Archive for May, 2009

Ponies Can Be Allocated Directly

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst argue that it’s time to resume aid to Zimbabwe to help out the unity government.

The problem here is that while almost everyone would like to help Morgan Tsvangirai and his allies “soft-land” the Zimbabwean crisis, a lot of observers are also perfectly aware that Mugabe and his closest supporters may be using Tsvangirai and the MDC for precisely this purpose, as a way to get development money flowing back into the hands of the ruling elite. This isn’t the first time that the powers-that-be have neutralized potential opposition figures by bringing them into the government and giving them a taste of largesse, nor the first time that they’ve done just enough to try and perform fake compliance with some minimum conditionalities for aid.

I was especially struck by this paragraph from Herbst and Mills:

To consolidate progress, donors should end their ambivalence about the unity government and begin to support Mr. Tsvangirai’s aims. Development assistance can be allocated directly. Replenishing the hospitals and re-equipping schools are measurable and defined projects. More generally, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should become more publicly enthusiastic about the unity government, especially because they haven’t been able to offer a better option.

“Development assistance can be allocated directly.” Not to be a wet blanket, but how? Unless, of course, the government (still effectively dominated by ZANU-PF and Mugabe) gives permission for development assistance to be allocated directly. Which, particularly in the case of hospitals and schools, it is unlikely to grant, since that would involve surrendering some measure of control over state institutions. This is like saying, “Freedom of the press can be practiced by distributing publications freely”. Sure! If the government which suppresses freedom of the press allows that to happen.

No outside institution has a plausible plan of action for producing better governance in North Korea, either, but I don’t see why that should produce higher levels of enthusiasm for the inevitable.

Tsvangirai and his allies are in a terrible spot. Whatever can be done to help them should be done. But if there was ever a time for ironclad conditionality, this is the time. The interests behind ZANU-PF power will not share any authority that matters unless they have no other choice.

Posted in Africa | 3 Comments »

What’s Distinctive About Africanist Historiography?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Swarthmore has an elaborate system of Honors seminars. The basic premise of the system is that third and fourth year students participating in the system take four small, intensely focused double-credit seminars, three in a major subject, one in a minor subject. At the end of their time at Swarthmore, they take written and oral examinations in these subjects designed and given by experts in the field who are not faculty at Swarthmore.

I’ve always found it a very difficult challenge to design a syllabus for these seminars. I’d like to ensure that I’m not just teaching a proto-graduate seminar primarily aimed at students who will be going on to work on a Ph.D in history or anthropology: I want there to be some intellectual value in the seminar beyond knowledge of a canonical literature in my specialization. But I’ve had a hard time deciding what the appropriate framing of my specialization is to accomplish that purpose.

What I’ve settled on for the last decade and a half is a seminar focused on the history of colonial Africa, beginning roughly with the 1870s and concluding with contemporary Africa. Since I do not have a prerequisite course for the seminar, I get students with widely varying levels of prior knowledge of African history, and I have to teach the seminar with no presumptions on that score.

This is a basic pedagogical dilemma for Africanists in most institutions, with most kinds of courses. The central concept of the Honors program is that courses are being taught at an advanced, challenging level, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time just laying out a bare-bones sequential history of modern Africa. But this tends to lead to students who have some interesting, sophisticated things to say about the contradictions of indirect rule or the role of gender in colonial society but who are somewhat uncomfortable about the difference between Togo and Botswana.

It’s hard to redesign these syllabi because external examiners are often dealing with two years’ worth of students, and need to have a stable syllabus that applies to both groups equally. I’m in a “gap year” now, though, so my chance for a big overhaul has arrived. I’ve tended in the past to rely on a few big overview texts that I think have strong, interesting arguments and then to throw in a collection of books and articles that I find challenging or interesting, worth debating or discussing, with a relatively minimal organization. So, for example, two weeks on the social history of colonial Africa with a changing selection of required and extended readings.

