The Traffic in Cairo and Max Weber
January 31, 2007
The current book for Freshman Studies is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. I was struck by an admittedly minor point, his description of the way a social system becomes self-perpetuating. One could ask: if certain varieties of Protestantism are largely responsible for capitalism as we know it.. then why are contemporary Catholics or Muslims so good at it? Weber dispenses a neat answer:
The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. [19]
In other words, once the social system is up and running Catholics and Muslims will be born into that system and will learn to live according to its ethos. The system itself is self-perpetuating.. and continues even after Protestants have stopped believing in the things that gave rise to that ethos.
This notion of the continuity of social systems provides a way of viewing some historical facts unrelated to capitalism. Take for instance the idea that something seminal in the American character was formed by the Puritans experience in the 17th century (a common notion). Numerically that might seem odd, since the Puritans that migrated to the United States would be numbered only in the thousands.. just a drop in comparison to the current 300 million Americans! Yet there is a certain competitive advantage to be had in instituting a system, namely: everyone that comes after you will to some degree conform to the dominant social pattern which you have set. So assuming growth is slow enough, a social system practiced by a handful of people may form the system of a much larger group.
This idea can be illustrated by a brief thought experiment relating to the traffic in Cairo (which is a mess). Below is a YouTube video (not by me) giving a glimpse of what this traffic is like:
What would happen if you took a couple of these Egyptian drivers and set them in the middle of Appleton, Wisconsin? Would the Egyptians continue to drive the way they do? My bet is no.. it might take a day or two, but before long these Egyptian transplants will be driving like Appletonians.. staying within the lines, stopping at traffic signals, and refraining from the kinds of exuberant risk taking that characterize Cairo driving.
Now extend this thought experiment. Say five Egyptian drivers and their families are relocated to Appleton every month.. what would happen? Each successive group of transplants will find themselves changing their driving habits and even after a couple of decades of monthly transplants, Appleton's system of driving will remain about the same.. even though a decent percentage of Appleton's population would be Egyptian.
This thought experiment could be reversed.. you could imagine Americans being dropped off in Cairo and told to make their way around Cairo by car. It might grate on them, but before long they would be driving like Cairenes. That is just the power of a social system. People do not commonly buck social systems.. they conform to them.
That is a fantasy situation.. but it illustrates the way 100 people could form the lifeway of 10 million people.. given a slow enough increase in population. The older system would perpetually hand off its rules and values to new arrivals. Interest in this idea should hardly be limited to national populations, but applies on a micro level to the social system at a fast food restaurant or large corporation. A social system perpetuates itself.. to the extent that even after one wave of employees has left, the social system remains the same.
Dodos Imagined
January 29, 2007
The New Yorker last week (Jan. 22, 2007) carried an article entitled "Digging for Dodos" by Ian Parker. It is mostly a record of a recent fossil expedition to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.. the island that was the home of the now extinct Dodo bird. In one area of the island was a swamp, known as the Mare aux Songes.. which was later covered over with rock. This former swamp has provided a snapshot of the Dodo's world before humans showed up to stay in 1598.
This would have made simply an interesting article were it not for the mention of Julian Hume, a scientist and artist. Parker writes about him:
...in his spare time he makes careful, although approximate, paintings of dodos and other extinct bird species, working with acrylic on paper. Three of these have been published in the journal Nature. This dual approach to the subject might not seem fully respectable to some paleontological colleagues, but Hume argues that a study of extinct animals calls for an imaginative and extrapolatory frame of mind, of a kind not always valued in research science: a readiness to see what is not there. [64]
The "dual approach" I take to mean the combination of traditional science with artistic representation. This happens to be a theme of recurring interest here in this blog.. the re-vivification of past worlds by means of artistic representations.
What might be the alternative? That is easy enough to see; it can be glimpsed in every dry science article. The analysis of bones and pollen counts allows for elegant tables and data, but does not allow room for the imagination. If this information about the past world is ever going to come alive there needs to be another step.. the imagining of that world and representation of it in some artistic medium.
The painting shown at the top of this blog is one of these efforts by Julian Hume, and it gives a sense of the way his project includes not just a re-imagining of the Dodo bird, but also a complete re-imagining of the island of Mauritius.. which is now nothing like its former self. (Strangely, this is not my first blog on the tiny island of Mauritius, which is treated in an essay on V.S. Naipaul's description of the island.. a blog which gives a sense of how unpristine the island now is.)
The Dodo itself has acquired a complex imaginative history.. and I located a brief video except in which Hume talks about early images of the Dodo. Its biggest break came when it was included in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where it was pictured as below:
That kind of portrayal in a classic text would be enough to keep any creature alive in the cultural imagination. The Dodo also came to acquire an odd status as the quintessential example of extinction. It couldn't have happened to a nicer species.. but I don't know how the Dodo was settled upon as the sign for extinction and not one of the myriad other unfortunate species.
Perhaps with this artistic re-vivification of the Dodo and its early habitat, the lost bird will become a sign for something more positive: the ability of scholarship to make real the past. For those who know how to read the tables and charts of a scientific article it may well be possible to imaginatively enter into that lost world.. but the rest of us need an artist.
In a world where change is accelerating, this kind of imaginative re-vivification of the past is an imperative for scholars.. it is part of the great future scholarly task of preservation. The old model for scholarship is to think in terms of analysis and data.. a model driven by the reality that important articles will be accessible to a relatively small group. The new model.. so it seems to me.. will be imaginative projects that are built upon analysis and data. This is a task now made possible by the internet and its ability to facilitate unique scholarly projects.. since it provides the unlimited storage capacity to present a wealth of pictures, maps and anything else that will help the imagination of the viewer grasp something that is no longer there. It looks like Julian Hume will be publishing a book (which I will need to buy!).. but this kind of creative project will someday find its home on the internet.
Oh, and here is an odd slide show featuring models of the Dodo that the New Yorker put online.
Hollywood Stories: Watching The Aviator
January 28, 2007
Hollywood has no apparent interest in reality.. by which I mean the world as it is actually experienced by human beings. The Aviator struck me as such a highly stylized version of the world that it became simply a procession of movie moments. Hollywood movies have always existed a step or two away from the real world.. and I guess my favorite films (Chinatown, Bringing Up Baby) do not exactly hew to any line of realism.. but those films stand a more comfortably within the confines of a genre. The Aviator, on the other hand, is an a little more self-consciously a serious film.. with pretensions to grandness.
