A month after moving to Philadelphia, I can devote sufficient mental bandwidth to the matter of unpacking my books. Physically moving a library, or any extensive set of books, not only offers new juxtapositions, new combinations, new shelving arrangements, even when the bookcases themselves have been moved —but also a chance for reflection upon what this particular collection of books can mean.
In September 2021 Mary Beard posted a short essay about weeding her books (paywall) in preparation for retirement from Cambridge University after many years. She asked: does anyone have any advice? and I responded. I indicated what kind of criteria we employed in my library when we undertook a massive weeding project in 2015 (in which we shed tens of thousands of redundant volumes).
Then I wrote to Mary more personally: a personal library is a personal expression of loyalties, history, hopes, even disappointments. I asked her:
Does this particular book remind me of a significant individual? (colleague, mentor, friend, family)
Is this a book that I've always had (since childhood or adolescence)?—and I just can't bear to send it away because it reminds me of where I came from;
Is this a book that I have a realistic chance of reading in the coming years? --both in my professional field, and in other subjects that I find interesting;
Is this a book I wish to retain because of a future project I seriously intend to undertake? (not just "someday" but a time more specific).
Using these criterion I weeded my book form approximately 1,000 to just under 500. I packed them well, in smaller boxes to avoid back-breaking lifts—and the movers looked at me with some dismay anyway.
When I unpacked and shelved these books in Philadelphia, I was reminded, of course, "Oh, I really want to read that" even if it's several years old and by now thoroughly reviewed. I could also resolve quirks: why were volumes of fiction shelved in different bookcases? I could now put the fiction together, as well as biographical books, and books by a few particularly beloved authors, whether famous (Tolkien) or less well-known (the late Frederick Buechner, RIP).
I can't report finding any particular surprises, or sudden amazing insights. I affirm several long-standing interests (Old English language and literature; classical writers; Karl Barth; seafaring and sea travelers)—and that feels good. Since I'm in a new community where I know a few people, but not many, these authors, living and dead, provide partners for imagined dialogue.
Beyond all that, I can affirm the power of learning well-grounded in life, an integration and differentiation of points of view. What might Kierkegaard have to say to Colson Whitehead? Virginia Woolf to P.D. James? This is the inherited power of formative education in the liberal arts —an idea or ideal (or set of ideals) now passing out of practice or respect. These voices (living and dead) do not sort themselves neatly according to contemporary ideological commitments or political tribes—and thank God for that!
Monica Potts' beautiful In the Land of Self-Defeat in today's New York Times (October 6, 2019) accurately portrays the fragile realities of community in a very small place: Clinton, Arkansas. Self-defeated is a way of describing the lives and attitudes of many people there: just about anything a governmental body can do is a sad waste of money. Potts describes a fight over library financing and the salary of a librarian (that would have paid her $25 per hour or about $42,000 per year) as a step too far for the residents, whose median household income is often not more than $25,000. Self-defeated is about much more than finances, but about an entire attitude and expectation of individual lives and community life that the word describes.
Particularly telling is one resident's dismissal of the value of the librarian's degree or the work of the library. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.” That remark is not about Dewey. It is a willful dismissal of what the library there does: provide a portal to so much of the world beyond Clinton for those who cannot afford it or even imagine it. The evocation of Dewey itself is a telling dismissal: a nineteenth century system of relative shelf location is taken as the be-all and end-all of what can be known --not just a library, but what a library can point to.
In Potts' telling, the politics and mind-set of scarcity defines Van Buren County, Arkansas, and "people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use." The Chair of the library board points to a conversation, "They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” (The Chair pointed out that he doesn't have children and never uses the public school.) Social discourse becomes even more impoverished than community finances. In Potts' words:
A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families. . . . They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library.
I was left thinking, "what about the children? What about the young people? Is there any hope here for the future? How is the next generation to live?
One of the premises of all education is that somehow things might become better, smarter, wiser, more effective, from theory to very practical results. When education is seen as strictly a private good, that benefits only the person enrolled, and strictly as job training, to do work that is done right now, then any sense of hope for betterment has vanished. And a school or university becomes simply a credential mill, properly certifying new workers to do what is done now. This is wildly dissonant with ideas about innovation (disruptive or incremental) or any kind of increased efficiencies or synergies. "Self-defeated" portrays those withdraw, pull back, turn aside from any hope that things could be better than they are in any way whatsoever.