I’ve been considering a classic strategy for redesign, which is either to go smaller, to the history of southern Africa, or to go bigger, to the history of the British Empire, with the hope of resolving the main focal point of the course discussions. One major axis of discussion has tended to be, “What’s empirically distinctive about the history of modern Africa?”, the other axis has been “How can we use African history to talk about the character, causes and consequences of modern imperialism or even of modernity in general?” The problem with the former discussion it is implicitly comparative in two ways: to premodern Africa and to other modern societies. The problem with the latter discussion is that it requires attention to theoretical and empirical debates about imperialism and modernity that aren’t limited to African examples.

The flaw with the “going smaller” approach is first that it potentially buys into the area-studies parochialism of African Studies. I don’t know that I want to solve the problem of comparison by abolishing comparison and taking a region of Africa as historically self-referencing. Second, there’s a practical problem. I’ve enjoyed inviting friends and colleagues who work on other regions of Africa to be examiners. Southern Africa locks me into a much smaller group of people (many of whom I like very much) which can just pose difficulties in terms of availability. On the other hand, however, I think I could get students to a point at the end of the semester where they were not only literate in high-level historiographical and analytical debates in this subfield, but very comfortable with concrete questions about who did what to whom at what date in which location.

The flaw with the “going bigger” approach is that it will accentuate that sense of vagueness about specificity save for a command over the history of empire as it developed in metropolitan Britain itself. E.g., I think I could get students in an Honors seminar to a point where they were very comfortable telling me about the impact of Gordon’s campaign in Sudan on British politics and on the later development of British imperialism, but at the cost of knowing little or nothing about the Mahdi or Sudanese society. Which is the classic trade-off of imperial history versus area-studies approaches to the colonial era of history in a particular region or place.

——

I’m close to settling back where I started, with a seminar that’s focused on colonial Africa as a whole. But I’d like to sharpen up the way the course is organized and see if I can’t work harder to give students in the course a comfort level with concrete knowledge of specific places, times and events.

In preparation for this redesign, I’ve been asking myself: what’s intellectually distinctive about African history as a field of scholarly knowledge? What questions has it posed in particularly interesting or compelling forms compared to the wider discipline of history? I really want to focus on one big theme of this kind rather than trying to throw everything but the kitchen sink in the mix, which has been more of my approach in the past. I come up with several possibilities. I’m thinking here of ways to organize the existing body of scholarly publication around debated or contentious propositions, not arguments which reflect my own sympathies or views.

1) The historiography of Africa is methodologically and/or epistemologically distinctive. Africanists have to think through problems of archival interpretation in creative ways, have to think about the status of oral narrative in new ways, have to grapple with debates about nomothetic and ideographic knowledge in a unique way, have distinctive issues with the validity of comparative or universal history, have to struggle with the “constructedness” of their field of knowledge in special ways.

2) The particular character of colonialism, globalizing capitalism or modern institutions in African history raises a distinctive range of questions for historians and anthropologists which has some comparative significance for understanding colonialism, globalizing capitalism or modernity in general.

3) The marginal or failed position of many African societies within contemporary global systems is a special challenge for many comparative or universal frameworks and requires historical investigation into the roots or causes of this marginality and thus to possible resolutions or addresses to these problems. (Or illuminates the extent to which all modernity is an incipient failure or in a state of unresolvable crisis, in some more pessimistic or critical frameworks.)

4) African societies (or some subset of African societies) have some distinctive material, cultural, philosophical character over their longue duree; studying the colonial era is just a way to focus an exploration of the particular character of African societies as they experienced new pressures from external forces and institutions.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Swarthmore | 6 Comments »

The Pursuit of Happiness

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

This is a good summary of the current state of work on the experience of happiness, and its implications for homo economicus and public policy based on assumptions that people are rational utility-maximizers. Makes an interesting companion to this article on the Harvard Study of Adult Development. (via 11d).

What this work shows is that we’re lousy about predicting the consequences of possible future events for our state of mind. Our reported experience of happiness tends to return to a middling point after events that we expect to make us permanently happier or sadder (such as achieving major career goals or suffering a huge disability or tragedy). I agree this is a significant rebuke to the idea that rational actors will generally select actions which increase their happiness: if happiness in the long-term returns to a default setting regardless of the consequences of our actions, then a study which concludes that one choice objectively has more utility than another is missing the point.