Citizen Kane was clearly in the mind of Scorsese, with his film's Kane-like fadeouts, the flashbacks to an explanatory youth, and the obvious similarity of a film based on the life of a monumentally rich self-made American. Where Citizen Kane offered us finally the great opaque mystery of a human being, The Aviator gives us an over-determined portrait of a man suffering from germ phobia. Citizen Kane fills one with hope that cinema can richly explore human experience, even if within stylized parameters, while The Aviator sends that hope crashing to the ground.
The portrayal of Katharine Hepburn riled me up.. which may be inevitable after having completed such a thorough biography (by William Mann). Cate Blanchett won the Oscar for best supporting actress for this performance. If one is looking for mimicry of the Hepburn screen persona, then she is indeed superb. But this film was ostensibly about Hepburn as a person.. and so it seems a shame to settle for a cutout version of her. I understand that filmmakers need to simplify events in order to get a film on the screen.. but this should hardly license the creation of epic romances at every possible opportunity.
I guess this is why I have chosen to review this film on the blog.. I want to register the fact that we are being short-changed. I do not believe that contemporary movies from Hollywood are able to portray our world in a convincing way. The Departed and Blood Diamond are two more ambitious and serious Hollywood films which have no anchor set in reality.. and neither have an interest in depicting human beings and their odd relationships in a realistic fashion.. not to mention our unstylized and trivial everyday reality.
Sunday Afternoon with Rory
January 28, 2007
Well our little girl is growing up fast! It was just two weeks ago that we brought her home a little elfin girl.. and now those cheeks are filling out. Day by day she seems to get a little better sense of the strategic possibilities of her limbs. She loves to kick out her legs as she is getting her diapers changed. When I swaddle her for beddy time we often get a series of grunts and groans as she works her hands free of the swaddle wrappers. She remains the cutest thing you ever saw.
Paleolithic Art, pt. 5
January 27, 2007
The fifth chapter.. "The Art of Hunting Large Mammals".. lays out the forces that combined to make us who we are as human beings. For Guthrie our stand-out traits go back to a specific lifeway that human beings followed for thousands of years.. and which shaped our evolutionary development. We were round pegs in a round hole while following the hunting lifeway.
When I imagined the deep human past I never thought of it in terms of pleasure. In my mind the fun would not have started until human beings got together in something like a civilization.. and before that life was famously nasty, brutish, and short. Guthrie, however, gives a portrait of the human past that, while acknowledging hardships, recognizes the intensity of the pleasure that belonged to this lifeway. He writes:
Jubilation and poignant awareness of death can occur together, and we need to rekindle these emotions when we think about our human past. Such a long-running play, such a long success, means the Paleolithic hunting lifeway had to be deep fun.. [224-5]
That is to say, human emotional responses to the world followed closely the demands and rewards of the hunting lifeway. This was our passion for thousands of years.. our Super Bowl, our daily work, the subject of our stories, the goal of our education, and the reason for our deaths. All these emotions and tasks that in the modern world are split into multiple smaller channels once ran together in pursuit of a single goal: to bring down mammals.
I kept thinking about Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March as I read about this hunting lifeway.. Augie March kept revolving through job after job.. looking for a fate that fit him.. where he was a natural. Maybe this hunting lifeway is what Augie March was searching for? Finally all these restless things about us human beings makes sense. We were not born to sit in a box and push papers.. or to kill our souls in industrial repetition.. but to use all our creativity and ingenuity to track and kill smart and dangerous animals.
Making their way in this ancient world.. which involved killing large animals without the help of guns.. meant special attention to rearing quality offspring:
Paleolithic children had to have spent a long apprenticeship in a wide range of disciplines. Quality education mattered here; the evidence of that story forms the spine of this book. The radically new thing about the Pleistocene band may have been its carefully nurtured children with years of rich and intimate experiences, able to achieve new plateaus of individual and social complexity. [251]
Although it may sound strange, I have read nothing more insightful on parenting (a task I am just beginning to think about) than this book about the earliest human beings. The importance of play and fun learning seem obvious.. and creativity is something that comes naturally to a child that is allowed to expand at her own pace. This need for quality children appears also to have been the reason that human beings developed such strong male-female bonding.. it was an evolutionary strategy for bringing up the kind of children who could succeed following this hunting lifeway. These were children that needed the long-term nurture of a couple. Emily and I could do worse as parents than to constantly ask ourselves what will bring us closest to the Paleolithic norms that shaped us.
Koko the Gorilla
January 26, 2007
My interest recently has been in human origins and consciousness.. and I could not help but get ahold of the Criterion re-release of this documentary on a gorilla that learned sign language. But I was underwhelmed with Koko's linguistic ability.. there did seem to be signs used for foods and basic actions.. and she seemed to be able to admit that she had been "bad".. but I had a hard time spotting anything like a grammar or a genuine abstraction. The desire to show Koko communicating through signs made the filmmakers lose sight of her simpler exploratory actions, which were amply intelligent in and of themselves.
The documentary also bordered on the disturbing with its insistence that Koko is a "person" with whom one can communicate. I have no problem with the idea that Koko is an intelligent and feeling creature who should be protected.. but that was not the point.. which was more that Koko should rightly take part in human society. One of the most striking images is of Penny, Koko's keeper, driving around with Koko in the passenger seat of her car. It almost looks natural.
It is fascinating to get a sense of the cognitive possibilities in a gorilla, but ultimately it is more important to understand how gorilla's function within their own cultural and environmental setting. If there is anything to learn about ourselves from gorillas it will be from there conduct in that original setting. In the current website for the Gorilla Foundation, Penny (same person) speaks laudingly of "interspecies communication".. and I have trouble acknowledging that as a legitimate goal in the study of primates.
Koko's sign language is shown in the video below:
Great.. we see Koko signing words. But those words are fit into a broader narrative about Koko being sad about the death of other gorillas and pleading for help in founding a gorilla sanctuary. I have no problem with the idea that Koko could sign that she feels sad.. or that she needs help.. both seem within her range. But I doubt that Koko understands the fact that others of her species are being killed and therefore that she needs to ask an unseen video audience for help. Yet this consciousness is implied in the video. I am uneasy with such overstatement of her cognitive ability.. which indicates to me an irresponsible use of a beautiful creature.
Teaching Close Reading
January 25, 2007
Every class I teach could be subtitled: "how to read". The fun of teaching ancient literature is exactly the challenge that its cognitive assumptions and material references pose to the modern reader. Read a modern novel and one is immersed in a world that is largely understood.. and shared.. but step back a few centuries and the opacity of the world rises steeply. The interesting points in such old works arise only as they are read closely..
