia; for which reason, too, they were called the city band; for citadels in those days were properly called cities. But some say that this band was composed of lovers and beloved. And a pleasantry of Pammenes is cited, in which he said that Homer’s Nestor was no tactician when he urged the Greeks to form in companies by clans and tribes, “That clan might give assistance unto clan, and tribes to tribes,” since he should have stationed lover by beloved.

“For tribesmen and clansmen make little account of tribesmen and clansmen in times of danger; whereas, a band that is held together by the friendship between lovers is indissoluble and not to be broken, since the lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other. Nor is this a wonder since men have more regard for their lovers even when absent than for others who are present, as was true of him who, when his enemy was about to slay him where he lay, earnestly besought him to run his sword through his breast, ‘in order,’ as he said, ‘that my beloved may not have to blush at sight of my body with a wound in the back.’ It is related, too, that Iolaüs, who shared the labours of Heracles and fought by his side, was beloved of him. And Aristotle says that even down to his day the tomb of Iolaüs was a place where lovers and beloved plighted mutual faith. It was natural, then, that the band should also be called sacred, because even Plato calls the lover a friend ‘inspired of God.’

“It is said, moreover, that the band was never beaten, until the battle of Chaeroneia; and when, after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the three hundred were lying, all where they had faced the long spears of his phalanx, with their armour, and mingled one with another, he was amazed, and on learning that this was the band of lovers and beloved, burst into tears and said: ‘Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.’” (2.14: Plutarch, Pelopidas 17-19)

Or, in other words, it was a band of 150 homosexual male couples, and they were fierce, and they were feared.

It’s been a while, but, when I was crawling around homophobic corners of the Internet it was around the time there was a lot of pearl clutching about letting openly gay men into the military. And one of the arguments made, in addition to that there would be sexual harassment (I could never figure out whether the people who made that argument were thereby admitting that women in the military are sexually harassed), was that it would weaken the military because gay men can’t fight.

As Codex Melcher says on their blog, “People often ask when LGBTQ concerns arise ‘Why are tons of people suddenly gay/trans/not like me when it’s never existed in history before now'” and the answer is “They’ve always been here.”

I wish I’d know about the Sacred Band when I was trying to argue with homophobes.

Page numbers for Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle'”

Kenneth Burke’s 1939 essay, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” is brilliant. For reasons I don’t understand, however, Burke didn’t give page numbers on his quotes. I had a hard time finding the page numbers, since he’s using a different translation from the one generally considered authoritative (by Ralph Manheim).[1]

I spent way too much time today trying to find the quotes in the Manheim translation, in order to give them page numbers and cite them correctly (since I intend to use that translation). I thought it might be helpful for other rhetoric folks to have the correct pages—to save y’all some time.

Burke 192: “The geo-political importance of a center….a hand that represents this unity.” (Manheim 347)

Burke 193: “As a whole, and at all times…bitterness against the attackers.” (Manheim 118)

Burke 197: “The more I argued with them….began to hate them.” (Manheim 62)

Burke 198: “This was the time in which…fanatical anti-Semite.” (Manheim 64)

Burke 212: [His discussion of Hitler’s tendency to provoke communists.] (Manheim 483-485)

Burke 212n: “Here, too, one can learn….blind adherence.” (Manheim 458-9)

[1] The Manheim translation came out in 1943, so this isn’t a criticism of Burke.

Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

  1. It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
  2. It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
  3. And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
  4. There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”

Time management and scholars

I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, my first in twelve years, and I’ve long argued that we can get our jobs done averaging 40 hours a week. I over-committed myself. I agreed to writing or co-authoring six book chapters/articles, seven campus visits in the US, several days of talks in Czechia, and reviewing one article and two book manuscripts. I was still Director of the University Writing Center. I also kept track of my time (more or less). I thought it would be helpful to tell folks how it turned out, since I know that the first time I got a sabbatical I wished that someone had given me more advice about how to use my time. You don’t completely get away from teaching or service, but you can keep it reined in.

I counted my sabbatical as nineteen weeks, from just after New Year’s till the end of finals.

  1. I did pretty well at trying to average 40 hours a week (it was 40.5 average). That’s partially because I took about four weeks of vacation.
  2. The largest category was scholarship (which is where visits went), with 65% of my time.
  3. If I was at the Writing Center, I just clocked it as UWC–there’s no way I could have kept track of when I was teaching, when it was scholarship, when it was service. That was the second largest category, with around 13% of my time.
  4. I spent just over 8% of my time on “misc work” (email, planning, phone calls, organizing).
  5. Non-UWC service also took up just over 8%–some professional, some departmental, but mostly one university committee I didn’t realize would be such a time sink.
  6. The rest was really random–a few hours for dentist appointments or sick days, a few on things that mixed categories (such as writing undergraduate letters of rec–that always seems to me to be both teaching and service).

The reason I emphasize average is that I keep getting misunderstood on this point. Of course you don’t work 40 hours every week. If you take off the four weeks of vacation, then I was working around 50 hours a week for the weeks I was working.

There are also always things that are hard to figure. I didn’t count the time I spent cleaning up cat barf off my desk so I could work, setting up dog beds so they wouldn’t bug me, chasing down the shoes that Pearl stole, nor the time I spent walking a dog and thinking about my writing, or talking about my work. I did, however, count the time at the gym that I spent reading things for work (so not my Sunday gym visit when I’m usually reading apologetics or sermons or Jane Austen).