I agree that some of this research has interesting policy implications. If it turns out that chronic pain or constant environmental irritants are more inimical to happiness than permanent disabilities or losses, it’s possible to imagine a plausible adjustment to law and policy which could accomodate that finding.

I’m not sure the people debating the policy implications of happiness research are entirely getting the point, however. What this work also implies is that our younger selves are poor custodians of the interests of our older selves. Among other things, if you took this really seriously, it would mean that the entire idea of contract is profoundly flawed. How could I possibly make a binding commitment now on behalf of my older self, given that I have no ability to predict what will make my older self happy or unhappy? On some level, we already recognize this to be true. That’s why we have divorce as well as marriage, and allow contracts to be affected by the changed circumstances of the parties involved. This is the stuff of middle-age crisis: that we didn’t know what we were getting into, that we didn’t understand what life would be like. But if you were going to formalize the most extreme implications of this research, you’d need to see the self both as exceptionally discontinuous (that my younger self knew nothing of my older self’s needs, and therefore should have no determinate role in my older self’s condition) and as exceptionally continuous (that it doesn’t matter that much what my younger self chooses or what harm is done to me by others, because my happiness will return to a default state anyway).

Even worse, it’s very possible that knowing what makes people happy doesn’t help us to produce more happiness, either as individuals or as a society. The Atlantic article points out that the person who understands the findings of the Harvard study best hasn’t been able to apply those findings to his own life, except perhaps that he understands his own failings better than most people do. So much of what we do in public policy is aimed at the production of more happiness, more satisfaction. If it turns out that knowing why we are happy (or not) doesn’t affect why we are happy or not, a lot of dominoes may fall. Or maybe part of being happy is believing that we can be good custodians of our personal and social happiness?

Posted in Domestic Life, Miscellany | 3 Comments »

Never Happened

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Oh, well, if the truth is going to get our soldiers into trouble, by all means, let’s airbrush it out of existence. Why stop with photographs? Let’s shred all remaining records from the last eight years. We clearly need a national security-oriented amendment to the Constitution as well so that the government can use prior restraint to suppress any reporting that the Pentagon thinks could cause trouble for whatever war we’re in at the moment. Sure, people in countries we’re occupying might know a few things about how we’ve carried out the occupation, but who are they going to tell? Al-Qaida? We all know that terrorists don’t believe anything they read unless it appears in the U.S. mass media.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments »

Figgleton v. Ditchens

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

So recently there was a good bit of blogging reaction to the public disagreement between four of the most tendentious intellectuals on planet Earth: Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All four of them are prone to making and then furiously humping straw men while avoiding introspection about their own previous work and thinking. In this particular case, the issue was the muscular public atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens, which Eagleton and now Fish have criticized as ignoring the genuine virtues of religious thought.

I completely agree with the criticism that Eagleton and Fish aren’t talking about religious practice or religious institutions which actually exist in the world, but instead a secular person’s ideal spirituality, primarily concerned with the limits to knowledge, the importance of mystery, the meaning and phenomenology of human life, and so on, and that both of them rig the game so that there can be no legitimate challenges to religion. Many actually-existing religions have very strong truth claims that are expansive in scope rather than the kinds of tentative, humble embrace of the unknowability of human existence that Eagleton and Fish see as the essence of religion. Dawkins and Hitchens, on the other hand, irritate me not just because they lack even the slightest trace of introspection about their own past errors and exaggerations, but because on the subject of religion and atheism, they have such truncated tunnel-vision arguments.

A pox on the whole discussion as these four construct it. This isn’t exactly a new debate. Finding the shrillest or most tendentious formulation of long-standing arguments on these issues is not much of an accomplishment.