I had a friend back at Emory who was interested in getting students to read closely.. and his idea was to work through painfully brief sections of text.. in detail. The work he chose for this exercise was the Prelude of William Wordsworth. He made his way through specific passages over multiple class periods, asking the students to re-read the text and to consider aspects of it at length. I always wondered if that was really the best way to get students to read closely?
I should say that one of my tactics is to make sure that every reading assignment is doable. I know from my own experience as a student that the quickest way to invite skimming is to demand too many pages. Whatever time is allotted to reading I want to be spent really reading.. not powering through an absurd number of pages. At the same time reading closely is not a skill one gains by doing it once successfully. It is rather the kind of skill you acquire as your reading experience becomes more diverse and broad. And if this is true, then to spend four weeks of class time on a few pages in Wordsworth is a bad idea..
I connect the skill of reading well to that of writing well. Sure, certain aspects of writing can be taught.. but the most important aspects of writing take something else: practice writing. Perhaps heretically, I doubt the possibility of rapid improvement in a skill like writing. It is a skill too connected to the ways we mentally process the world.. and too dependent on the world of language that exists already in our heads. So how do you learn to write well? Read a lot and write a lot.. and think a lot too. That is the bottom line.
So how does one prod students toward the art of reading closely? Get them to read diverse material. Then model close reading by asking the types of questions that a close reader asks. Why does the author express things in this way? Isn't that quite different than what we would expect? What values are being assumed here? One of the greatest gifts I have acquired from teachers is a cast of mind.. a way of approaching texts.. and this came through listening to their questions.
I don't think writing should be taught by atomizing a single written essay.. by examining all the details and helping students to turn it into a perfect essay. Change those passives into actives! That time is better spent writing something new. In the same way reading should not be a matter of atomizing a paragraph or chapter and pouring over it ceaselessly.. in the way that my friend had his class read and re-read portions of Wordsworth's Prelude. Better to let it go and read something different.. with fresh challenges.
Aurora Floating in Space
January 23, 2007
Lord Jim Meets Stanley Milgram
January 23, 2007
Reading Obedience to Authority I kept thinking about Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. In that novel we meet a young man who goes to sea believing in conventional notions of duty and heroism. Early in the novel Conrad gives us an image of him standing in the fore-top of a ship, looking down upon the world "with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers" (5). That self confidence is shattered by an absurd event. Thinking that his ship was about to go down, he abandons it.. leaving behind its human cargo of pilgrims to their fate. Only the ship does not go down.. and when the young man and others are rescued from the sea, they have some awkward questions to answer. Conrad is not interested in this story as an example of one man's failure of courage, but as a signpost to something larger in human nature: we do not know ourselves.. and in moments of testing we may easily betray the values we profess to believe in.
The narrator of the novel, Marlowe, comments on the young man's attempts to explain the fateful action:
It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure. [59]
That "moral identity" we could define as the folk psychology that lies behind our conception of virtue. Faced with dire situations we should make honorable choices.. and for a captain that means he will not abandon his ship in the face of imminent danger. In this case, though, we find a young man in the midst of a confusing and chaotic environment.. acting not so much from thought as from impulse.. and betraying that precious moral identity.
Before Stanley Milgram proceeded with his shock experiments he asked psychiatrists and college students to guess the result of his experiment. What percentage of people would administer the highest level of shock to the learners? Nobody who was asked to predict the results thought that ordinary people would administer shocks to the highest level. Most thought those people being tested would desist early on.. as soon as the shocks became painful. These predictors of human behavior were wrong.. as is well known. Over 60% of ordinary people, upon being given an order, gave shocks to the highest level possible.
Milgram tries to explain why people were so wrong in their assumptions about human action:
...the individual is preeminently the source of his own behavior. A person acts in a particular way because he has decided to do so. Action takes place in a physical-social setting, but this is merely the stage for its occurrence. The behavior itself flows from an inner core of the person... [31]
That is a description of a widely held folk psychology about the ways that human beings make moral choices. The value of Obedience to Authority is its ability to get us to convince us that human actions take place within a social context.. and that social context often overrides the moral choice that seemed so obvious when considered as an abstraction.
The genius of Milgram's book is the way he does not simply describe human actions, but draws the reader into his experiment. One of my early questions to my Freshman Studies class was whether they would have stopped earlier than the people in the book. I tried to open this as a possibility by noting that this took place a long time ago and that values have changed. I thought maybe someone would say: No way.. I would never do that! But they seemed to mostly buy into the conclusions.. offering comments like: I would like to think I would act differently, but I can see that the odds are I would act like the majority. To me that is a fascinating response. In effect it is an admission that given the proper authority they would kill an innocent person.. or at the very least administer incredibly painful shocks.
This ability to strip away a folk psychology in favor of a more situational appraisal of human actions is the goal of Lord Jim. A chasm lies there.. since all of our virtues are founded on that folk psychology. Conrad exploits the darkness of this action in a way that Milgram does not. Conrad shows the affect of this singular failure on those who hear his story:
"Such an affair destroys one's confidence. A man may go pretty near through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But when the call comes... Aha!... If I..." [49]
One hesitates to put into words the possibility of failure.
Even if Milgram is willing at the end of the experiment to bring out unharmed the man who was supposedly receiving the shocks.. and to explain to people that their actions were perfectly normal.. It is still impossible not to feel slightly haunted by the knowledge that we do not know ourselves.. and that our actions are driven by forces we don't fully understand.
Paleolithic Art, pt. 4
January 22, 2007
In one of the many sidebars in this book, readers are given a picture of an airplane diving and shooting at a tank. Jagged lines of an explosion surround the tank and indicate a hit. Guthrie writes: "If you found this drawing in a wastebasket or dustbin, you should be able to guess the drawer's age and sex" (181). The book has nothing to do with the art of modern school children, but Guthrie wants us to reason similarly about paleolithic art.. by its themes and preoccupations we should be able to instantly guess what general age group and gender is responsible for much of this art..
What interests me here is not so much the conclusion, but his way of reasoning. A long past world is illumined by the simple drawing of a child.. and something similar happens when Guthrie introduces his own experience as an adolescent cave explorer in the Ozarks. On the topic of the age scatter of young paleolithic youngsters, he notes: "Similar combos, from my youth, explored creeks and woodlands, built forts, fished, and made general mischief" (197). The habits of modern children come in handy to explain the habits of very ancient children.
