"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
30.5.08
LINK: Carrie Brownstein wonders:
It's never been clear to me what the functional purpose of a prom is. It's certainly not preparation for adult life, since the only occasions I've since had to wear a tux were at my siblings' weddings. Every other circumstance I've seen other people get similarly fancied-up seems, from the outside, to be similarly contrived (fundraisers, etc). Then again, I'm an academic: I'm happy to suit up for conferences, but otherwise I don't much see the point.
Nor does it appear to be an exercise in nostalgia, though it may be one of the moments in which gender roles are most explicitly acted, because, one would have to ask: nostalgia for what?
Rather, it seems most probable that Prom is a high schooler's idea of what being an adult is like, in much the same way that Saturday Night Live is a high schooler's idea of what adults find funny.
I was also surprised to see Aerosmith and Cyndi Lauper as two of the writers behind this year's prom theme songs. In 2008? Is prom one of our only traditions immune to contemporary trends in music, culture, and technology? Wouldn't Usher, Fall Out Boy, or Gnarls Barkley be timelier? Or is prom the ultimate form of nostalgia, wherein kids reenact traditions and traditional roles long since abandoned or transmogrofied, so that the themes are in fact a commentary on the staleness, retro-ness, or novelty of the dance itself? I could not say for sure.
It's never been clear to me what the functional purpose of a prom is. It's certainly not preparation for adult life, since the only occasions I've since had to wear a tux were at my siblings' weddings. Every other circumstance I've seen other people get similarly fancied-up seems, from the outside, to be similarly contrived (fundraisers, etc). Then again, I'm an academic: I'm happy to suit up for conferences, but otherwise I don't much see the point.
Nor does it appear to be an exercise in nostalgia, though it may be one of the moments in which gender roles are most explicitly acted, because, one would have to ask: nostalgia for what?
Rather, it seems most probable that Prom is a high schooler's idea of what being an adult is like, in much the same way that Saturday Night Live is a high schooler's idea of what adults find funny.
29.5.08
SUBMITTED FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: Michigan is more of a redneck state than North Carolina. How much more? this much (from Becky, who was made nostalgic by this video for some reason).
28.5.08
This is basically what I remember my year on the editorial board of the high school paper being like.
LINKS, college nostalgia being the common theme:
* AAiO, finally outed
* Sentences I never expected to read: "When Iraqis talk of going to the U.S., Michigan often is the place they want to see..."
* Ann Arbor, now with 800 liquor licenses to give out
* AAiO, finally outed
* Sentences I never expected to read: "When Iraqis talk of going to the U.S., Michigan often is the place they want to see..."
* Ann Arbor, now with 800 liquor licenses to give out
For much the same reasons that I don't consider Roger Daltrey an impartial source to explain the influence of The Who, I doubt anyone's memoirs will add to the historical interpretation of recent events. Heck, the LRB had an article that reminded me newspapers aren't a very good source for the historical record (section beginning "Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information...").
Thinking about the qualitative research that I've read, you almost never see memoirs used as evidence, because individuals cannot get past self-interest, especially when that self-interest allows them to rehabilitate public opinion concerning them. As an example, a few years ago Duke had a reasonably famous person who has produced work on Rescuers during the Holocaust give a lecture; their research includes a heavy component of interviews with those people in order to discern their motivations. The researcher showed video clips from some of those interviews, where it became apparent (among other issues) that they had assimilated much of the post-WWII discourse on their actions to explain what they did. As research, that borders on the useless. What will be most useful in constructing the future picture of the decision to fight the Iraq War will be documents that have not yet been declassified. All this to say, don't expect to see an equivalent of Essence of Decision anytime soon.
Thinking about the qualitative research that I've read, you almost never see memoirs used as evidence, because individuals cannot get past self-interest, especially when that self-interest allows them to rehabilitate public opinion concerning them. As an example, a few years ago Duke had a reasonably famous person who has produced work on Rescuers during the Holocaust give a lecture; their research includes a heavy component of interviews with those people in order to discern their motivations. The researcher showed video clips from some of those interviews, where it became apparent (among other issues) that they had assimilated much of the post-WWII discourse on their actions to explain what they did. As research, that borders on the useless. What will be most useful in constructing the future picture of the decision to fight the Iraq War will be documents that have not yet been declassified. All this to say, don't expect to see an equivalent of Essence of Decision anytime soon.
27.5.08
I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT IV:
* Hugo Schwyzer on the plight of the male volunteer in children's ministries:
You often hear (or I often hear, anyway) how important it is for men to take part in children's ministries, and how critical it is to have male role models, who are dependable and can provide boundaries and affection at the right times. It's impossible, in my experience, to be one of those people and not have the set of considerations Schwyzer mentions. If you're committed to helping, you have to welcome that scrutiny as a challenge you'll meet happily, or else you'll burn out.
* Jerry Fodor zings Steven Pinker from awhile back. My first philosophy TA was a student of Fodor's, so I recognize a number of the concerns, and the argumentative style. Philosophy of Mind is no longer my overriding interest, but it was an entertaining reminder.
* Reading about what you already know. The comments, as usual, are interesting.
* Norm on the use of philosophy:
* Hugo Schwyzer on the plight of the male volunteer in children's ministries:
Simply because I am a man, people will assume that I am fundamentally weak. They will assume that I am incapable of exercising self-control. They will worry I have a hidden sexual agenda with them or with their children. Not everyone will assume this, but many will. And because I am a male feminist who has been so forthright about my views on everything from youth ministry to the ills of the porn industry, a not insubstantial number of folks seem to be awaiting my “Eliot Spitzer moment”, when I will be caught doing something fundamentally at odds with my professed values! (You’ll be waiting a while, friends.) I’m not trying to prove my own personal purity for the sake of my ego, of course. Rather, I’m absolutely committed to living out the simple but challenging principle that we can match our words and thoughts and actions, both private and public. We can live lives that are coherent, justice-centered, and whole. Part of living that way, as a man, is not complaining about suspicion, but rather understanding that it is our job to accept with cheer the task of proving ourselves innocent, proving ourselves trustworthy, proving ourselves to be who it is we profess to be.
You often hear (or I often hear, anyway) how important it is for men to take part in children's ministries, and how critical it is to have male role models, who are dependable and can provide boundaries and affection at the right times. It's impossible, in my experience, to be one of those people and not have the set of considerations Schwyzer mentions. If you're committed to helping, you have to welcome that scrutiny as a challenge you'll meet happily, or else you'll burn out.
* Jerry Fodor zings Steven Pinker from awhile back. My first philosophy TA was a student of Fodor's, so I recognize a number of the concerns, and the argumentative style. Philosophy of Mind is no longer my overriding interest, but it was an entertaining reminder.
* Reading about what you already know. The comments, as usual, are interesting.
* Norm on the use of philosophy:
Philosophy itself, indeed, encourages a questioning frame of mind. It should also encourage those who practise it to perceive that moral issues that divide intelligent people can have complexities to them, especially where they concern alternative courses of action that are both – or all – costly in human terms; and should encourage them, likewise, not to pretend in such circumstances that their own preferred view just stands out boldly in the facts, as if it had been written there by a Superior Hand. It should encourage these attitudes, but evidently doesn't always do so. That is not the fault, though, of philosophy, merely of the fallible humans that we all are, including even those who are philosophers.
26.5.08
QUOTE FOR THE DAY:
-Joseph Raz, "The Obligation to Obey"
Those who emphasize the danger of every person deciding for himself whether the case for the law's authority over any range of questions is good or not often overlook this last point. Human judgment errs. It falls prey to temptations and bias distorts it. This fact must affect one's considerations. But which way should it incline one? The only general answer which I find persuasive is that it depends on the circumstances. In some areas and regarding some people, caution requires submission to authority. In others it leads to denial of authority. There are risks, moral and other, in uncritical acceptance of authority. Too often in the past, the fallibility of human judgment has led to submission to authority from a misguided sense of duty where this was a morally reprehensible attitude.