As with many similarly well-worn discussions, I’d just as soon review the available lines of argument about why secular or atheistic thinkers perhaps should have an interest in religion or spirituality which goes beyond being resolutely hostile, which takes religion to be an interesting subject to investigate with an open mind (rather than just finding new ways to arrive at familiar criticisms). Any of these lines of argument has its own shortcomings, and none of them seem to me to prevent strong criticisms of some or all religions, but all of them seem to me to provide some intellectual texture and complexity lacking from recent “muscular atheism” of the Dawkins-Hitchens type. It’s not that they don’t consider some of these lines of argument, but that they simply see them as speedbumps on the road to the crusade.

Here’s what I come up with when I make a list.

1. Religion is adaptive, instinctive, or inevitable (in human consciousness or in social experience), and therefore arguing against it is largely beside the point. I know that Dawkins has entertained versions of this argument, as have other evolutionary psychologists who have a critical perspective on religion. There’s a familiar dodge in this kind of argument about the evolutionary roots of a contemporary behavior of which the arguer disapproves: that the behavior was once adaptive and is now maladaptive. But this claim is often asserted rather than studied or demonstrated, usually with striking disregard for what “adaptive” means in evolutionary biology, as well as weak arguments about why the new norms are preferable. In the context of contemporary global society, in what respect is strong religious faith maladaptive? The most secular populations in the contemporary world have the lowest birth rates. Where’s the evidence that the reproductive success of religious populations is threatened by their religious belief or practices? These uses of evolutionary argument have never really escaped the intellectual failings of social Darwinism, in that they’re used to make moral or social claims about what human beings should be instead of what they are while ignoring actual evolutionary science. In any event, this kind of argument should really be a much bigger impediment for Dawkins-style atheism than it appears to be.

2. Religion is sociohistorically embedded. You could argue that regardless of one’s personal opinions of religious belief or practice, that religions and spirituality are as deeply embedded in human social organization as state sovereignty, law, kinship structures and so on. You might be able to make a philosophical argument against a specific religion or religion in general, but it would be irresponsible to allow that opposition to blind you to your intellectual responsibility to explore the complex history of religious practice and sentiment or to unrealistically assume that this history can be simply dispensed with because of the cogency of a philosophical argument. I suppose you could go from this line of argument to suggest that a passionately anti-religious person needs to understand that their political project is a profoundly revolutionary one, no different in scope than an anarchist who wants to eliminate the nation-state. And as with any revolutionary project, the scope raises a moral problem about the costs of pursuing it and a practical problem about the plausibility of pursuing it.

3. Religion is functional. This approach is where a decent number of secular intellectuals who have studied religion tend to alight, conceding that whatever the philosophical problems of religion, it serves some kind of useful long-term or short-term functions for its adherents and as such, makes some kind of sense. This argument has all the problems that functionalism has applied to any practice, but it’s still a pretty serious challenge to the strongly anti-religious, in part because the range of possible functions is so broad: psychological comfort, social networking or mobilization, territorially expansive form of political connection that doesn’t rely on kinship, enforcement of moral norms, you name it. The anti-religious might argue that these functions can be better served by other institutions or belief systems, but it’s up to them to demonstrate that. Or they can argue that these functions are themselves bad, but that’s a much harder thing to do in many cases than knocking some specific bit of theology from a given religion.

4. Local religious practices and experiences and large-scale religious institutions are different. E.g., this is the conventional “I’m not against religion, just against organized religion” argument, an observation that an anti-religious critic who reasons about all religion from the actions or beliefs of a large-scale formal religious institution is missing an important distinction. This is the reverse of what the commenters at Crooked Timber noted about Eagleton and Fish, which is that they construct an idealized philosophical account of spirituality that ignores the concrete institutional reality of religion.

5. The private or local habitus of religious life is different from the ideological life of religion. Similar to #4, an observation that how the experience of spirituality may have little or nothing to do with formal ideologies or philosophies put forth by religious organizations, and that a critical view of the latter should not be projected easily onto the former.