Behind this easy back and forth movement lies the conviction that human beings are unified in important ways. It is a conviction that goes against the grain:
I do not want to underemphasize the cultural diversity humans construct from our innate predispositions. These have been thoroughly publicized and are a central feature of social anthropology. What has been missing from contemporary intellectual tradition until very recently is a broad airing of the continuity within this diversity, the human universals. [164]
That statement caught me because it resembles some of the stances I took in my dissertation (and soon to be book?). I used a comparative method, examining several cultural traditions concurrently, and my justification for that method was based on the fact that I wanted to avoid writing about the unique characteristics of a single cultural tradition and locate instead something broader about the way human beings construct meaningful places.. such as Mecca or Delos.
The universals that Guthrie is particularly interested in are those related to gender difference. Young males are universally the risk-taking members of a society.. and far more attracted to violent activities. Guthrie adds that they also have "an ear-ringing, mind-buzzing preoccupation with hard-core sexual fantasy" (190). The biology of being an adolescent boy is not something that Guthrie will admit has changed over the past thousands of years.. and he when he gazes at the cave walls filled with drawings he sees universals.. and not mysteries:
We've seen that the Paleolithic cavers seem not to have been imagining frogs, beetles, babies, moles, hedgehogs, or beautiful necklines. Instead they recognized stalactites and cracks as parts of large mammals, a scatter of ugly faces, erections, and vulvae. These subjects were likely not foremost on everybody's minds. [187]
That is to say: they were on the mind of adolescent males. Just as by its subject we could recognize the age and gender of the person who made a drawing that wound up crumpled in a school wastebasket.. so we should be able to recognize the source of the drawings on paleolithic cave walls.
Guthrie sees most of what remains from the paleolithic time through the male lens of testosterone. Yet strangely this point of view also opens up an unknown world for the female presence in the paleolithic times. Much of it is lost, but it would have filled the same cultural niches that we see in traditional cultures all over the world.. and this female artistic vision would have been captured by less durable materials.. Guthrie laments the loss of this other material:
If sounds could crystallize, we could dissolve them back to Paleolithic songs and dances aplenty and hear the wealth of children's stories and learn about the herbal tonics and unique ways of making and preserving delicacies. [199]
By explaining what does survive, the imagination is freed to imagine the broader human world that didn't survive.
Old Roads Picks a Candidate for '08
January 21, 2007
With the rash of campaign announcements it is hard not to start looking ahead to the presidential campaign of '08. Another reason for our early attention to '08 is the continuation of dangerous trends in the Bush administration.. from escalation of the war in Iraq and a seeming willingness to begin a conflict with Iran.. to domestic policies that weaken our individual rights and increase inequality.
Old Roads has decided to endorse the presidential candidacy of John Edwards. Three issues stand out for us as deciding factors:
- His stated desire to begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq.. which we believe to be the best course of action out of a range of bad options.
- His attention to the growing levels of inequality in our country. We hear non-stop news of corporate profits and whopping paychecks for those at the top, but average Americans are not connected to this prosperity.
- His desire to extend medical coverage to all Americans. In our view there can be no greater moral imperative than to make sure all Americans have access to health care.
Further, we respond to Edwards' call for involvement now. For us that does not mean door-to-door political activism.. but it will mean a willingness to stand for something in the forums that are open to us.. such as this blog. Beyond advocacy for a specific candidate we are going to look for ways to pitch in and help form a fresh vision of who we are as Americans.
Father and Daughter, Paul Simon
January 19, 2007
If you had to look for the poet of family life, you might do worse than Paul Simon. It would have been difficult to guess that the man who wrote "I am a Rock" in the 60s or "Have a Good Time" in the 70s would turn so strongly to songs about family and children.
One of my favorite songs from the album Rhythm of the Saints is "Born at the Right Time":
Too many people on the bus from the airport
Too many holes in the crust of the earth
The planet groans
Every time it registers another birth
But among the reeds and rushes
A baby girl was found
Her eyes as clear as centuries
Her silky hair was brown
Dire observations about the contemporary world give way to a lovely description of a single child found among the "reeds and rushes".. which inevitably calls to mind the discovery of baby Moses. Perhaps, like baby Moses, this child offers some form of hope to the world.
That image of a baby whose eyes are clear as centuries could well be the inspiration for the cover of the latest album from Paul Simon, Surprise. The loveliest song from this new album is "Father and Daughter". It is a song whose chorus I have been singing since the summer when I found out we would be having a child.. and the urge to sing it got stronger when it was confirmed that we would indeed be having a daughter. The chorus is quite simple:
As long as one and one is two
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you
Once you hear him sing those lines I bet you too will have a hard time getting them out of your head!
The song begins with the image of a father standing over the bed of a young child. The first stanza contains some advice for getting over a bad dream, and then the second stanza continues in a similar vein, this time making the position of the father clear:
I believe the light that shines on you
Will shine on you forever
And though I can't guarantee
There's nothing scary hiding under your bed
I’m gonna stand guard
Like a postcard of a Golden Retriever
And never leave till I leave you
With a sweet dream in your head
I think that image of a "postcard of a Golden Retriever" is particularly touching. It is a faithful dog made somehow even more faithful by being converted into a picture.
The father standing guard at the bed as a daughter falls off to sleep. It is an image I am beginning to relate to.. although I trust in the future there will be a little more falling off to sleep going on and a little less watching! The idea that a poem/song could be inspired by this common moment should not be surprising. The great example is perhaps Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight", which begins:
The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud-- and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
(Now if that is not a portrait of a blogger at work, I don't know what is!) Yeats wrote his "Prayer for My Son" that opens:
Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in his bed
Till his morning meal come round;
(Now for the first time I understand this.. I could paraphrase it as: "Keep my little son asleep until the morning so that I can write..") Even Dylan gets into the act with his song "Lord Protect My Child":
While the world is asleep
You can look at it and weep
Few things you find are worthwhile
And though I don't ask for much
No material things to touch
Lord, protect my child
So Paul Simon has chosen a situation which has been well picked over by poets and lyricists.
The final stanza of the song contains what seems like a father's advice to a daughter.. and it is advice that reflects what I would like to tell Aurora someday:
Trust your intuition
It's just like going fishing
You cast your line
And hope you'll get a bite
But you don't need to waste your time
Worrying about the market place
Try to help the human race
Struggling to survive its harshest night
The first four lines set out life as a matter of listening to one's intuition.. throw yourself out there and see what comes up. "Cast your bread upon the water". Then she is warned against "worrying about the marketplace".. which seems to generally reflect a distaste on Simon's part for the money chasing way of life that is so common. Forget about the stock market! instead he urges her to "try to help the human race". It is a human race which, like the depiction in "Born at the Right Time", is not doing too well. Surely he has in mind our wars, the threats of terrorism, the environmental destruction.. all those things that represent our harsh night. The highest hope of the father is that his daughter would spend her life doing something for others.