-Joseph Raz, "The Obligation to Obey"
A QUIBBLE: With the anti-Louvre post here. While there are plenty of valid criticisms of the Louvre, many of which I am happy to repeat to anyone who will listen, this strikes me as incorrect:
The way they handle crowd control around the Mona Lisa is abominable. I have a medium level of knowledge about visual art, which expands considerably when the periods in question are Gothic or Northern Italian Late Renaissance/Mannerist/Baroque, and was pushed by a line of people past Caravagggios, etc, that I would rather have dwelt upon (though, as my friend Camille once remarked, the correct amount of time to appreciate a given work of art in a room with other people who wish to view the same painting is 60 seconds. Circle back around, if you like, but don't dominate). But I had the room with Supper at Emmaus to myself, and there was perhaps one other person in the room of Titians. So I suppose it all depends on what you're going to look at.
Also, the note of disapproval here seems wrong:
I think trying to be a repository for as much as possible is perfectly defensible, and perhaps superior. For any smaller museum, or one focused on a single artist, the only people who will come are devotees of that artist, or people who are unusually risk-acceptant. If the point is to expand people's horizons just a little bit, the spread is justifiable.
Tell them that the Louvre is a labyrinth where mobs crowd famous works three people deep, particularly the Mona Lisa, entombed beneath three feet of bulletproof glass. Lesser known works mostly span artistic periods visitors know nothing about; the line alone stretches longer than it would take to visit two smaller museums.
The way they handle crowd control around the Mona Lisa is abominable. I have a medium level of knowledge about visual art, which expands considerably when the periods in question are Gothic or Northern Italian Late Renaissance/Mannerist/Baroque, and was pushed by a line of people past Caravagggios, etc, that I would rather have dwelt upon (though, as my friend Camille once remarked, the correct amount of time to appreciate a given work of art in a room with other people who wish to view the same painting is 60 seconds. Circle back around, if you like, but don't dominate). But I had the room with Supper at Emmaus to myself, and there was perhaps one other person in the room of Titians. So I suppose it all depends on what you're going to look at.
Also, the note of disapproval here seems wrong:
Another muddled analogy is useful: the Louvre is akin to a library of history’s best classical music; enough major symphonies, classic concertos and delightful string quartets exist there to occupy a dozen orchestras for decades. But the music people savor today is rock & roll and its offspring.
I think trying to be a repository for as much as possible is perfectly defensible, and perhaps superior. For any smaller museum, or one focused on a single artist, the only people who will come are devotees of that artist, or people who are unusually risk-acceptant. If the point is to expand people's horizons just a little bit, the spread is justifiable.
LINKS: Words I'm always a little surprised to write: I agree with Munger on this one.
It's like Rod Dreher has never even heard of a co-op:
The reason your typical conservative might look at this group of people and think "ugh, dirty hippies," is, well... they're probably not conservatives, wouldn't describe themselves as conservative, wouldn't agree with any policy enactment a conservative might like. Also: conservatism speaking to idealism?
Compare this to Munger's sense-talking on Peak Oil (see also here, look at highlights for 25:13).
If you don't accept the narrative that we're flinging headlong to our doom, then you're less likely to find its gloomy portents everywhere.
It's like Rod Dreher has never even heard of a co-op:
Good for those kids. Now, your typical conservative will note that the winners of that contest didn't take showers for two weeks, sneer, "Ugh, dirty hippies," and move on. The real story here is how a particular kind of asceticism is being incorporated as a social ideal by these students, and lived out not with eat-your-peas grimness, but with pleasure, even joy. They are doing something through creative renunciation to rebuild what decadence helped destroy.
Where are conservatives in this? This idealistic project is fundamentally conservative. No conservative politician has any idea how to relate to what these kids are doing. Aside from some Evangelical churches, I'm not aware of any politically or culturally conservative institution or group that can speak to this kind of idealism.
The reason your typical conservative might look at this group of people and think "ugh, dirty hippies," is, well... they're probably not conservatives, wouldn't describe themselves as conservative, wouldn't agree with any policy enactment a conservative might like. Also: conservatism speaking to idealism?
Compare this to Munger's sense-talking on Peak Oil (see also here, look at highlights for 25:13).
If you don't accept the narrative that we're flinging headlong to our doom, then you're less likely to find its gloomy portents everywhere.
23.5.08
THE VARIETIES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE:
"On the one hand, it's entertainment and rock 'n' roll music, and something that you can look at as furniture or as wallpaper, or clean the dishes to. Or if you want to dig deeper, it's something that you can think about, something that might provoke you towards investigating particular things."
-Michael Stipe, from my copy of It Crawled From the South
I've been puzzling over something Helen wrote. That something, in particular:
Now, part of what Helen's opposing is the much-discussed Atlantic article on teaching people who probably don't belong in college. I think Professor X in part anticipates an objection of this kind:
Part of the problem, in other words, is that there's no one thing that can function as the bridge between popular culture as his students know it, and more ambitious artistic works (and though he doesn't provide a syllabus, English 102 as he describes it is not very ambitious, though attempting to cover both prose and poetry may be too much). In a class of any size whatsoever, the professor is unlikely to be positioned so he can facilitate the sort of connections Helen mentions, unless the students are already prepared to do so themselves.
It's this latter point that becomes most complicated. I don't doubt, for example, that one can approach The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, etc etc and come away with an appreciation of Humphrey Bogart and, by extension, existentialism. But it doesn't strike me as a necessary result of having watched them: otherwise America in the 1940s should've looked like a postwar Le Deux Magots on a Friday night. As Michael Stipe reminds us, deep aesthetic contemplation is one possible outcome of art, but so is having something to listen to while washing dishes.* Cheating songs may be in part about confronting "the power of the flesh over good sense, the perversely noble stoicism of the sacrifices that adulterous couples make, and the way that infidelity destabilizes a marriage in ways that the guilty party could never have foreseen," but they're also catchy songs, or they need to be if they're going to be popular (one may also observe, in this vein, the radical difference in tone between lyrics and music in almost any Motown song).
That is to say, the ability to pull a certain deeper meaning out of a work arises only in part from that work, where multiple layers of meaning might be available (or perhaps only one); it depends more on the disposition of the person approaching the work.
*As much as possible, I wish to stress this is not a judgment. My favorite professor as an undergrad worked on American political behavior, a line of work that can make you very cynical about democracy. Instead of criticizing Americans for knowing virtually nothing about politics, he'd point out that he'd made a life decision to study politics, and so it was very important to him; other people had different passions and interests and jobs on topics he knew little about, and one just has to accept that level of difference.
"On the one hand, it's entertainment and rock 'n' roll music, and something that you can look at as furniture or as wallpaper, or clean the dishes to. Or if you want to dig deeper, it's something that you can think about, something that might provoke you towards investigating particular things."
-Michael Stipe, from my copy of It Crawled From the South
I've been puzzling over something Helen wrote. That something, in particular:
Some forms of low art don’t have any intellectual content, but there’s a lot of middle ground between dance music on one hand and Shakespeare on the other. A man who has an opinion about Humphrey Bogart has given serious thought to existentialism, even if he didn’t know to call it that. You don’t have to deconstruct James Bond and Indiana Jones to see that, if both of them are “heroes,” heroism has to be something complicated. If you have a working knowledge of “cheatin’ songs,” you’ve confronted the power of the flesh over good sense, the perversely noble stoicism of the sacrifices that adulterous couples make, and the way that infidelity destabilizes a marriage in ways that the guilty party could never have foreseen. A lifetime with George Jones is as educational as four years with Wittgenstein.