6. Religious ideology is a superficial gloss on top of bad social action; the bad action is not caused by religious ideology. So, for example, if an anti-religious critic were to ascribe the cause of the Crusades to the existence of religious faith or religious organizations, they might arguably be missing deeper or more powerful underlying social, economic and political causes of the Crusades. This is a fairly familiar kind of debate between historians whether we’re talking about religion or not, about whether or when cultural, intellectual or social conflicts visible at the “surface” of events are are actually causes of those events or not. I think at the least you could suggest that long lists of bad events attributed to religious faith or organizations are intellectually lazy, that almost any given event is a lot messier when you poke into it. For example, just saying that the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo’s findings and ergo, that religion suppressed scientific truth and human progress is pretty much greasy kid’s stuff as far as understanding that specific history, which also involved Italian court politics, the economic and social transformation of Renaissance Italy, debates within Western European Catholicism about many subjects, and a good deal else.

7. Religious thought and experience is a subclass of philosophical exploration of questions about the meaning of human life. This is where Fish and Eagleton are coming from, and while they make the argument in manipulative fashion, there’s certainly a more interesting version of it available which acknowledges that the norm of religious life may not involve philosophical exploration but that religion is at least one example of a broader class of such explorations, and that the broader class involves something valuable and important that cannot be provided by most scientific thought.

More? I’m fairly unsympathetic to some of these lines of argument, but I at least know that a lot of ink has flowed under all of these bridges.

Posted in Politics | 14 Comments »

It’s a Trap

Monday, May 11th, 2009

So. This Star Trek film? It’s pretty goddamn excellent. It’s sort of like the second time that a good play gets performed and the new casting is better than the old casting, the new staging is better than the old staging, the dumb lines and unworkable scenes have been edited out, the dramatic narrative shifted in good ways. It’s still recognizable as the old play, but way better in many respects.

If you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re planning to see it based on the trailer, I’m guessing you already recognize the excellence of casting Simon Pegg as Scotty. You probably are already impressed at the look of the film. Well, your presentiments are spot-on, only it’s even better. The cast nails the essence of the characters without ever sliding into a Rich-Little-style impersonation, except maybe Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy, but his McCoy is so right that it’s never an issue. The Kirk-Spock relationship is freshened up (K/S fans have some new wrinkles to work with: more in a minute) but even better, all the supporting characters are given great defining bits. Chekov in this version, for example, is so much better as a character than he ever was in The Old Show.

When the credits roll at the end, I think just about everyone will be clamoring for a sequel.

———-

So what’s the problem? Well, there isn’t one, if we’re just talking about it as an entertaining film or even as an attractive, sustainable version of Star Trek. No bashing the film for being fun and watchable here.

No, what I’m wondering is whether geeking out about the plot is part of the fun or not. Spoilers follow from here on.

J.J. Abrams makes stuff that you’re meant to geek out about. He does geek service and feeds off of geek service. So in that sense, you’d think the welcome mat would be out for thinking about the plot, the setting and all that. But in this case, I’m worried not so much that plot holes are large, but that thinking too much about them might actually deflate some of the pleasure of the film.

There are the traditional Trek gripes to have about the film, maybe preserved as much as homage as anything else. (The film has tons and tons of great little Easter eggs: McCoy calls out for “Nurse Chapel” at one moment, there’s a tribble in a cage on Scotty’s desk, and so on.)

Trek has never ever had a “total mythos” that makes any sense. Starfleet makes no sense as an organization, the Federation makes no sense as a culture, the future that Trek shows us is plainly a cardboard cutout for the fun characters and schticks to perform in front of. This film keeps with that tradition. I could just barely find a way to rationalize a Romulan mining ship from 130 years in the future being armed to the teeth with photon torpedoes that can wipe out Klingon and Federation ships with ease, and for that ship to be 50 or 75 times bigger than ships in the past. It’s one thing to be a Somali pirate overhauling a supertanker, but if a supertanker with 100 well-armed crewmen and deck guns was coming to crash into an East African port and a little pirate speedboat was given the mission to stop it, that would be another matter, and maybe comparable to the situation that the Enterprise is in. But on the other hand, it’s pretty hard to come up with an explanation for why any single Starfleet captain has all the passwords to permanently turn off every single defense that the Terran solar system possesses and why (as usual) there isn’t a constant hum of interstellar traffic (military and otherwise) around both Earth and Vulcan. A lot of Trek films treat Earth and Vulcan more like they’re the most isolated, underdeveloped and undefended locales in the entire galaxy.