Having a child takes a certain amount of faith in the future. It is an act of hope.. like planting a tree on a property. It is an act of a person who believes in the future. Simon is clearly frightened by what he can make out of the future.. but he also can express some of the purest lines of hope that I have ever heard. A line from Rhythm of the Saints sticks in my head:
And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours I feel sure
Yes, my dear Aurora.. I do believe that in the future there will be peace..
Aurora Comes Home
January 17, 2007
Today Aurora arrived at our little home. I have been reminded of my old fascination with the way some things are impossible to photogaph. Lots of beautiful moments pass one by.. little firsts and odd realizations. Some will live in our memory.. and some will be forgotten. And the camera catches only the marginal moments.. times when one happens to think of the camera.. when one thinks: whoops, looks like we are going so I better get a picture now.
One thing to know about Aurora is that she is tiny. She is a perfect and beautiful baby.. but so small! So many of the little outfits which we were given now look huge to us. We laugh and wonder when in the world our little daughter will be able to fit into something so cavernous? But they do grow fast.. I have been told.
Looking at such a tiny baby it is hard not to try and imagine how she will turn out. I try to imagine a sequence of images and the changes that will happen to that little face.. like those people on YouTube who take a picture of themselves every day for a lengthy period of time and then stitch them together. And more important than physical looks is the inner person that she will become.. what will that look like in ten years? twenty years? But whatever the eventual answers to these questions I think my job is to love her for who she is.. and who she becomes. She is not going to be set out into the world as some conqueror or genius.. She has not been born to rub my ego or to give me bragging rights. She is just our tiny Aurora, loved for herself alone.. always.
Aurora Peace
January 15, 2007
The day came a little sooner than I had thought. Emily's baseless intuitions were once again miraculously confirmed. The delivery was as quick and complication free as we could have hoped for. And the end result was a beautiful.. I mean beautiful.. daughter.
She weighed in at 6 pounds 1 ounce.. light, but she is a little over 2 weeks early. Her length is 20 and 1/2 inches. She arrived into our world at close to 2 am. The baby naturally will get lots of attention, but I should also mention that Emily was absolutely amazing throughout the birthing process. I would not have held up as well. She went into this wanting a natural birth.. with no pain medication.. and she got it.. staying determined to the very end.
There was no sleep up until that point.. and very little afterwards. So I am going to keep this brief.. mostly photos of baby with one of us and then some photos of the way the world looked on the morning of her birth.
New Test Leper, REM
January 13, 2007
The song "New Test Leper" by REM is about as close as one can get to the sound of liberalism. To understand it one must imagine an interview on some television talk show. An individual is trying to express an opinion in the face of an indifferent host and a hostile crowd. It is a common and ephemeral moment in our media saturated world.. the kind of moment one glimpses while waiting somewhere for an appointment.. but it is mined by Michael Stipe for some unexpected drama.
The first lines are beautiful.. and push the listener to understand this confrontation as partially religious in nature. Here is the first stanza and the chorus:
I can't say that I love Jesus
That would be a hollow claim
He did make some observations
And I'm quoting them today.
"Judge not lest ye be judged."
What a beautiful refrain.
The studio audience disagrees.
Have his lambs all gone astray?
Call me a leper
Call me a leper
The narrator begins by defining himself religiously in negative terms: "I can't say that I love Jesus". The implication is that the audience is largely composed of Christians. We never find out precisely what this man is trying to defend, but it seems evident that it is some flash point in the culture wars. I like to think that this imagined narrator is gay, and trying to defend his world before this popular audience. In an effort to get the audience to refrain from their hostile judgments, he recites the words of Jesus: "Judge not lest ye be judged". The lines, as sung by Stipe, seem to come from some place deep inside. It is not the most popular biblical phrase to drop from the mouths of conservative Christians.. but it did drop from Jesus' mouth.
To this plea by the narrator, the audience remains hostile, and he asks: "Have his lambs all gone astray?" Again the New Testament language remains strong. Jesus is the Good Shepherd.. a popular image of Jesus. Christians are his lambs.. "the sheep of his pasture". But that imagery seems all out of whack for the situation as it is unfolding. These are hardly lambs, but attackers.. unwilling to listen to someone presenting another viewpoint.. another lifestyle.
The chorus at first seems enigmatic: "Call me a leper"? Certainly Stipe has his share of enigmatic lines. Yet there is sense here, and again we have to look to the New Testament to grasp it. Lepers were shunned outcasts, but Jesus was willing to touch them and to spend time with them.. as he did with other socially despised groups. With this in mind the chorus seems to be a gentle attempt to change the cognitive frame of an audience. We could paraphrase it as follows: "don't call me a devient or a lowlife, call me a leper.. and in doing so remember the treatment that lepers received from Jesus." A leper would seem to be deserving of a certain minimum standard of decency.. a standard which is hardly upheld as insults are launched in popular forums.
The second stanza continues:
"You are lost and disillusioned"
What an awful thing to say.
I know this show doesn't matter.
It means nothing to me.
I thought I might help them understand
But what an ugly thing to see:
"I am not an animal"
Subtited under the screen.
The narrator hears the condescending charge: "You are lost and disillusioned".. a self-righteous comment if ever there was one. Then we get a sense of what has driven him to come before this hostile public.. it is out of no personal craving for money or fame, but out of a desire to help others to see something: "I thought I might help them understand.." But there will be no communication here. We close out the stanza with a reminder of the vast television audience, viewing a subtitle that reads: "I am not an animal". The effort at genuine communication has been condensed to a denial that only reinforces the common viewpoint: "This is an animal".
The final stanza:
When I tried to tell my story
They cut me off to take a break.
I sat silent five commercials
I had nothing left to say
The talk show host was index-carded
All organized and blank
The other guests were scared and hardened
What a sad parade.
This is about as bleak an assessment of the possibility of communication as one is likely to encounter. The narrator seems to come out of his own head to try and express something personal about himself: "my story".. but he is cut off and unable to speak. You can see him sitting there silent, stared at by the crowd and by the other guests on the show.. By the end he has "nothing left to say". Our attention is then drawn away from the audience and we see the host stuck in his or her index cards.. unwilling to take interest except when on camera. The other guests sit there tense and perhaps angry.. not willing to extend a helping hand or listen to another viewpoint. That is not anyone's goal.
Consider what is stacked against genuine communication in this case: an audience that reflexively knows its positions, a host that is more interested in smooth flow than any sort of breakthrough, and other guests who are pointedly partisan in their viewpoints. The talk-show situation is of course a fiction, but it works to dramatize the broader question of whether genuine personal communication is possible along the various channels of American popular culture. Coming from a popular rock band, with some very popular albums under their belts, that is a probing question.. and Stipe here doesn't seem to believe it is likely.. certainly not easy.
