The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. . . For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the suffering of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one toward the hardening of their pains. (26-27)

Adorno writes based on his conviction that a post-third-Reich world should not seek to reinstate some version of the 19th century, the seedbed of Nazism, because to ‘go on as if nothing had happened’ would in fact be to participate in the recurrence of that catastrophe, to implicate oneself in murder.

Now, how to take something like Robertson’s comments in the light of Adorno’s subtlety of conscience?

It seems to me that in the person of men like Robertson we have gone far, far beyond merely quietly implicating ourselves in murder — that is what those who, as K-Punk pointed out for instance, recommend the occasion of the earthquake as an opportunity to further US interests in that part of the world have done, utterly ignoring the responsibility which those very neo-liberal interests bear for the depth of this tragedy. What Robertson has done is worse than this.  He hasn’t merely missed an opportunity for solidarity in favor of self-serving blindness, but he has revealed the hateful mythology that lies behind conservative religious support for the American Way — our wealth and satiety is not the result of exploitation, but the just reward of a God who rewards his people while punishing his enemies (such as those who supposedly make pacts with the devil).

This sort of speculation — that any given catastrophe in others is an instance of judgment from God — should be utterly abandoned because it serves to religiously justify policies of exploitation and enacted prejudice. Better not to speak at all than to speak with such an evil effect.

First: literature classes seem to be designed for people who don’t read. This semester, during a particularly inane session of Early American Literature, it suddenly dawned on me that students so lazy they wouldn’t read The Scarlet Letter unless required to by a professor were the real target audience of the course. Maybe students who are really interested in literature should study something else — something easy that left them plenty of time to do basic reading on their own, to maintain some kind of literary dignity. Additionally, if more literature students studied something else, then perhaps I wouldn’t have to make the next complaint.

Second: literature professors display a truly horrifying summary knowledge of intellectual history and non-narrative ideas. I’ve seldom felt so dismayed on the behalf of my peers (typically I don’t feel anything on their behalf) as when my Modern British Literature prof assayed to serve up Kant in five minutes with one whiteboard diagram. I suspect this particular prof’s understanding of Kant actually only derived from a comparison (presumably encountered in an introductory essay in some anthology, written by another literature prof) between Kant’s epistemology and the Copernican Revolution. (I only raise this possibility because I am convinced I once encountered the same diagram she used to explain Kant, used in another classroom to explain Copernicus’s crazy idea about the earth’s wanderings.) The only literature profs who seem to avoid this haziness and this damaging over-simplicity, tend to be philosophers, psychologists, or theologians in disguise, bent on using literature to explore their own dearer subjects.

Third: the papers I end up writing for literature classes are despicable hack-work. The best of them rise only to the level of a puzzle — tracing a constellation of explicit allusions in order to propose a less likely one — the worst of them become the medium for truly hasty reflections, a training ground for calculated ambiguity. Clarity of idea — and consequently clarity of expression — only impede getting good grades on literature papers. I have concluded that over the past year my immersion in literature classes has actually decreased my rhetorical ability. Comparing papers from the year before and the papers from this year, I find the former much better written. I seem to have lost both the punch of the right word — in favor of the grade-raising tickle of the long word — and also the exciting rhythm of transparent argument and easy narration. This is at least partially the fault of literature courses.