Now, part of what Helen's opposing is the much-discussed Atlantic article on teaching people who probably don't belong in college. I think Professor X in part anticipates an objection of this kind:
One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz.
Part of the problem, in other words, is that there's no one thing that can function as the bridge between popular culture as his students know it, and more ambitious artistic works (and though he doesn't provide a syllabus, English 102 as he describes it is not very ambitious, though attempting to cover both prose and poetry may be too much). In a class of any size whatsoever, the professor is unlikely to be positioned so he can facilitate the sort of connections Helen mentions, unless the students are already prepared to do so themselves.
It's this latter point that becomes most complicated. I don't doubt, for example, that one can approach The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, etc etc and come away with an appreciation of Humphrey Bogart and, by extension, existentialism. But it doesn't strike me as a necessary result of having watched them: otherwise America in the 1940s should've looked like a postwar Le Deux Magots on a Friday night. As Michael Stipe reminds us, deep aesthetic contemplation is one possible outcome of art, but so is having something to listen to while washing dishes.* Cheating songs may be in part about confronting "the power of the flesh over good sense, the perversely noble stoicism of the sacrifices that adulterous couples make, and the way that infidelity destabilizes a marriage in ways that the guilty party could never have foreseen," but they're also catchy songs, or they need to be if they're going to be popular (one may also observe, in this vein, the radical difference in tone between lyrics and music in almost any Motown song).
That is to say, the ability to pull a certain deeper meaning out of a work arises only in part from that work, where multiple layers of meaning might be available (or perhaps only one); it depends more on the disposition of the person approaching the work.
*As much as possible, I wish to stress this is not a judgment. My favorite professor as an undergrad worked on American political behavior, a line of work that can make you very cynical about democracy. Instead of criticizing Americans for knowing virtually nothing about politics, he'd point out that he'd made a life decision to study politics, and so it was very important to him; other people had different passions and interests and jobs on topics he knew little about, and one just has to accept that level of difference.
22.5.08
SO TRUE: Schadenfreude is the basis of sports fandom:
(via Deadspin)
So,yes, I was cheering for ManU in public and have been hearing ever since that I'm no longer worthy of wearing my Arsenal thong. But if being branded a traitor means that Chelsea had its heart ripped out yesterday in front of a billion people, then I say bring it on. You Duke and UNC fans know what I'm talking about.
(via Deadspin)
A LITTLE TIP FROM ME TO YOU, or, THAT'S WHY I LEARNED GAME THEORY: Now that my renter's insurance claim has been more-or-less resolved (the check's in the mail, as they say), a few lessons I learned from my experience:
1. Renter's insurance is totally worth it. The loss of my guitar equipment was moderate, financially--I should be able to scrape together the money to replace everything without starving--and though I got something less than the full value of everything, the check they're sending will still be for more than I've paid in renter's insurance for the past two years. If you live anyplace that has any crime to speak of, its a worthwhile investment.
2. Take photographs of anything that might be even remotely valuable. Fortunately, I was playing around with my digital camera a few months ago, and happened to take up-close pictures of my acoustic guitar, which went a long way to demonstrating I owned it. The process of documenting ownership, particularly if, like me, you've never thought of it before, is tedious and aggravating--an ounce of prevention and all that.
3. If possible, pay more to have a lower deductible. I'm not sure what the marginal cost of a lower deductible is, but it's almost certainly worth it, especially if you're a grad student with limited financial resources. A lower cost now beats a higher cost at a moment you're not expecting.
4. Information asymmetries are a wonderful thing. As a Ron Paul supporter might say, DO your HOMEWORK. In a lovely game-theoretic fashion, the insurance company is trying to find the point at which you're willing to settle (reservation point?), and they will start on the low end. The check will be for slightly more than double their original offer, largely because 1. I knew some relevant facts they did not (the acoustic guitar I had stolen was a model that hasn't been made for over 30 years; they should've known this, since I included that information in the documentation I sent to them, but it was clear the adjuster had done a cursory read, at best) 2. I know a little bit about how depreciation works, which allowed me to argue it was not applicable for some of the things I lost (I could've continued fighting on this one and gotten more, I think, but it wasn't worth the hassle to me)* 3. Recognizing that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. After giving a week and a half for them to work on my claim, I started calling every day, leaving messages if I didn't get through, and respectfully but firmly arguing my case when I thought they were being unfair. In so doing, I signaled that I was willing to continue until I got a fair value for the items I had stolen, at which point it becomes easier for them to make me a better offer rather than have me arguing discount rates with them for a week.
*Actually, a pet theory I've developed over the past few weeks: I think the depreciation for most guitar-related items is zero, or else negative (and thus increasing in value over time), the only exceptions being things with a processor. What drives down the price of a number of items in the 5-15 year range is the presence of a large secondary market, and their close similarity to guitars and amps as they're made today (that is, the value of my 12-year old guitar is similar to the same guitar made today, but since I could go out and buy a new guitar for the same price, its value is discounted in the secondary market).
1. Renter's insurance is totally worth it. The loss of my guitar equipment was moderate, financially--I should be able to scrape together the money to replace everything without starving--and though I got something less than the full value of everything, the check they're sending will still be for more than I've paid in renter's insurance for the past two years. If you live anyplace that has any crime to speak of, its a worthwhile investment.
2. Take photographs of anything that might be even remotely valuable. Fortunately, I was playing around with my digital camera a few months ago, and happened to take up-close pictures of my acoustic guitar, which went a long way to demonstrating I owned it. The process of documenting ownership, particularly if, like me, you've never thought of it before, is tedious and aggravating--an ounce of prevention and all that.
3. If possible, pay more to have a lower deductible. I'm not sure what the marginal cost of a lower deductible is, but it's almost certainly worth it, especially if you're a grad student with limited financial resources. A lower cost now beats a higher cost at a moment you're not expecting.
4. Information asymmetries are a wonderful thing. As a Ron Paul supporter might say, DO your HOMEWORK. In a lovely game-theoretic fashion, the insurance company is trying to find the point at which you're willing to settle (reservation point?), and they will start on the low end. The check will be for slightly more than double their original offer, largely because 1. I knew some relevant facts they did not (the acoustic guitar I had stolen was a model that hasn't been made for over 30 years; they should've known this, since I included that information in the documentation I sent to them, but it was clear the adjuster had done a cursory read, at best) 2. I know a little bit about how depreciation works, which allowed me to argue it was not applicable for some of the things I lost (I could've continued fighting on this one and gotten more, I think, but it wasn't worth the hassle to me)* 3. Recognizing that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. After giving a week and a half for them to work on my claim, I started calling every day, leaving messages if I didn't get through, and respectfully but firmly arguing my case when I thought they were being unfair. In so doing, I signaled that I was willing to continue until I got a fair value for the items I had stolen, at which point it becomes easier for them to make me a better offer rather than have me arguing discount rates with them for a week.
*Actually, a pet theory I've developed over the past few weeks: I think the depreciation for most guitar-related items is zero, or else negative (and thus increasing in value over time), the only exceptions being things with a processor. What drives down the price of a number of items in the 5-15 year range is the presence of a large secondary market, and their close similarity to guitars and amps as they're made today (that is, the value of my 12-year old guitar is similar to the same guitar made today, but since I could go out and buy a new guitar for the same price, its value is discounted in the secondary market).
20.5.08
I DON'T BELIEVE IN BEATLES, I JUST BELIEVE IN ME: Another offhand comment of Rod Dreher's leads to a pair of observations. The comment:
The observations:
1. Just as a matter of chronology, I can't miss anything at all about 1950s neighborhoods. As for 1950s-style neighborhoods, I lived in as close an approximation as one can manage until I was 18. Though I liked it well enough then (though not so well as to resist moving elsewhere), I'm not sure I'd feel the same way about living in that sort of neighborhood now.