Whatever the difficulty in communication, the song refuses to return hate for hate. Stipe is exemplary in his ability to be politically engaged and yet to refuse to give in to hate. This is a point that comes out in their last full album Around the Sun, where in "Final Straw" Stipe opens by singing: "as I raise my head to broadcast my objection.." With this kind of performative language he lodges his complaint, but then near the end he states his deepest principles:
now love cannot be called into question.
forgiveness is the only hope I hold.
and love—love will be my strongest weapon.
I do believe that I am not alone.
In a public sphere that generally strikes me as angry and unforgiving, it is poignant to see a pop star staking out the ground of love and forgiveness. These are not the words of a Toby Keith.. who described for us the "angry American".. nor is it the spirit that I pick up from so-called religious leaders.. But there is something more deeply Christian.. and more Christ-like even.. in the ground staked out by Michael Stipe.
Naipaul Getting His Nobel Prize
January 12, 2007
There is not a lot about V.S. Naipaul on the internet. He has a quite short Wikipedia entry, and there appears to be no website devoted to his works.. no legion of fans willing to track his life. (Compare the external links for Naipaul on Wikipedia with the much longer list for Salman Rushdie.) I am sure Naipaul would not be bothered a bit by this state of affairs. He has settled into his cultural niche.. a niche defined by a rather stodgy concept of books.
Although YouTube carries no footage of Naipaul, the official website for the Nobel Prize (which Naipaul was awarded in 2001) held a virtual bonanza of photos and even the video of his acceptance speech. In a spare window of time this past week I listened to Naipaul's speech.. and I was reminded once again why I like his work so much.
The lecture began with the careful distinguishing of one's life from one's work. He quotes Proust on this point admiringly, and then adds his own moral:
Those words of Proust should be with us whenever we are reading the biography of a writer - or the biography of anyone who depends on what can be called inspiration. All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain.
This strikes me as a response to Paul Theroux's vivid description of his lengthy friendship with Naipaul. "Details of the life and the quirks and friendships" is exactly what Theroux set down.. and Naipaul has plenty of quirks. But the listener here is persuaded to put aside the oddities that make up the man V.S. Naipaul.. and to gaze instead at his works.
The lecture then sketches the cognitive journey made by Naipaul over the course of his life.. beginning in Trinidad:
My background is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused. I was born in Trinidad. It is a small island in the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean. It was developed as a New World plantation colony, and when I was born in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all from the Gangetic plain.
One can't help but be amazed at the way this man from nowhere found a literary voice. (And by the way what a contrast with Edward Said.. who was a voice for the colonized, but who came from a wealthy and privileged background.)
Naipaul goes on the describe the cultural world surrounding him.. a world transplanted from India but ignorant of itself and its past. He does us the favor of not calling that mixture of people "stimulating" or "colorful". He calls it what it undoubtedly was: confusing.. exceedingly confusing.
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them. It will come indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the newspapers and on the radio. And at school the work of generations of scholars, scaled down for school texts, will provide some idea of France and the French.
The picture is of a tiny and restless consciousness.. surrounded by "areas of darkness" (as he will call them). There was no real cultural tradition.. no agreed-upon framework that one could grab hold of to understand the self or to gain an identity.
It is from this initial bewilderment, Naipaul wants us to understand, that his long string of books proceeded. Every book represented a chance to fill in something about himself and his confused cultural past. Those areas of darkness became areas of understanding.
When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books.
That note brings us back to the beginning of this lecture and his plea to set aside biographical inquiry.. to let his quirks remain just quirks. This is the kind of personal project that many people undertake.. to slowly acquire knowledge and understanding about their past as they grow into life. But with Naipaul that personal project was strangely externalized. What for others is acquired personal wisdom is for Naipaul a shelf of books.
The goad for all this writing was a confusing and bewildering past. That rings true to me. Genuine intellectual penetration is not so much a product of computational ability.. like one's IQ.. but rather a product of having to find one's way out of a confusing maze. The process of having to work one's way out of a false outlook.. and to find an identity.. is a work beset with false paths and illusory stops. At the end of that intense effort, though, is a peace.. areas of understanding. (I know that it is more than just cultural mazes from which one must escape.. there are other kinds as well, equally challenging.)
This idea marks what I respond to in Naipaul's work. The works flow from a hunger to understand himself and his past. There is no desire on his part to become an expert at anything (that prime motivator for the academic). He can flit from topic to topic, yet not disintegrate into unconnected projects. There is a center, and it holds. That center is an enigmatic self.. which has taken many volumes to partially work out.
Waving Adieu to Redlands, California
January 11, 2007
My family no longer resides in Redlands, California. For 20 years.. since I was in the 7th grade.. my family has lived this unique little city. As of this week that is no longer true. My mom and dad took advantage of incredible real estate prices and moved to the Ft. Worth area. My sister Angela had moved at the beginning of fall to start a Ph.D. program at Texas Christian University.. in Ft. Worth, Texas. Only my youngest sister Joanna remains in California.. and she is in Hemet, not Redlands.
It has been hard for me to know what to say about this turn of events, actually. There is nothing one can ever really say about change. It just comes.. and the worlds we knew are gone. Next time I show up in Redlands it will feel like a very different place. The home I returned to for holidays is owned by someone else (the photo above is from our backyard). The church where my dad was a pastor will have someone besides my dad stand up and speak every Sunday. It will be a strange town.
Redlands is where I gained a love for place.. hiking in the mountains that defined our horizons.. seeing the orange groves that always seemed close.. feeling like I was in a self-defined little city with a neat history. Certainly it was here that I learned to think about the kinds of myth-making that goes into creating something as durable as "California". The public schools I attended had a sizable portion of Hispanic students, and then I worked with Spanish speaking immigrants during my time at Carls Jr. Here I learned to love the desert and its bareness.. and I am taking from Redlands an orientation eastward toward the great wide landscapes of the Mojave rather than westward toward the wealthy canyons of Hollywood and the rich beaches of the Malibu..
I remembered a poem by Wallace Stevens. Here are the first two stanzas:
That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.
No matter my ability to "redo" or "undo" almost anything I do on this computer.. there is never any going back in life. And there can be no great "redo" in a future world. We have what we have.. and like Stevens, these endings, these wavings of goodbye, can be poignant.. profounder.. because of that permanence.
The following pictures are my waving adieu..