Potts' writing haunts me (I look forward to her book) because I know these people, and grew up with them in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bridgeport is or was probably a step above Clinton, Arkansas, but only a small one. In the 1950s and 1960s the attitude there was one-dimensional: work in the automobile plants, get 30-and-out, and retire early. Maybe the UAW can help, maybe not. In retrospect many people regard those times as better than they were; in reality the economy there was heavily boom/bust and the busts were not pretty. (See Daniel Clark's Disruption in Detroit, Univ of Illinois Press, 2018) In this decade Bridgeport is a shadow of its former self (which wasn't much to begin with), and the same mindset of withdrawal and going-it-alone is pervasive throughout the township. Saginaw County's population has declined dramatically since 1980 from 228,000 to 190,000 (while the USA grew from 226 million to 327 million). The neighboring school district went bankrupt, was taken over by the state, and dissolved; the local school district was in similar difficulty but seems to have become more stable in the past few years.
Potts quotes a resident of Clinton, Arkansas, "“If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it." Many from Clinton took her advice and left; many from Bridgeport, Michigan have taken similar advice, as did I. The potential for a life at anything more than just above the poverty line are very limited in both places. More than that statistical, financial poverty line is the poverty of spirit, a refusal to see what could be possible, a reluctance to band together to fight for what could be better, and a real willingness to disparage any achievement elsewhere as a sad waste of money and time.
I try to balance Potts' article with the blogs by James and Deborah Fallows that look at places in America that are re-inventing themselves, Our Towns. I try to square the demoralized, self-defeated residents of many rural corners with the attractive idea that needs further research, that some young professionals are intentionally moving away from expensive urban centers to places where life is both more affordable and more relaxed. Potts article warns: those places are not just everywhere or anywhere. For a community to re-invent itself, to fight against the self-defeatism that reigns in Clinton, Arkansas, or Bridgeport, Michigan, such a community needs a core of dedicated people, both leaders and followers, who see what an area could be, what it could offer, how it could be better --in short, a set of people who can hope and then get to work. In too many rural communities, those people simply have left, frustrated with the poverty of mind, imagination and spirit.
Potts does not mention a curious fact about Clinton, Arkansas: it has seen another, useful government intervention (with private assistance). A 1982 flood of the Archery Fork of the Upper Little Red River severely damaged the town and a subsequent channelization project sought to prevent another one. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy and the state Game and Fish Commission supported a cantilevered stream bed, a trail, and habitat restoration. I can't imagine that anyone in Clinton would be in favor of another 1982 flood (but I can imagine, "That project. What a sad waste of government money.") I can definitely imagine a familiar dismissal of the later re-engineering to provide better habitat, so that flood control would divide the community less sharply, even though I imagine few would want the old channel back. It must be an improvement, but will be dismissed as a waste. If my suspicions are correct, this is a prime example of how a community can defeat itself: a refusal to hope, a willing refusal to work together. No wonder anyone who can gets out. How poorly these people are served by the very ideology and individuals they select to preside over their local, state, and national communities.
In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?
Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.
To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,
[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .
Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."
Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120
This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!
That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:
Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.
The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!
Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.
Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.
The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison
(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)
Milano - Castello sforzesco - Michelangelo, Pietà Rondanini (1564) Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto, 6-jan-2006 - 05. Source: Wikimedia; CC-BY-2.0
I've been mulling Arthur C. Brooks article in The Atlantic, "Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think" -- cheerily subtitled "Here how to make the most of it."
My first thought was: this article has an important core, but somehow was badly edited. The title seems to have been made up by someone for whom such a prospect seems distant. The subtitle is straight-up advice-column mush. Worse, Brooks seems to have buried the lede --something that he does not do elsewhere in his writings,, and is done here in such a way that it's not a sign of his alleged decline. I cannot avoid wondering whether somehow The Atlantic's editors were nervous about this article, and whether it touched some raw nerve, perhaps in an editor closer to Brook's age than the one who titled the article.
Brooks lede is important, and worth reading and emphasis. In the course of the article, he recounts their stories, and concludes, "Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin. How does one do that?"
