Phil Christman

A friend of mine says the following prayer every time she watches “Mad Men”: Lord, thank you for feminism.

By this, of course, she doesn’t mean all feminisms. Like most revolutions in human understanding, that one brought along its own characteristic errors of overemphasis, of overcorrection. (I used to know an absolutely lovely person who referred to herself as a “former separatist dyke” and who for many years of her life would have refused any sort of friendship with me because I was a man. I once heard a feminist argue that all men accused of rape should be attacked and murdered by roving gangs of radical wymynist vigilantes. There are some lame varieties of feminism kicking around out there, just as there are some lame varieties of Christianity, science, cantaloupe, and everything else.) But feminism, good and bad varieties both, helped create a situation in which the Don Drapers, however numerous, are a tiny bit more scared to show themselves, and in which women have at least a micron of recourse when they do.

No one who spends much time around English departments can help having some position on the Age of High Theory which took place concurrently among humanities intellectuals. That’s not because Theory is as hot as it was twenty or even ten years ago—indeed, like feminism, it’s entered that thankless phase of its life when even people who couldn’t exist without it can afford a few chuckles at its expense. Of course, Theory on the whole is probably even more problematic than feminism (though less problematic than speaking about Theory, as I’m doing here, as if it were all one thing!). As far as I can tell, it has tended toward relativism, bad prose, sloppiness, and self-defenses of the “You’re-just-resistant-because-you-don’t-have-the-balls-to-take-Foucault’s-reordering-of-your-little-world” variety. Still, one thing that Theory has made it very hard to do is to talk about “rationality” as if it were a freestanding building somewhere in Xenia, Ohio. Unless your name is Richard Dawkins, that is, you’re not very likely to be running around these days talking as if Rationality were a clear and simple set of mental steps that can operate in a propositional vacuum, leading folks to the Truth—rather than, as it is, something that can only operate within some particular goalfield of prior assumptions, which must be taken on faith. Logic, Theory (broadly speaking) insisted, is a vehicle, not a map.  

Lately I’ve been looking back through the vast archives of the BBC’s “Dr. Who,” a show that began broadcast in 1963—in other words, on the other side of the historical gap separating us from Don Draper. Every so often the Doctor finds himself in conflict with some villain or other who claims to be operating on something called Purely Logical Grounds. In “The War Machines,” a lovable little curio from 1966, he fights a monstrous computer that represents Pure Logic run amuck. (You find the same sorts of, well, logical mishmash on “Star Trek,” as Spock runs around making ethical decisions left and right, claiming to do so on the basis of Pure Logic when actually his decisions always begin with essentially trans-logical assumptions about the value of individual lives, of Starfleet’s mission, etc.) It’s always a little shocking: one gets the impression that at least some people, in the mid-‘60s, thought that “Pure Logic” was something besides an oxymoron. Apparently enough people felt so, even, that the plots of the only two TV shows worth watching from the period absolutely depend on “Pure Logic.” Apparently somebody back then really thought you could have rationality in a vacuum. How utterly quaint.

I never thought I’d say it, but: Lord, thank you for Theory.