In my early twenties I wrote a series of essays on places in Redlands.. and I think I am going to find those.. I know they are buried somewhere in my stacks of journals..
Make It into a Museum:
More on Milgram's Obedience to Authority
January 9, 2007
One of the most effective strategies of Obedience to Authority is the use of brief portraits of real people. Two chapters are entitled "Individuals Confront Authority". In them the physical characteristics of individuals are sketched and we get snippets of transcribed dialogue or citations of written responses. To my mind these portraits have a novelistic feel.. I mean, imagine the situation of Milgram.. he has hundreds of subjects and for each subject a lengthy videotape of the experiment and concluding interview. Out of that mountain of material important characters must be identified and a few "telling details" selected to be presented to the reader. I would argue that this process of selecting information is akin to the work of a novelist.. it took a good ear for dialogue and character to construct these portraits.
In the first chapter entitled "Individuals Confront Authority" a man named Morris Braverman is described. He is a social worker:
He appears intelligent and concerned. The impression he creates is that of enormous overcontrol, that of a repressed and serious man, whose finely modulated voice is not linked with his emotional life. [52]
In the process of raising the shock levels Morris commences laughing. The notes made by the experimenter are the following: "Almost breaking up now each time gives shock. Rubbing face to hide laughter" (53). In the midst of this laughter he proves willing to administer the shocks all the way to the maximum. Then in the concluding interview the man is sedate, calm.. able to analyze what happened. It is the kind of character we might otherwise have to look to Dostoyevsky to find.. but here he is in America in the 60s!
Morris gets even more interesting when we discover at the end of this brief portrait his reflections in a questionnaire a year later:
What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e. the value of a memory experiment even after it became clear that continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value... As my wife said, 'You can call yourself Eichmann.' I hope I can deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter. [54]
What is more important to a novelist than character growth? And there it is.. Clearly some new level of consciousness has been reached.
That response triggered for me memories of my experience at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The goal of the museum was not to simply present information, but to prod the visitor confront values choices. I remember thinking: "What would I do in this case?" Here is the official website's description of one exhibit:
The Point of View Diner A recreation of a 1950's diner, red booths and all, that "serves" a menu of controversial topics on video jukeboxes. It uses the latest cutting edge technology to relay the overall message of personal responsibility. Following scenarios focusing on drunk driving and hate speech, this interactive exhibit allows visitors to input their opinions on what they have seen and question relevant characters. The results are then instantly tabulated.
Now, granted nobody is going to be fooled into thinking they are actually back in time confronting racial segregation.. but the goal of feeding people loaded situations and asking them how they might respond is interesting. One could even imagine using the experiment by Milgram as a scenario: "Suppose you responded to an advertisement to be part of an experiment on memory and learning.. and you were asked to administer shocks that ascended in strength..?"
Would anything be gained by sitting there and pondering this situation? Granted, it will not be as powerful an emotional experience as the one that Milgram's participants actually went through.. but it is still something. The goal of these scenarios—according to the museum—is give the "overall message of personal responsibility". Milgram too notes the importance of "responsibility" in the actions of various people. People see themselves as the agents of another person.. and therefore not responsible. Yet here is a museum filled with exhibits geared precisely to increase that feeling of personal responsibility in the midst of social situations. Reading about Milgram's experiment gave me a new appreciation for the Museum of Tolerance and its efforts in this direction.. Any experience that might get ordinary people to acknowledge themselves as a possible Eichmann is worth trying to replicate in some fashion or other..
The Tawdriness of Hubris:
The Hanging of Saddam Hussein
January 8, 2007
It was hard to resist watching the final moments of Saddam Hussein's life. The initial video, posted by the New York Times, seemed sedate.. a mysterious hooded man whispering into the ear of the former dictator. Then came the rougher cell phone video, posted on YouTube.. with its testy verbal exchanges. This video clip did not politely fade away for the hanging.. and we witness Saddam in the fall that will break his neck. Amid much shouting he is there again, head snapped back. Right at the conclusion of the film, out of the darkness, there is a momentary illumined view of the head. It is strangely affecting.
Throughout the flawed trial of Saddam Hussein it has been easy to imagine better ways to handle the trial. (If you don't believe the trial was deeply flawed, then check out this dossier put together by Human Rights Watch.) Instead of using the trial as 1) an opportunity for Iraqis to learn about their brutal past, 2) a tool for encouraging national reconciliation, and 3) a useful international precedent, we got instead a spectacle which was ushered ASAP to its tawdry end.. and took on the undeniable trappings of revenge. It is hard to imagine the trial of Saddam Hussein ever standing as anything but a negative precedent.. a memorable example of how not to conduct a trial of a dictator.
No matter how easy it might have been to imagine a more useful and ultimately just trial for Saddam Hussein, our leaders did not have that kind of moral imagination. They were motivated by one overriding imperative: keep out the international community. We went into Iraq alone and the last thing they wanted to do was to give credence to the idea that the United Nations could lend a helping hand.. or that those Europeans could add anything to our own sterling morality. That was pure hubris. Arrogance. And the result was a trial that contributed zero to the stabilization of Iraq and which ended in tawdry fashion.
Someday it is possible that historians will settle upon the lack of imagination as the besetting sin of this administration. Its actions have been consistently blind to perceptions. We did not bother with United Nations support.. after all we know we were right!.. and we were surprised when the Arab world in general, and Iraqis in particular, did not consider our occupation legitimate.. and even more surprised when the insurgency gained strength because of that lack of legitimacy. One of the recent recommendations of the ISG was to renounce the permanent occupation of military bases in Iraq.. an unclarified issue which convinced many Iraqis that we were in their country to stay. After all these years, we have, incredibly, still not clarified that basic unsettling point.
But who cares what other people think or suspect about us? or so it seems this administration believes.. still! From early on in this struggle our work should have been to build legitimacy and to deflate suspicions. It would have taken an active imagination to try to see the world through different cultural lenses.. but such an active imagination could have saved us from this terribly unimaginative use of 500 billion dollars.. and this unimaginative loss of over 3000 men and women.
What If There Were No More Babies?:
The Children of Men
January 7, 2007
This is a hell of a film to watch when you are expecting a child any week now. There is a point toward the end of the film when Theo (Clive Owen) with baby in hand and young mother in tow walks out of a building beset with bullets and fighting.. and the crying baby simply stops everyone. The poor immigrants reach out to touch the child and the government soldiers hold their fire and stare at the newborn child. It is an unexpected moment of awe.. reminding the viewer of the hope that should accompany every child.. but which we somehow forget in a world surrounded by babies.