Scholars and racism

There is a controversy in one of my disciplines right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. And the nastiest part of this argument is nasty because people are arguing as though there is a shared definition of what it means to be racist. There isn’t, and that is the problem. There are at play at least four different ways of thinking about racism: aversive, unconscious, disparate impact, systemic.

Briefly, the controversy concerns the long and documented failure of the NCA Distinguished Scholars to include a significant number of POC in its membership. There are various ways of explaining that failure—off the top of my head, I can imagine someone arguing:

That POC don’t merit inclusion in the group because they are bad people (a racist argument).

    • Or, that the 70 Distinguished Scholars are knowingly engaged in aversive racism—the conventional notion of what racism is (conscious hostility toward and aversion of POC). In other words, the problem is that they are bad people.
    • Or, that unconscious racism means that the kinds of networks necessary to come to be seen as “distinguished” are unintentionally racially exclusive.
    • Or, that something is wrong in the process such that POC scholars have to meet a higher bar or that makes their kind of scholarship invisible in some way.
    • Or that systemic racism means that POC scholars haven’t had the kinds of advantages and breaks (including mentoring) necessary to meet the implicit criteria of the Distinguished Scholars.

[There are other issues in this controversy, including some procedural ones—as to how NCA has made and communicated decisions. I’m not going to talk about those issues because I don’t know enough to say anything, not because they’re unimportant.]

Notice that these can be divided up—the first argument is simply racist (and I think many people are reading some of the documents involved as making that argument—I have trouble imagining that it is, but that’s an issue worth clarifying).

The second is saying that this is an issue of aversive racism, in which people see that someone is a POC and consciously deny them the honor.

The third is unconscious racism, such as if people are more likely to vote for people with whom they feel more comfortable, or (as will be discussed below), white discomfort with POC means that POC aren’t included on panels, in edited collections, or invited to lunches.

The fourth is what is legally called “disparate impact,” in which intent is irrelevant—if scholars’ implicit criteria is a kind of scholarship POC tend not to do (as happened with women when women started publishing more), then there is racially-valenced discrimination with neither intent nor aversion. The politics of respectability–the ways we define and enforce norms about respect and respectability–apply disparately to POC, whether they’re intended to or not.

The fifth is systemic or institutional racism, in which institutions and organizations were structured for the benefits of the dominant group at the time, and, while there is no longer necessarily a conscious intent, there is still the impact (such as previously male institutions that have inadequate women’s rest rooms).

At least one widely-distributed argument assumes that this controversy is all about identity—the identity of the Distinguished Scholars. There is one editorial being distributed that makes two occluding assumptions: first, that any claim that a process is racist is the same as accusing the people involved in the process of aversive racism. The criticism is, as this editorial says, “an attack on the association’s own Distinguished Scholars,” that the NCA is “implicitly accusing them [the Distinguished Scholars] of racism.” This editorial frames the changes in NCA procedure as an attack on the identity of the Distinguished Scholars—on their goodness, character, and judgment.

The second occluding assumption is that the only way to include more POC is to ignore merit in favor of decisions based purely on identity. That seems to be saying that there are no POC scholars who merit inclusion—what, then, are the reasons for their exclusion? Because they are excluded.

I don’t know what the NCA argument is, and I can imagine that there are legitimate complaints that the NCA Distinguished Scholars might have about how the NCA has handled this problem. But I’m concerned that there appears to be no acknowledging that there is a problem of exclusion.

This isn’t to say that you can look at the numbers and infer aversive racism on the part of the Distinguished Scholars—the assumption that many people seem to be making. I doubt it is aversive racism; it certainly isn’t about the feelings or character of the people involved. This shouldn’t be an argument about their identity.

If we move the stasis from the identities of the Distinguished Scholars, to the fact of exclusion, then we can talk about processes and institutions and systems. And, really, racism is generally about processes, about often completely unconscious biases built into those processes, even on the part of people who mean well. Racism is often about the sometimes unintended and too often unacknowledged consequences of the ways that powerful organizations and institutions function.

Take, for instance, the problem of racism in science grants. A 2016 study of NIH grants concluded that:

White women PhDs and MDs were as likely as white men to receive an R01 award. Compared with white women, Asian and black women PhDs and black women MDs were significantly less likely to receive funding. Women submitted fewer grant applications, and blacks and women who were new investigators were more likely to submit only one application between 2000 and 2006. (Ginther et al. “Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and National Institutes of Health R01 Research Awards: Is There Evidence of a Double Bind for Women of Color?”Academic Medicine Volume 91(8), August 2016, p 1098-1107)

Ginther et al. suggest that there was no conscious racism involved on the part of people reviewing applications—they noted that both women and men of color submitted fewer applications (implying problems with institutional support or mentoring).

An Economist discussion of the study points out that:

Another possible explanation is social networking. It is in the nature of groups of experts (which is precisely what peer-review panels are) to know both each other and each other’s most promising acolytes. Applicants outside this charmed circle might have less chance of favourable consideration. If the charmed circle itself were racially unrepresentative (if professors unconsciously preferred graduate students of their own race, for example), those excluded from the network because their racial group was under-represented in the first place would find it harder to break in.

If that is the case, this is not aversive racism, let alone conscious hostility.

But there is a problem with NIH grants. And, similarly, there is a problem with the processes by which the Distinguished Scholars group is constituted.

But, to solve that problem, we don’t have to talk about the identities or characters of the Distinguished Scholars.

This isn’t about them; it’s about our field, and its processes, organizations, and institutions. Let’s talk about them.