2. I was talking with my dad a few months ago, while he was making coffee. He told me how surprised he was by the wide variety of mediocre coffee available now. When he was a kid, his parents used to make coffee which always smelled great--better than it does now (and ostensibly tasted great, though I don't remember that part of the conversation). The problem is that his memory is almost certainly factually incorrect. Coffee is, by almost any objective measure, better now--from factors like the change from robusta to arabica beans, improvements in packaging materials, the switch from percolators to drip coffee makers, to the widespread availability of a higher quality of bean*--what he's remembering is not the quality of the coffee but all the other things it represented. There's nothing wrong with that: I keep the coffee maker that's in my office at school not because it makes a good cup of coffee, but because it's the one we had in the house I grew up in.
But I think, as a matter of temperament, one either ends up taking the position that some things have been lost irretrievably, or else that we can have, if not the same things back again, than something that is worthwhile in a similar way, which is, I suppose, the difference between meliorist and declinist conservatisms.
*my last four cups of coffee have come from Kenya, Java, Kenya (same lot, different roaster) and Costa Rica
It's like Alan Ehrenhalt's argument in "The Lost City": that people today miss the security of the old 1950s-style neighborhoods, but they would not give up the personal autonomy they've gained since then, despite the verities and the cohesion they've lost.
The observations:
1. Just as a matter of chronology, I can't miss anything at all about 1950s neighborhoods. As for 1950s-style neighborhoods, I lived in as close an approximation as one can manage until I was 18. Though I liked it well enough then (though not so well as to resist moving elsewhere), I'm not sure I'd feel the same way about living in that sort of neighborhood now.
2. I was talking with my dad a few months ago, while he was making coffee. He told me how surprised he was by the wide variety of mediocre coffee available now. When he was a kid, his parents used to make coffee which always smelled great--better than it does now (and ostensibly tasted great, though I don't remember that part of the conversation). The problem is that his memory is almost certainly factually incorrect. Coffee is, by almost any objective measure, better now--from factors like the change from robusta to arabica beans, improvements in packaging materials, the switch from percolators to drip coffee makers, to the widespread availability of a higher quality of bean*--what he's remembering is not the quality of the coffee but all the other things it represented. There's nothing wrong with that: I keep the coffee maker that's in my office at school not because it makes a good cup of coffee, but because it's the one we had in the house I grew up in.
But I think, as a matter of temperament, one either ends up taking the position that some things have been lost irretrievably, or else that we can have, if not the same things back again, than something that is worthwhile in a similar way, which is, I suppose, the difference between meliorist and declinist conservatisms.
*my last four cups of coffee have come from Kenya, Java, Kenya (same lot, different roaster) and Costa Rica
19.5.08
HUGO GROTIUS, COLONIALIST:
From III.XV ('Moderation in Obtaining Empire'), §12:
From III.XV ('Moderation in Obtaining Empire'), §12:
In order to make a right use of victory, the saying of Tacitus ought always to be remembered, that "We cannot finish a war in a more happy and glorious manner than by pardoning the vanquished." Julius Caesar, in a letter he wrote when Dictator, says, "Let this be the new way of conquering, to secure ourselves with mercy and liberality."
NIT-PICKING, INDIE ROCK EDITION: Says Poulos:
I presume he means 're-born.' Otherwise, Paul Westerberg and Bob Mould would like to have a word with him.
Also, what to make of Billy Corgan's playing all the non-drum parts on Siamese Dream?
And so both alt-rock and alt-glam were banished from the public eye. Britney beat Billy. And, quietly, carefully, introvertedly, a younger generation of sensitive types stayed away from the Warped Tour and the Summer Sanitarium in preference for their bedrooms, often in solitary diligence, softly preparing a revolution.
They weren't rich like their alt-rock ancestors; weren't already famous; had no record deals of the sort their aesthetic parents enjoyed in an era when labels like Interscope and even Maverick could make the earth tremble. What they did have was talent, time, and the means of production, and that's all an artist ever really needs. And so was indie-rock born into the world. (Italics mine)
I presume he means 're-born.' Otherwise, Paul Westerberg and Bob Mould would like to have a word with him.
Also, what to make of Billy Corgan's playing all the non-drum parts on Siamese Dream?
LINK: I recommend, without reservation, Jacob Levy's article "Not so Novus an Ordo", which discusses the extent to which the theory of constitutionalism has become inseparable from social contract theory, and argues instead for a constitutionalism which remains aware of law, practice, and society as existing before, and somewhat continuously after, the formation of any particular constitution (I hope I've summarized it appropriately).
The article was of particular interest to me because this issue is one in the background of Grotian scholarship. For Northeast this past year, I wrote a paper on the right of resistance in Grotius, arguing (contra Tuck, among others), that Grotius articulated both a full, meaningful sense of sovereignty, but also an appropriately-sized right of resistance. The issue overlaps with constitutionalism, because, as one might expect, at stake is the question of what the political unit is, how it comes into being, and how the conditions underlying its legitimacy might be challenged. At the time, I took the position that it was an attempt to demystify the state, as it were, by replacing a non-specific sense of tradition (very much akin to revisionist British ideas of common law and constitution) with an explicit history; one accepts social contract (or the idea that law, sovereignty, and institutional structure are not arbitrary and so cannot be replaced at whim) in order to reject state-of-nature thinking (one engages first in legal, not philosophical, analysis, to determine the obligations one owes to one's own state), which serves the cause both of those who would rebel whenever they thought they could get away with it, and those who would arrogate unlimited power to themselves.*
Reading Levy's article, I am slightly more unsettled in that opinion. That Grotius' is a social contract model is hard to deny (though it does not focus all that much on consent and does not really worry about how consent plays out in any generation past the first one), as is its general hostility to change (there are mentions of the possibility of revision, and, embedded in the idea of multiple forms sovereignty can take, the idea that change might look different in each). However, there is also a great deal of past opinion and law, and in Prolegomena 38-39, Grotius identifies the inability of past authors to properly distinguish between types of law, and their unwillingness to use examples from history, as signs their work can only be, at best, incomplete. The answer to these new thoughts, I would expect, is that he has a foot in the old and the new; but it's an interesting set of problems on which to think.
*It's also this which has led me to the belief that a conservatism of history might be even better than a conservatism of tradition.
The article was of particular interest to me because this issue is one in the background of Grotian scholarship. For Northeast this past year, I wrote a paper on the right of resistance in Grotius, arguing (contra Tuck, among others), that Grotius articulated both a full, meaningful sense of sovereignty, but also an appropriately-sized right of resistance. The issue overlaps with constitutionalism, because, as one might expect, at stake is the question of what the political unit is, how it comes into being, and how the conditions underlying its legitimacy might be challenged. At the time, I took the position that it was an attempt to demystify the state, as it were, by replacing a non-specific sense of tradition (very much akin to revisionist British ideas of common law and constitution) with an explicit history; one accepts social contract (or the idea that law, sovereignty, and institutional structure are not arbitrary and so cannot be replaced at whim) in order to reject state-of-nature thinking (one engages first in legal, not philosophical, analysis, to determine the obligations one owes to one's own state), which serves the cause both of those who would rebel whenever they thought they could get away with it, and those who would arrogate unlimited power to themselves.*
Reading Levy's article, I am slightly more unsettled in that opinion. That Grotius' is a social contract model is hard to deny (though it does not focus all that much on consent and does not really worry about how consent plays out in any generation past the first one), as is its general hostility to change (there are mentions of the possibility of revision, and, embedded in the idea of multiple forms sovereignty can take, the idea that change might look different in each). However, there is also a great deal of past opinion and law, and in Prolegomena 38-39, Grotius identifies the inability of past authors to properly distinguish between types of law, and their unwillingness to use examples from history, as signs their work can only be, at best, incomplete. The answer to these new thoughts, I would expect, is that he has a foot in the old and the new; but it's an interesting set of problems on which to think.