Well, not by working for a think-tank, no matter how distinguished. Some of Brook's nervousness seems to me to be a product of the Massachusetts Avenue hothouse in DC: the American Enterprise Institute is right next door to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and across the street from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Peterson Institute of International Economics. (I regret slighting other worthy organizations on those blocks.). Just a little competitive, no? And from this perch is one supposed not to feel old past 45?
Maybe because I've always worked in higher education I'm used these past decades to being an old person amidst the young --since I was 28, in fact. I have known so many young people, and like them, work well with them, and certainly am not threatened by them. I see their youth and ingenuity up close well enough to know that being young "before professional decline" can be a great, good thing --and not, much of time. Especially now, in the age of locked-down anxiety.
Years ago a wonderful Benedictine monk, the Rev. Fr. Gabriel Coless, who has the serene, very long-now outlook of his order, taught me a lasting lesson. Coless was reflecting on a common experience: a mannerly University building operations worker was reviving a recalcitrant air conditioner on a warm September day in a seminar room, while several students gossiped about a particularly idiotic, recent scandal involving a certain professor of theology, and the spouse of another one. Just after the uniformed, sweaty, good-natured mechanic left the room, Coless commented, "the order of practical wisdom and the order of academic intelligence have nothing to do with each other." The mechanic knew nothing of Scholastic theology, but treated people well and was intensely loyal to a wife with a long-term chronic illness. His practical wisdom outshone any of the supposed academic brilliance reposing in that other asinine, arrogant professor. Young people, no less than their elders, can confuse academic brilliance with practical intelligence, and one suspects nowhere so much as in Washington think tanks.
Brooks draws on British psychologist Raymond Cattell's distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, and finds that fluid intelligence has special valence for young people. He's right, but sparkling fluid intelligence is not much use to a considerable majority of young people, who either don't have much of it to begin with, or must cope with circumstances very different from the denizens of think tanks and the academy. Brooks example, perhaps drawn from Cattell: poets done with half their creative output by age 40, on account of the waning of their fluid intelligence? If the other half is done by, let's say, age 80, that's a lengthening and changing of creativity, but hardly its senescence. Just lately I've been reading the late W.S. Merwin, who produced such amazing work in his 80s--exactly because he was setting his mental and creative habits when he was in his 20s and 30s. His later work was nothing he might have imagined fifty years before, but he could not have done it without his earlier work. Perhaps I am merely cherry-picking a contrary example, but I believe that there are many others, as well. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, published 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year later--when she was 62-63, and twenty years after her earlier well-received fiction, Housekeeping. Her writing took a long time to crystalize. Does that mean she lost her fluidity of expression and imagination, or merely removed the incidental to reveal the essential, sculpted away the unnecessary stone to reveal the true figure?
That is Brook's most arresting and poignant metaphor --shaping his life by subtracting what is extraneous.
What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.
Printed version, July 2019, page 73
After listening to the wisdom of the Hindu sage Acharya ("Teacher"), Brooks makes four specific commitments:
Jump (leaving his current status and prestige)
Serve (fully sharing ideas in the service of others, primarily by teaching at a university --more about that in a moment)
Worship refreshment of the soul, pursuing one's spiritual heritage, shaping work itself as a transcendental commitment
Connect --becoming more conscious of the roots that bind us together, each to each (as aspen trees).
Brooks avoided E.M. Forster's "Only connect" --by now maybe trite, but still just resistant enough to mere sentimentality.
These worthy commitments and important insights were unfortunately buried under a load of repetitive citations from social science and real editorial nervousness. I wish Brooks had started his article with his account of his earlier, unhappy career as a professional French Hornist. That story leads directly to Brook's specific commitments, and foreshadowed his later encounter with some famous, bitter old man on a plane. Then distill the social science before the conclusion.
That no one can maintain peak professional performance indefinitely is no news, however many people (especially men, but sometimes women) attempt it. How many failed intimate relationships are the collateral damage of such fantasies! That intelligence and imagination changes as one ages is also no real news.
The poignant force of Brook's piece is that he realizes all this from his vantage point in elite Washington, and is willing to step away before others might wish he had. How different are the current, comparative cases of Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas --the later seems simply to have soured in self-imposed isolation beyond what even many conservatives can stomach, while the former must watch many of her life's deep commitments under assault every term. Her grace and wit outshines his embittered silence.