The entire movie works to set up that moment. We are asked from the start to ponder what would happen to the world if there were no such thing as newborn children. According to director Alfonso Cuarón (and novelist P.D. James) it would be a world knocked off its hinges, with people looking to grab what remains for themselves. And maybe there is some truth to that.. if the desire for giving a better life to a child is a strong motivating factor for stability and security. There would be no soccer moms in a world without babies. Then in the midst of that world knocked off its hinges we are asked to imagine the entry of a single child.. a dramatic film entrance..
Looking out a London window you can see a Pink Floyd album cover re-made. When they initially entered the armed camp where the government holds immigrants, there were scenes with dogs and stripped humans reminiscent of scenes from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. As Theo and the young woman enter a building to get away from the camp we see on the walls of the cave-like building images reminiscent of paleolithic art. This kind of visual smartness continues throughout the film; every frame considered and created.
This level of allusiveness causes Children of Men to resemble The Matrix.. but some of the heavier religious symbolism is avoided. Upon meeting the young pregnant woman, Theo asks with whom she has conceived the child. The young woman looks at him and tells him she is a virgin. One thinks: No, not another religious allegory! But then the young woman laughs and gives a naturalistic answer. While thankfully bypassed as a plot device, the mention of a virgin birth nevertheless suggests the presence of an allegory. That allegory is strengthened at the end with the appearance of the ship named "Tomorrow" to rescue the young woman and her child.. That ending seemed heavy handed..
It is worth thinking about the portrayal of the two main human factions in the film. There is the xenophobic government brutally repressing foreigners in this time of crisis. And then the rebels are a cross between anti-globalization rioters and modern Islamic rebels. This group includes dreadlocked fighters and hooded men chanting "allah hua al-Akhbar" and wearing Arabic headbands. At one point there was a sign on a wall that said "Uprising" in English and then in Arabic "intifada" was written.
We are accustomed from Star Wars-like films to root for the rebels against the unjust empire. In this film both sides are hopelessly off track.. and the young woman's escape to the ship "Tomorrow" run by the Human Project appears to be a triumph of no political side, but of individual human values. There is no good side of the force.. only a struggle to be human. The fact that the hero of the film Theo at no time picks up a gun or shoots anyone.. despite wandering in and through much gunfire.. tells us something about how Cuarón imagines this human stuggle.
Doing the Paper Dance:
Paper Mills in Appleton, Wisconsin
January 6, 2007
It is possible that for some people a trip to the paper museum would not be completely engrossing.. but for us it definitely was. We arrived knowing little about how paper is made, and left having made our own paper.. and pretty confident that we could make paper at home. (Needless to say Emily is excited about that prospect!)
The Paper Discovery Center is located down next to the Fox River. A whole series of wherehouses down along the river seem to be remnants of the paper business.. which is still present in the area, but which evidently outgrew these brick buildings. In Appleton one complex has been turned into an apartment building, and then just down the way is this center.
The Paper Discovery Center features a wall of paper hall-of-famers. Granted, these people are not household names.. but they appear to have served their chosen industry well. Every industry, I imagine, could field a wall like this..
So how is paper made? This diagram does a pretty good job answering that question. Take wood chips and add white liquor. With heat and time the white liquor breaks the wood chips down into a moist pulp. Then the pulp has to be separated from the black liquor which is created in the process of breaking down the wood. That wood pulp is the basis for paper. It should also be noted that different kinds of wood will yield different kinds of pulp.. with eventual differences in paper properties.
In making paper for oneself it is possible to skip the wood pulping process and simply break down the paper into pulp.. which can then be re-used to form new paper. All it takes to break down pulp is water and a food processor. One can also put into the mix different kinds of paper and different colors.. and even bits of flower petals. All this is then settled onto a screen and merges together to become a new sheet of paper:
You may notice that there are three pieces of paper above.. for indeed, we were three at the Paper Discovery Center.
That's me.. tightening the screw in order to flatten the paper.
That's Emily.. pregnant but still willing to dance..
And that is the man who will be known to readers of this blog as Mr. Magneto.
Authority in the Classroom:
Reading Stanley Milgram
January 4, 2007
This term, which has begun in a whirl of activity, I teach Freshman Studies. The class starts off with a book that has really grown on me: Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. This is the book on the topic of that experiment in which individuals are asked to administer an educational exam and each time the "learner" gets a question wrong he received a shock. The shocks increase in intensity until the "learner" begins to holler that he wants to stop the experiment.. and it is evident that he is in extreme pain. The surprise of the experiment is the high percentage of people (over 60%) who were willing to proceed to the maximum voltage.
It is a good book to reflect on as a teacher.. On the first day of class I generally walk into a class and write my name on the board: Professor Smith. And that is only the least subtle of the actions that are geared to let students know who is in charge. That sense of "being in charge" in turn engenders obedience on the part of the students. As Milgram points out this state of being under someone's authority is a position that human beings are habituated to from the earliest moments of their lives. Who is out to tear down family and education?
At the same time this structure of authority is what legitimizes terrible action. Commentary from Milgram and others often focuses on large scale atrocities like genocide, but I think his insights are perfectly applicable to smaller scale situations. A while back when we read the biography of Woody Guthrie, I was interested in the description of banks foreclosing small farmers during the dustbowl years.. and thinking about the bankers who had to carry out those official "policies". That is a parallel case of people doing terrible harm but not allowing themselves to question their actions.. as long as it is a "policy" it must be OK.
Obedience to Authority opens up the possibility of a critique of systems and institutions. People are largely drones, programmed to follow orders and carry out commands. The crux of moral action is not in the heart of the individual, but in the gears of the system. That runs strikingly counter to most religious and popular views of good and evil.. and it is interesting on the internet to find uses of Milgram as an exposer of human individual "depravity".. such language only betrays an insufficient grasp of Milgram's work.
But back to the implications for my teaching. I am teaching within an institution. My words and actions are setting up a system of authority. In some ways I find that disheartening. I think to myself: let's just forget this Dr. and Prof. stuff.. and then let's just exchange ideas equally.. but so long as I am handing out grades and evaluating, there is not much I can really do to lessen my authority.. I am limited to cosmetic changes.. if I go further, what I am doing ceases to be higher education.
It is easier to think in terms of education as a tool for prodding students to be more willing to challenge authority. But if that is to happen it will not be from the content of my talks.. but from my responses to students. I have had plenty of experiences in grad school where I have witnessed authoritarian professors teach anti-authoritarian ideas.. and of course never see the conflict between their actions and words. Milgram leaves me with a desire to redouble my efforts to present myself in the setting of the classroom in ways that encourage students to strip off more of our common dronehood..