*It's also this which has led me to the belief that a conservatism of history might be even better than a conservatism of tradition.
ARM TWISTED: Alex Massie linked to the NYT review of Joseph O'Neill's new book, which I had seen, but also to James Wood's, which I had not. I am generally wary of new fiction, but I assume Wood does not throw around comparisons to The Great Gatsby lightly. We'll see.
18.5.08
SOMEONE BUY THESE KIDS A METRONOME*:
James Poulos links to a youtube clip of Radiohead, which I can only assume is a sound-check where the monitors were not loud enough to let each member hear what the others were doing.
UPDATE: Actual version not noticeably better. CAN, anyone? Accept no substitutes.
*(The difference between the first and second discs of 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is that someone obviously introduced Mark E. Smith to the concept of a 'click track.' Radiohead sound like they need a similar intervention.)
James Poulos links to a youtube clip of Radiohead, which I can only assume is a sound-check where the monitors were not loud enough to let each member hear what the others were doing.
UPDATE: Actual version not noticeably better. CAN, anyone? Accept no substitutes.
*(The difference between the first and second discs of 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong is that someone obviously introduced Mark E. Smith to the concept of a 'click track.' Radiohead sound like they need a similar intervention.)
15.5.08
Feeling the nostalgia again: Five Reasons to Love Ann Arbor. Mine would be slightly different:
1. Leopold Brothers- wait a minute...
2. Sweetwater's (also, Cafe Zola before it got weird)
3. The Bang!--I went to four or five, and only one was a letdown
4. The band shell in West Park/the Old West Side--not a better neighborhood to walk around in
5. 8th floor of the grad library--where I spent far too many evenings trying to catch up on my reading
And many others...
1. Leopold Brothers- wait a minute...
2. Sweetwater's (also, Cafe Zola before it got weird)
3. The Bang!--I went to four or five, and only one was a letdown
4. The band shell in West Park/the Old West Side--not a better neighborhood to walk around in
5. 8th floor of the grad library--where I spent far too many evenings trying to catch up on my reading
And many others...
LINK: This sort of thing drives me crazy:
Maybe. I've seen plenty of chauvinism in readings of this kind, if it's the only way you ever approach the text. The trick, here as in political theory, is to have some idea of the kind of question you want to have answered. If I want to have an idea of what Grotius wrote, the absolute worst thing to do is read the commentary on De jure belli, which is largely a reflection of the biases of the commentator. If my question is how the concept of sovereignty develops over the modern period, or how it gets used in various political contexts, those commentators become more important. Within Protestant hermeneutics, I see no reason why one cannot read a prominent Christian writer's positions, accord them a great deal of weight, and still find them lacking as interpretations, or interpretations when certain questions are in mind (Christ and Paul are different, but let's not step into that minefield).
See also allegory:
My Bible study (stuck in the middle of Jeremiah) got into a big argument on this topic a few weeks ago: they (Orthodox and evangelical protestant alike) were finding allegories everywhere, and assigning the primary meaning of the text to these. I protested, because these seemed to me a dodge--the text had to mean something to the people who first encountered it, and as the intensity of allegory is increased (so I find), the urge to find other meanings decreases, and that seems to me to do definite violence to the text. If you come to the text asking what portions of it might further our understanding of what it means to be in Christ, and how his coming changes our understanding of past events, well, go to town. But it's an activity that has a time and a place, and any halfway decent reading will balance hermeneutic techniques against what's being sought after.
So too, growing numbers of serious Christian readers of the Bible have become persuaded that we can't hope to know what Moses "means" without seeing how he was read by Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Newman, and Barth. The particular lineup of midrashic commentators can change, of course. The point is the exegetical humility of reading the Scriptures through the saints—an appropriate response to the humility of a God who bends toward us in Christ and gathers his people in a communion of saints.
Maybe. I've seen plenty of chauvinism in readings of this kind, if it's the only way you ever approach the text. The trick, here as in political theory, is to have some idea of the kind of question you want to have answered. If I want to have an idea of what Grotius wrote, the absolute worst thing to do is read the commentary on De jure belli, which is largely a reflection of the biases of the commentator. If my question is how the concept of sovereignty develops over the modern period, or how it gets used in various political contexts, those commentators become more important. Within Protestant hermeneutics, I see no reason why one cannot read a prominent Christian writer's positions, accord them a great deal of weight, and still find them lacking as interpretations, or interpretations when certain questions are in mind (Christ and Paul are different, but let's not step into that minefield).
See also allegory:
Those in Reformation-based churches have often recoiled at allegory as one of the means by which the plain sense of Scripture is distorted. This is rooted in our revolt against our Catholic forebears: let them have allegory, and pretty soon they'll find the Queen of Heaven in Revelation, or prayers to the saints in 1 Maccabees. Williams ably shows that the heartbeat of allegory for the ancient church was Christological. Allegory was a means to further the church's passionate love affair with Christ through discerning his presence on every page of Israel's Scripture. Like any interpretive practice, allegorical reading can go wrong and stand in need of reining in, sure enough. But without it, something dear to the heart of Protestants is lost: the chance to see Jesus anew, now refracted through the words not only of the New Testament, but of the Old as well. And there are so many more words in the Old!
My Bible study (stuck in the middle of Jeremiah) got into a big argument on this topic a few weeks ago: they (Orthodox and evangelical protestant alike) were finding allegories everywhere, and assigning the primary meaning of the text to these. I protested, because these seemed to me a dodge--the text had to mean something to the people who first encountered it, and as the intensity of allegory is increased (so I find), the urge to find other meanings decreases, and that seems to me to do definite violence to the text. If you come to the text asking what portions of it might further our understanding of what it means to be in Christ, and how his coming changes our understanding of past events, well, go to town. But it's an activity that has a time and a place, and any halfway decent reading will balance hermeneutic techniques against what's being sought after.
I have an almost unlimited patience for all things Grotius, and Martine van Ittersum's Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories, and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies 1595-1615 is, at turns, quite engaging (and as close to a total reconstruction of Grotius' work on these issues in that period as is possible*), but I'm about 3/4 of the way through and having a little trouble following all the historical details, of which the book has many.
* Which is not to say the reconstruction is always convincing--though I don't do a lot of work with archival sources, so I don't know how reasonable a complaint this is. But the interpretive techniques are not clear to me:
In the chapter on the 'Spanish Black Legend,' Ittersum writes at some length about Grotius' appropriation of various anti-Iberian tropes in De jure predae, but she never addresses directly the following, somewhat important questions: 1. Did the Spanish consider Dutch independence to be fundamentally illegitimate? 2. Did the Spanish actually commit atrocities against the peoples of the new world, in part because they refused to convert to Catholicism? 3. Did the Portuguese commit atrocities against Dutch sailors in the East Indies? In all three cases, so far as I can tell, the answer is 'yes' (the discussion of Spanish military and economic pressures against the Netherlands comes up in later chapters). The question, it seems, is less whether those tropes are used for rhetorical purposes, but rather, how realistic the danger to the Netherlands really was (power asymmetries, which should loom when considering the Dutch v. the Spanish/Portuguese at the beginning of the 17th century, are rarely mentioned), and I can't quite put my finger on the underlying assumption that makes these concerns overblown, in Ittersum's estimation.