Brooks apparently desires to teach in a universtiy, and I wish him well. I doubt that he will have to get sucked into the machinery of academic life --advising, committee work, and empty sloganeering from so-called thought-leaders (much less the poisonous atmosphere of freedom-versus-safety controversies). I've certainly seen enough academic colleagues simply rot on the vine (in some cases with alcohol), and in other cases turn so rancid that their colleagues dearly desire their departure under any circumstances whatsoever. I've also watched faculty in the later years connect with students in a manner that changes their lives (both the students', and sometimes the teacher's). I hope the latter for Brooks, knowing that such connection is forged in a lifetime of experience, some of it unhappy, and in thinking and re-thinking about what is really important.
May the sculpture of his life reveal a strength and liveliness that would be lost in a think-tank, and may his students rise and bless his memory decades later. Only connect.
Intimidation sculpture by Michel Rathwell from Cornwall, Canada [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
Barbara Fister's post on InsideHigherEd Unkind Rewind (June 26) is totally correct about Kanopy Streaming Video's creepy tactics, contacting users directly when a library cancels its Kanopy contract. This is an outrageous abuse of user data and has the long-term effect of completely undermining librarians' trust in the Kanopy organization.
Barbara references the Twitter feed @Libskrat as an oblique reference to Kanopy complaining to New York Public Library management when a librarian spoke out about their practices on a mailing list (AKA "listserv" but that's trademarked in the USA). Kanopy referenced a supposed NDA and may have threatened legal action. If this violates any NDA my library inadvertently agreed to, then let Kanopy bring it on. I do not see any non-disclosure stipulated in the Kanopy TOS (terms of service), but other terms are fairly creepy: the requirement to submit to binding arbitration by the American Arbitration Association, which is as good as useless. I may seek to cancel my library's Kanopy account on that basis alone. I expect my University General Counsel may in fact require that I do so.
In addition, Kanopy's privacy policy allows them (at 2.(a)), in their view, to abuse librarians' trust outrageously:
We may ask for certain information such as your name, institution name, email address, password and other information. We may retain any messages you send through the Service, and we may also retain other information you voluntarily provide to us. We use this information to operate, maintain and provide to you the features and functionality of the Service, and as further described below.
Barbara Fister (back to her blog) makes one claim, though, with which I differ:
For librarians, my advice is to resist the shiny and trust we are relevant, to value the rights we traditionally have when we purchase content, and push for transparency and fairness in licensing deals.
I did not fail to "resist the shiny" when we began to work with Kanopy in 2014. My library entered into an agreement with Kanopy for good reasons.
We began to work with Kanopy, in the first place, because our Communications school (then department) contracted with Kanopy without informing the library--and then expected to use the library's proxy service. (Actually a rather ignorant former staffer there wanted every student to create her or his own login, an obvious non-starter for Kanopy.) The Communications faculty wanted access to the Media Education Foundation's Media Studies and Communication. Only later did the library add the patron-driven acquisition, user-initiated (PDA) model which proved unsustainably expensive in the past fiscal year. We did so because we needed to move the library into providing streaming video for curricular use, not because it is "shiny" (. . . and some of it is not!)
With Barbara's help (above), I realize that we happily dodged a bullet. Because we could not cut Kanopy off entirely (Communications still wants and has that MEF license), Kanopy has never contacted our users to deplore our decision to discontinue PDA. What we have done instead is more circumspect. We left Kanopy in our A-Z databases list, but publicly discouraged its use. We removed records for any videos that are not licensed from our discovery service.
When an instructor wants to use a video in class (we have some of those), we attempt to re-direct the instructor to Academic Video ONline (AVON), which we have leased from ProQuest at a more affordable (and controllable) price. If no suitable content is available, we will reluctantly authorize a PDA license for that one video --but we make sure the instructor knows how much this it costs for 365 days. If a student wants access for a class or paper, we gently deny the request. (We can distinguish student requests from faculty because students have a slightly different e-mail domain address.) We make sure that department chairs, program directors, and Deans know how much Kanopy costs. They completely support our plan to control expenses.
So my advice to librarians: don't discontinue Kanopy, simply bury them. Take them out of your A-Z databases list. Remove them from your catalog or discovery service. Act as though they don't exist. Make Kanopy your library's "frenemy." And refuse to knuckle under to anyone's mob-like tactics of intimidation.
Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience. There is no app for this. But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.