* Which is not to say the reconstruction is always convincing--though I don't do a lot of work with archival sources, so I don't know how reasonable a complaint this is. But the interpretive techniques are not clear to me:
In the chapter on the 'Spanish Black Legend,' Ittersum writes at some length about Grotius' appropriation of various anti-Iberian tropes in De jure predae, but she never addresses directly the following, somewhat important questions: 1. Did the Spanish consider Dutch independence to be fundamentally illegitimate? 2. Did the Spanish actually commit atrocities against the peoples of the new world, in part because they refused to convert to Catholicism? 3. Did the Portuguese commit atrocities against Dutch sailors in the East Indies? In all three cases, so far as I can tell, the answer is 'yes' (the discussion of Spanish military and economic pressures against the Netherlands comes up in later chapters). The question, it seems, is less whether those tropes are used for rhetorical purposes, but rather, how realistic the danger to the Netherlands really was (power asymmetries, which should loom when considering the Dutch v. the Spanish/Portuguese at the beginning of the 17th century, are rarely mentioned), and I can't quite put my finger on the underlying assumption that makes these concerns overblown, in Ittersum's estimation.
LINKS: Music-related items, while I try to finish drafting my syllabus:
* Carie Brownstein, the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist/vocalist, has a blog through NPR. Her mixes are excellent, and her general observations on music and creativity are well worth your time.
* Dead Flowers interviews Ivy, whose album, In the Clear, I bought on the strength of a couple songs DF offered earlier--very good. Requisite bizarre indie-rock connection: Adam Schlesinger is in Fountains of Wayne (which I think was originally the side project), and also wrote "That Thing You Do!" from the movie.
* Carie Brownstein, the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist/vocalist, has a blog through NPR. Her mixes are excellent, and her general observations on music and creativity are well worth your time.
* Dead Flowers interviews Ivy, whose album, In the Clear, I bought on the strength of a couple songs DF offered earlier--very good. Requisite bizarre indie-rock connection: Adam Schlesinger is in Fountains of Wayne (which I think was originally the side project), and also wrote "That Thing You Do!" from the movie.
13.5.08
Finished A.S. Byatt's Possession this afternoon. I haven't had enough time reflecting on it to make a determination of whether I find its underlying premise ridiculous or not, but it was enjoyable to read and, I think, offered a few insights into the academic process (or, at least, inspired a few moments of recognition). The passage on letters struck me:
And two pages at the end which describe the process of reading (specifically re-reading) better than anything else I've encountered, from which I excerpt a part:
Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going...
Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader; they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader.
And two pages at the end which describe the process of reading (specifically re-reading) better than anything else I've encountered, from which I excerpt a part:
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appear to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognized, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
9.5.08
I often take issue with Daniel Larison on... practically everything. But he's right about the clumsy references to Constantine in the Evangelical Manifesto (first post, on whether Constantine oppressed dissenting religious opinions, here; second, on Evangelical defensiveness, here). From the second post:
For reasons that might be obvious, I encounter anti-Constantinianism with some frequency, and there are few theological positions that aggravate me more. I try to avoid conversations on these topics whenever possible. A few months ago, I found myself at someone's birthday dinner; one person at the table asked if anyone could recommend a good book covering Christian ethics with respect to war. The gentleman sitting to my right said he considered John Howard Yoder to be the definitive source on this question. I was unable to repress my usual derisive snort, which then led into a long conversation on the merits of the pre-Constantinian church.
As an evangelical protestant, I have the usual reluctance to bring out arguments relying too much on authority, but on this question, I follow the historical interpretation of, among others, Grotius, C.S. Lewis, and Reinhold Niebuhr: the nigh-unitary voice of all Christian writers throughout history indicates that war may permissibly be fought under some conditions. A strictly pacifist view is, at best, a minority opinion that opposes the tenets of most major denominations (Lewis' position), or else an important witness to the church as a whole, but not to be confused with a tenable Christian approach to politics (Neibuhr's). The history of these writers is one of the signal worldly accomplishments of Christianity: without Augustine, Lactantius, Aquinas, Vitoria, etc etc, political ethics would not be developed as it is today.
Unfortunately, as my interlocutor was only too happy to remind me, every one of those came after Constantine, and thus is to be held suspect. He told me I could have my Augustine: he'd rather be on the same side as Christ and Paul.
What exactly do you say to that?
Related to the previous post, this is an attitude in the manifesto that strikes me as far more troubling and obnoxious than any perceived defensiveness. No Christians today trace their heritage to Constantine (nor have any Christians at any other time done this). Indeed, the implicit claim is that there are Christians who do trace their heritage to Constantine, and so are actually schismatics who supposedly reject Christ and prefer Constantine. (It is an old polemical move to identify oneself with Christ and others with another individual to demonstrate the sectarian, rather than catholic, nature of the opposition.)
For reasons that might be obvious, I encounter anti-Constantinianism with some frequency, and there are few theological positions that aggravate me more. I try to avoid conversations on these topics whenever possible. A few months ago, I found myself at someone's birthday dinner; one person at the table asked if anyone could recommend a good book covering Christian ethics with respect to war. The gentleman sitting to my right said he considered John Howard Yoder to be the definitive source on this question. I was unable to repress my usual derisive snort, which then led into a long conversation on the merits of the pre-Constantinian church.
As an evangelical protestant, I have the usual reluctance to bring out arguments relying too much on authority, but on this question, I follow the historical interpretation of, among others, Grotius, C.S. Lewis, and Reinhold Niebuhr: the nigh-unitary voice of all Christian writers throughout history indicates that war may permissibly be fought under some conditions. A strictly pacifist view is, at best, a minority opinion that opposes the tenets of most major denominations (Lewis' position), or else an important witness to the church as a whole, but not to be confused with a tenable Christian approach to politics (Neibuhr's). The history of these writers is one of the signal worldly accomplishments of Christianity: without Augustine, Lactantius, Aquinas, Vitoria, etc etc, political ethics would not be developed as it is today.
Unfortunately, as my interlocutor was only too happy to remind me, every one of those came after Constantine, and thus is to be held suspect. He told me I could have my Augustine: he'd rather be on the same side as Christ and Paul.
What exactly do you say to that?
8.5.08
FWIW: I don't like any of these "Greatest Movie Teachers"
Interesting fact: I saw Stand and Deliver four times in high school (three times in Spanish classes (though only once in Spanish), once in Calculus (which I later dropped for Public Speaking)
Interesting fact: I saw Stand and Deliver four times in high school (three times in Spanish classes (though only once in Spanish), once in Calculus (which I later dropped for Public Speaking)
7.5.08
LINK: Intended to go below, except what I forgot. The newly revamped Harry's Place on Ken Livingstone, Coriolanus, and leadership in a democracy.
I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT III: Finally done with finals?
* The best Mac-v-PC zing I've seen in awhile.
* I found How to Get Divorced by the Time You're 30 to be an interesting look into several of the typical mistakes of relationships in one's 20s. Excerpt:
The article builds from there, and it's impressive to watch how 'common knowledge' combines with factors only clear in retrospect and... it's depressing, I won't lie, but also fascinating in the emphasis it puts on self-awareness, self-analysis, and change. One doesn't necessarily know what one wants, and if that fact is kept in mind, it can mitigate a number of mistakes and make it easier to reverse course when things go wrong. (h/t: Prettier Than Napoleon)
* In response to this, I'll take the line William Zinsser adopts in On Writing Well: everyone thinks they have a style which is an ideal reflection of themselves as a person and a writer. However, if you look at anyone who writes well, they develop an obsession with style and constantly try to improve their writing. Certainly, Lancelot Andrews did not feel the need to follow 'the rules of English grammar' when translating the KJV (though I question what that could mean, given 1. 400 years of use between then and now 2. the fact he was often translating poetics and not just prose 3. that religious English is frequently recognized as a category of English writing that functions as a poetry-prose hybrid), but there's a substantial difference between suspending principles of good English usage because the occasion demands it, and haphazardly observing them.
* For those so inclined, Norm takes on, and links to, the discussion on whether it's better to take pictures or have memories.
* The best Mac-v-PC zing I've seen in awhile.
* I found How to Get Divorced by the Time You're 30 to be an interesting look into several of the typical mistakes of relationships in one's 20s. Excerpt:
STEP ONE: Jump from your horrible early-20s relationship right into a mid-20s relationship without learning or growing or pondering what you really want out of a mate — then marry that person.
By your late 20s, you’ll realize you were merely over-correcting the first person’s flaws and that the one you married is just as wrong for you as the one you didn’t, but in very different ways.
The article builds from there, and it's impressive to watch how 'common knowledge' combines with factors only clear in retrospect and... it's depressing, I won't lie, but also fascinating in the emphasis it puts on self-awareness, self-analysis, and change. One doesn't necessarily know what one wants, and if that fact is kept in mind, it can mitigate a number of mistakes and make it easier to reverse course when things go wrong. (h/t: Prettier Than Napoleon)
* In response to this, I'll take the line William Zinsser adopts in On Writing Well: everyone thinks they have a style which is an ideal reflection of themselves as a person and a writer. However, if you look at anyone who writes well, they develop an obsession with style and constantly try to improve their writing. Certainly, Lancelot Andrews did not feel the need to follow 'the rules of English grammar' when translating the KJV (though I question what that could mean, given 1. 400 years of use between then and now 2. the fact he was often translating poetics and not just prose 3. that religious English is frequently recognized as a category of English writing that functions as a poetry-prose hybrid), but there's a substantial difference between suspending principles of good English usage because the occasion demands it, and haphazardly observing them.
* For those so inclined, Norm takes on, and links to, the discussion on whether it's better to take pictures or have memories.
6.5.08
RANDOM OBSERVATION ON GRADING:
I am near completion of my third semester of TAing (was supposed to be done yesterday, but, much like moving or writing a paper, the last bit always takes longer than you intend); all three semesters, I've been one of many TAs (six last year, five last semester, five this semester). Classes of large size don't bother me--my intro political theory lecture had 400 people--and the interaction with students is often deeply rewarding. But I am thoroughly convinced that coordinating multiple graders requires logistical organization seldom observed outside wedding planning. If you are soon or ever to TA with other people, I highly encourage you to make a plan, anticipate contingencies, and pick someone to be the enforcer. Failure to do so is a nightmare.
Relatedly, I can't imagine a three-hour meeting with a student; or I can't imagine one that would end well for the student. I make an effort when I first grade to be as generous as the terms of the assignment and the work in question allows me to be; thus I have never given extra points when a student has come to ask questions. While I don't anticipate that holding up forever, a student has about 15 minutes to make an affirmative case for more points. Pressing beyond that point (it's happened once or twice) increases my resistance to rewarding that behavior with a higher score. At three hours, they'd get the same level of scrutiny in the future, but stop getting the benefit of the doubt.
I am near completion of my third semester of TAing (was supposed to be done yesterday, but, much like moving or writing a paper, the last bit always takes longer than you intend); all three semesters, I've been one of many TAs (six last year, five last semester, five this semester). Classes of large size don't bother me--my intro political theory lecture had 400 people--and the interaction with students is often deeply rewarding. But I am thoroughly convinced that coordinating multiple graders requires logistical organization seldom observed outside wedding planning. If you are soon or ever to TA with other people, I highly encourage you to make a plan, anticipate contingencies, and pick someone to be the enforcer. Failure to do so is a nightmare.
Relatedly, I can't imagine a three-hour meeting with a student; or I can't imagine one that would end well for the student. I make an effort when I first grade to be as generous as the terms of the assignment and the work in question allows me to be; thus I have never given extra points when a student has come to ask questions. While I don't anticipate that holding up forever, a student has about 15 minutes to make an affirmative case for more points. Pressing beyond that point (it's happened once or twice) increases my resistance to rewarding that behavior with a higher score. At three hours, they'd get the same level of scrutiny in the future, but stop getting the benefit of the doubt.
5.5.08
THANK YOU FOR GETTING OFFENDED ON MY BEHALF: but it's not really necessary in this case. Ross Douthat links to all the apoplectic bloggers responding to a NYT piece on chain restaurants. I, you know, read the article, and having been to all-but-one of the chains reviewed, found it to be perfectly fair. Sure, there's a little "can you believe they have restaurants in/near malls?" tone, but I assume any city-dweller will have a similar reaction. The actual reviews seem to me to be about correct: the wait can sometimes be preposterous, and there are not adequate while the time waiting (and this accounts for the greet-staff/waitstaff distinction several of the reviews mention); the food is surprisingly good (with some exceptions*) and relatively inexpensive; all of these places are especially good for families. So far as I can tell, that's all true. What's the hubbub?
SEE ALSO: Daniel Larison, who has especially kind words for Outback.
*Every place has redeeming dishes, and some, like Red Lobster, have many--they say more nice things about the entrees at Cheesecake Factory than I would
SEE ALSO: Daniel Larison, who has especially kind words for Outback.
*Every place has redeeming dishes, and some, like Red Lobster, have many--they say more nice things about the entrees at Cheesecake Factory than I would
I came late to conservatism, so there are a number of things I spend time puzzling out, which perhaps do not seem odd to those who grew up in it (or embraced it earlier). The narrative of technology and progress is one of these. I read, and enjoy, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, but they buy in rather unreservedly to a critique of modern American capitalism, and take, as a point of contrast, an earlier agrarian time period, frequently making an appeal to the world of their parents or grandparents.
The historical narrative has always struck me as a little curious. This fantastic New Yorker review of a book on American technological progress in the 19th century does a good job of reminding the reader how early many of the changes we might lament set in.
In particular, I recommend the section that begins "Historical narratives in which machines drive history look like this: x machine produces y kind of society." It intrigued me because it makes a connection back to at least some of the technology-driven critique of contemporary life. Phrased in the way quoted, the sentiment is clearly Marxist (the means of production determine the stage of economic development)--and, indeed, Lapore goes on to quote Marx. But surely conservatism doesn't require technological determinism of this kind?
Lapore gives a number of examples of this kind of reasoning, and then goes on to ask the questions I have in mind:
This is not to be critical of any particular rejection of technology (many things one can and should do without), nor even the conscious choice to find meaning in something other than the usual sites; but when I start to think about how it's supposed to work across culture or society more generally, I'm not entirely sure how the critique is supposed to function, how we verify that it's correct, and whether the remedy suggested might actually solve the problem.
(And this is always, it seems to me, swamped by the demand-side problem. I have a friend working on architecture and politics in the context of radical democratic theory; his prospectus was very hostile to the residential patterns that emerged in the US after World War II. He did an excellent job of showing that, because of the architectural theory, what was being offered had a characteristic form, but did not even address why people wanted to live in those houses and neighborhoods--false consciousness and poor decision-making can only account for so much. That is to say, it's not just conservatism that has this problem in our contemporary context, but it does rule out certain options--like the coercive force of the state--in pursuing a solution.)
The historical narrative has always struck me as a little curious. This fantastic New Yorker review of a book on American technological progress in the 19th century does a good job of reminding the reader how early many of the changes we might lament set in.
In particular, I recommend the section that begins "Historical narratives in which machines drive history look like this: x machine produces y kind of society." It intrigued me because it makes a connection back to at least some of the technology-driven critique of contemporary life. Phrased in the way quoted, the sentiment is clearly Marxist (the means of production determine the stage of economic development)--and, indeed, Lapore goes on to quote Marx. But surely conservatism doesn't require technological determinism of this kind?