Back on January 5 (doesn't that seem like another age of Middle Earth by now?), Cal Newport wrote about what he termed "evaluation entanglement:
Evaluation entanglement. Keeping your productivity commitments all tangled in your head can cause problems when a strategy fails. Without more structure to the productivity portion of you life, it’s too easy for your brain to associate that single failure with a failure of your commitments as a whole, generating a systemic reduction in motivation.
Newport was writing in the context of New Year's "productivity tweaks," or what were once called resolutions. They usually go by the boards in a few days or weeks.
So far as I can tell, Newport borrowed "evaluation entanglement" from the physics of entangled states (Newport is a scientist) and description/evaluation entanglement in the work of Hilary Putnam (Newport is also a philosopher) --and both of these clusters disciplines are pertinent and informative for Newport's primary intellectual interest in computer science, distributed algorithms that help agents work together.
Putnam's work on fact/value entanglement liberated "thick ethical concepts" that lie under sentences such as Nero is cruel from the straightjacket of notions of fact and value judgement, so that Nero is cruel can express a value judgement and a descriptive judgement at the same time. The entanglement of facts and values is a characteristics of those many statements that" do not acquire value from the outside, from the subject's perspective, for example, but facts that, under certain conditions, have a recognizable and objective value." (Martinez Vidal, Cancela Silva, and Rivas Monroy, Following Putnam's Trail, ISBN 9789042023970, 2008, page 291)
Newport's point is simpler, but lies in the shadow of Putnam's entanglement of facts and values: a person can associate her or his single failure in one element or commitment (to productivity, in this context) with the failure of his or her commitments as a whole --and that this pervasive sense of value can generate "a systemic reduction in motivation." In other words: I want to be productive in manners or projects A, B, C, and D, "and if I fail at C, I fail at the rest, and my life rots." The fact of failure with C generates an evaluative entanglement that describes my whole life.
A life so described needs to be described in much thicker terms, however. Such failure is very rarely simple, straightforward failure.
This is where the work of Robert Kagan and Lisa Laskow Lahey at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is very helpful. They have focused on immunity to change: both individual's immunity, and organizational immunity. In their book Immunity to Change, and their large online class (I hesitate to call it MOOC) Including Ourselves in the Change Equation, they explore and describe the significant difference between undertaking technical means to solve adaptive challenges --when change is not simply a matter of altering well-known behaviors and thought, but involves adapting thinking and finding new mental and emotional complexities at work.
Based upon adaptive theories of mind and organizational theories of change, Kagan and Lahey take their students on a journey of thinking new thoughts, or telling their stories in a new way --literally, changing the narrative in such as a manner that both visible commitments to change, and corresponding hidden, competing commitments that block change, can reveal a person's (or organization's) big assumptions about the world. By holding up those big assumptions to the light of understanding and reflection, persons can question effectively and adaptively whether such assumptions in fact are valid.
I took this course last Fall, and found it to be a very rich experience. I won't reveal what my own visible commitments, hidden competing commitments, and big assumptions were --only to say that I was working on a life-long issue that affects every relationship and commitment in my life. My goal for change and understanding was something that definitely passed the "spouse test" --"oh yeah, that's you one hundred percent."
Kagan's and Lahey's metaphor one foot on the gas, the other foot on the brake pretty well summed up what I had been finding in attempting changes in my life and character. That metaphor invokes neatly an "evaluation entanglement" -- both a descriptive judgement and value judgement in the same phrase. The "thick ethical concept" is a philosophical way of telling a story --telling a narrative of your own life (or your organization's life) that frames the descriptions and the values in a certain way of thinking. Adapting such thinking to new complexities, and changing the story by expanding and deepening it, is the core structure that liberates a person, and changes and organization, from taking one example of failure as "failure of your commitments as a whole." Such increasing mental complexity and adaptive thinking is critical to avoid "generating a systemic reduction in motivation." There's nothing that defeats a person or an organization quite like the experience of seeking change but blocking change at the same time, one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. What is produced is a great deal of heat, significant atmospheric pollution, very little traction, and no progress.
Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience. There is no app for this. But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.
The nub of the argument seems to be that books are boring --well, because they are. And boring cannot stand in the age of constant distraction. The distractions of social networks, online communities of learning, and "learning how to learn" --as opposed to learning any actual content-- demand a rejection of "static, one-way conversation" of the author to reader. What a complete misunderstanding of the role of a subtle writer to a subtle reader!
This post refers back to the post of May 14, 2010, the post of August 25, 2010, and the post of January 30, 2011.
In those posts, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet. Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet. "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary." The second strand claims that "individual learning is outmoded, and that "social learning" is the cornerstone of "Learning 2.0" The third two strand asks, "is participating in online communities via social media a replacement for reading boring old books?"
Of course this question is either ironic or prejudiced --the latter if we assume that Sanger thinks that books are truly outmoded; the former if we understand (correctly) that he does not. The question as formulated does go to the nub of an argument by certain popular writers, however, that books are in fact outmoded, old-fashiong, and non-interactive. Books are alleged to "constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual." Clay Shirky, the internet theorist who always has something novel and fashionable to say, has alleged we are now experiencing a profound shift in culture in which an older "monolithic, historic, elite culture" is passing away in favor of "a diverse, contemporary, and vulgar one." This will entail altering "our historic models for the summa bonum [sic] of educated life."
Shirky's assumptions are breathtaking in their naiveté: since when is traditional Western thinking monolithic? I seem to recall that Socrates had some remarkably sharp things to say about his rivals, as did Peter Abelard, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf and other men and women who collectively make a "canon" (not even to pass to "the canon"). Shirky truly betrays the shallowness of his thinking when he writes, "... no one reads War and Peace. It's too long, and not so interesting." He does admit that his observation "is no less sacrilegious for being true."
Interesting to whom? I just spoke with a young Russian-American student who was vividly alive with reading War and Peace (in both English and Russian, his case), as well as The Brothers Karamazov --surely another book "too long, and not so interesting." One might waspishly add that interesting is as interesting does --or does not, in Shirky's case. His argument boils down to the Sophists' argument as presented by Socrates in various Platonic dialogues, notably Symposium, that the popular course will determine what is right. Ah, social networking, Athenian-style. But I suppose this is simply to appeal to "monolithic, historic, elite culture." No age lacks those who articulate obvious wisdom, the wisdom of the crowds, and tickles those crowds with it --not ancient Athens, or 19th-century Paris, or 21st-century New York University. Unfortunately Shirky's name always reminds me of Tolkien's Sharkey --the Shire-folks' name for Saruman, that speaker of half-truths extraordinaire.
The nub of the argument seems to be that books are boring --well, because they are. And boring cannot stand in the age of constant distraction. The distractions of social networks, online communities of learning, and "learning how to learn" --as opposed to learning any actual content-- demand a rejection of "static, one-way conversation" of the author to reader.
What a complete misunderstanding of the role of a subtle writer to a subtle reader! Think of seminal works of a variety of discourses --J. S. Mill's The Subjection of Women, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Karl Marx' Das Capital, even Ayn Rand-- could anyone read those texts and not engage in response and dialogue in the course of reading? Is the conversation really so "static" and "one-way"? Isn't one goal of liberal learning in fact to learn how to engage a writer, how to recognize strong points, weak points, and no points at all? Complex, dense minds require training on complex, dense texts whose meanings can be multi-layered and sometimes even self-contradictory. So much for monoliths.
This is an advocacy piece: I am advocating liberal learning in the face of so much that seeks to depersonalize young students today. I want my young students to learn to speak with their own voices, even when their voices profoundly disagree with my own. I am advocating that the traditional ideals of liberal arts education --independent judgement, imagination, care with texts, the ability to doubt both the wisdom of the crowds and the wisdom of the solitary individual-- matter intensely, and are not only valuable to our future, but essential to being human in the world.
The educational goals of Internet boosters --communal learning, substitution of crowd-consciousness for individual memory, the unique roll of co-created group knowledge-- point to a future which will be profoundly illiberal. What in such educationalist dreams might prevent the rise of another Fascism? To be sure, German liberal education did not prevent the rise of a Fascism but at least some Germans, and many other people with them, witnessesed against it. And ultimately it did not prevail. The prejudices of a digital hive or tribe could be profoundly unsettling --just ask any member of any minority. The educational methods of profound remembering --including, but not limited to, some memorization; the profound importance of individual learning with an individual voice; the importance of critical, dense, and complex texts-- this is what a liberal arts university stands for, what a library enacts, and what librarianship at its boldest embodies. It is a noble calling in an ironic age.
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