Lapore gives a number of examples of this kind of reasoning, and then goes on to ask the questions I have in mind:
These statements have a ring of truth; they’re useful, insightful, and worth considering. And, at first glance, they’re pleasing: you can picture the steam engine, the clock, the light bulb, the printing press, the cotton gin, the Pill, the automobile. You find yourself silently nodding in agreement. Technology changes our lives all the time, in little ways and big ways, sometimes profoundly, very often for good, and sometimes for very great good. Really, it’s not such a big leap to believe that technology drives change, and drives history. Asked to guess which is the more powerful force in history—gadgets you can tinker with or wispy, diaphanous ideas—most people would put their money on gadgets. And why not? The printing press versus, say, predestination isn’t really a fair fight, unless you’ve got a lot of time to think about it, and to read books—printed on a printing press. In some parts of these United States, daily life is like living in a museum dedicated to the proposition that technology is destiny.
But what if x isn’t all that triggers y, or even what mostly does; what if it just looks that way, because we are living y? It’s easy to forget that some of these y’s started long before the x’s, suburbs before automobiles. And none of the x’s tell the whole story; the Pill, while not a small thing, wasn’t everything. Statements like “The light bulb ushered in the age of abundance” employ a grammar suspiciously like that of advertising copy. Viagra will save your marriage. Electronic voting will restore faith in American democracy. The iPod will make you groovy.
This is not to be critical of any particular rejection of technology (many things one can and should do without), nor even the conscious choice to find meaning in something other than the usual sites; but when I start to think about how it's supposed to work across culture or society more generally, I'm not entirely sure how the critique is supposed to function, how we verify that it's correct, and whether the remedy suggested might actually solve the problem.
(And this is always, it seems to me, swamped by the demand-side problem. I have a friend working on architecture and politics in the context of radical democratic theory; his prospectus was very hostile to the residential patterns that emerged in the US after World War II. He did an excellent job of showing that, because of the architectural theory, what was being offered had a characteristic form, but did not even address why people wanted to live in those houses and neighborhoods--false consciousness and poor decision-making can only account for so much. That is to say, it's not just conservatism that has this problem in our contemporary context, but it does rule out certain options--like the coercive force of the state--in pursuing a solution.)
1.5.08
MY ONLY POST ON JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Brought on, as many of these moments are, by Rod Dreher, who repeated David Broder's question on Obama: "Why did Obama ever like Wright in the first place?" Excerpt:
This makes me reflect on my own intellectual biography. When I went to college, I was set on majoring in philosophy. Academic philosophy, at least of the analytic variety (and especially at a place like Michigan), is heavily populated with atheists and materialists; one does not exactly pick this up during one's first encounters with Plato and Aristotle. The GSI for my intro class, though of the 'I'd like to have faith, but can't quite manage it' variety of atheist, made a notable point of finding all the arguments for God's existence unconvincing; the Professor and GSI for my 17th and 18th century philosophy class was decidedly less fair-minded on these questions; they preferred Hume's position on religion. I was rather disillusioned with philosophy, or the possibility that it could ever be integrated with Christianity in any intellectually satisfying way.*
That changed, for me, somewhere January my freshman year, when Cornel West came to give a talk at Michigan's annual symposium on Holocaust-related issues. I don't remember very much about it, except that it was intellectually and emotionally serious, and held very tightly to both philosophy and Christianity. I explicitly remember his telling multiple people during the Q&A that he did not consider humanism to be a sufficiently good position from which to attempt to make social and political change: only Christianity would do.
Now that was over seven years ago. I don't have the same politics I did then. I find West's work to be, on the whole, incomprehensible (when he writes as an academic; he can still be intriguing when he speaks personally); I don't think he separates himself enough from trends (like liberation theology) from which his politics or religion ought to encourage him to separate; and I was on Larry Summers' side of that disagreement. But he also pointed me to a number of things I'm glad to have read (that liberation theology included), and in terms of essential moments in my personal development, it's one of the most important. I'm no Obama apologist, but I don't think it's hard to tell the same story: if Wright is the impetus for one of the big changes he's undergone in his life, I can understand his continued loyalty to Wright even if, as time goes on, he finds more points of difference, even to the point of opposition.
*for the record, I had read Kierkegaard and a few other prominent Christian philosophers at this point; but these are, at best, boutique options at most major philosophy programs.
I think Obama is lying, and is 75 percent of the political phony Jeremiah Wright said the other day that he is. Jeremiah Wright did not turn into some racialist kook yesterday. As far as I can tell, whether you love him or hate him, Rev. Wright has been the same man for a very long time. It was useful to young Barack Obama, fatherless and conflicted about his race and his class status, to leave the Ivy League and attach himself to a loudmouth Southside preacher/race man. Radical chic and all that. I doubt Obama would be where he is today if not for Jeremiah Wright.
Do I believe that Obama shares all of Wright's views? No. But I don't think he finds them offensive, or even all that objectionable, despite his positioning at the moment. Look, Wright is a buffoon, but I can understand why he feels used by Obama, who was happy to be associated with him when it was good for Obama's career, but when not, not. Don't misread me; I'm not defending Wright's incredibly vain and selfish sabotaging of Obama's campaign.
This makes me reflect on my own intellectual biography. When I went to college, I was set on majoring in philosophy. Academic philosophy, at least of the analytic variety (and especially at a place like Michigan), is heavily populated with atheists and materialists; one does not exactly pick this up during one's first encounters with Plato and Aristotle. The GSI for my intro class, though of the 'I'd like to have faith, but can't quite manage it' variety of atheist, made a notable point of finding all the arguments for God's existence unconvincing; the Professor and GSI for my 17th and 18th century philosophy class was decidedly less fair-minded on these questions; they preferred Hume's position on religion. I was rather disillusioned with philosophy, or the possibility that it could ever be integrated with Christianity in any intellectually satisfying way.*
That changed, for me, somewhere January my freshman year, when Cornel West came to give a talk at Michigan's annual symposium on Holocaust-related issues. I don't remember very much about it, except that it was intellectually and emotionally serious, and held very tightly to both philosophy and Christianity. I explicitly remember his telling multiple people during the Q&A that he did not consider humanism to be a sufficiently good position from which to attempt to make social and political change: only Christianity would do.
Now that was over seven years ago. I don't have the same politics I did then. I find West's work to be, on the whole, incomprehensible (when he writes as an academic; he can still be intriguing when he speaks personally); I don't think he separates himself enough from trends (like liberation theology) from which his politics or religion ought to encourage him to separate; and I was on Larry Summers' side of that disagreement. But he also pointed me to a number of things I'm glad to have read (that liberation theology included), and in terms of essential moments in my personal development, it's one of the most important. I'm no Obama apologist, but I don't think it's hard to tell the same story: if Wright is the impetus for one of the big changes he's undergone in his life, I can understand his continued loyalty to Wright even if, as time goes on, he finds more points of difference, even to the point of opposition.
*for the record, I had read Kierkegaard and a few other prominent Christian philosophers at this point; but these are, at best, boutique options at most major philosophy programs.
Put this down as an example of the merits of bureaucracy: I picked my car up from the body shop yesterday. First thing I did, on getting the keys back, was try to open the driver's-side door. One problem: the key didn't work. I pointed this out to the gentleman who was there to make sure I was satisfied with my repair. Not entirely believing me, I let him take the keys and try it himself, to which he said something along the lines of "that's not supposed to happen." Fortunately, my car has keyless entry, so I was able to head home anyway, but yeesh. Called today to complain; I go back in Tuesday, should only take a couple hours, and they will shuttle me to and from campus. I'd get upset, but it's a little too absurd to get worked up over.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)