Like I said, this kind of plotting is a Trek tradition. With the exception of DS9, no Trek show has ever paused long enough to work up any consistent representation of its overall setting or tried to make a single world or culture really make sense. It’s not the point of Trek, something which the original writer’s bible made clear by expressly declaring that the show would not ever return to Earth as a setting and where questions about the cultural, religious or social nature of the Federation would not be welcome. Still, at least Abrams saved some Trek traditions for the next film (or two), such as the fact that every admiral in Starfleet is secretly a power-mad authoritarian, budding lunatic or screaming incompetent.

Geeking out about all that is just the usual thing. The real issue is the choice to “sideboot” the franchise with a complicated time travel story. Time travel is NOT one of Trek’s better traditions, though it’s occasionally spawned a good episode. Russell Arben Fox has a nice entry about the way the film plays with time, causality and history in the context of Star Trek. I was thinking about some of the same issues as I watched, and in many ways, this approach was just as troubled as I suspected it might be.

One of the few clumsy bits of exposition in the film involves the central storytelling conceit: Spock pauses and comes pretty close to breaking the fourth wall to deliver the word about what to expect from Abrams’ version from here on out: that nothing is predictable about what will follow, that anything could happen, that the characters have been cut away from their prior histories.

If you look at the way the film handles the reboot with a deeply geeky eye, that declaration doesn’t really follow. The only person whose history is changed by Nero’s original timejump is Kirk. Instead of being a conventionally ambitious scion of a military family, he’s a rebel without a cause. This leads him to a bar on a night when Starfleet cadets are in town (it’s not entirely clear why they’re in Iowa: to visit a ship construction site, maybe?) which leads to a barfight which leads to him meeting Captain Christopher Pike which leads to Kirk meeting Leonard McCoy aboard a recruitment ship and enlisting in Starfleet Academy.

I’m heading into deep geekery now, so follow only if you dare. There are a lot of small but important changes which now follow on this shift. McCoy and Kirk are fast friends from the very beginnings of their career and serve together from the first moment onward, which was not true before. Presumably because of this, Kirk does not become close friends with Gary Mitchell. There’s no mention of two of his known girlfriends at this point in his life (Ruth and Carol Marcus), presumably because Rebel Kirk is even more of a devil-may-care horndog than Ambitious Kirk, and also because Gary Mitchell isn’t pimping for him.

Sulu, Chekov and Scotty still have character histories that could well be consistent with what they were before, given that we knew nothing official about them. But Spock and Uhura, on the other hand? There’s never been even the slightest hint in the old continuity that they were romantically involved. This is a nice touch, but it means that Spock’s personal history is also different at a moment in time when there’s no reason for it to be. (As is Uhura’s.) So even the rules of the premise, so loudly and mechanically declared three or four times during the film, are being broken.

By film’s end, everybody’s history is different. They’ve all come together at an earlier date in their lives than they did before. Kirk is captain of the Enterprise even earlier than he had been. Christopher Pike is not horribly disfigured and as far as we know, has never visited the planet Talos IV. Spock and other Enterprise stalwarts don’t serve with Pike. We may have glimpsed Number One briefly, but none of the cast members appear to serve with her. Gary Mitchell is not part of Kirk’s circle or one of his officers. Kirk takes command as an unrepentant rebel and hotshot with no real service record prior to becoming captain. As far as we know, the experiences that he is known to have had prior to being captain in the old continuity have not happened: he hasn’t seen a massacre of colonists by Kodos the Executioner or encountered a vampiric space cloud which kills his captain. Spock now has a completely different backstory: his mother is dead, his planet gone. Scotty’s been given technological knowledge that comes from his future (actually, have we ever seen that kind of transporting in any version of the show?). When the Doomsday Machine shows up, does Kirk even know Decker? Presumably he’s not been the butt of Finnegan’s jokes: it’s hard to imagine Rebel Barfight Kirk putting up with that kind of crap.

You get the idea. This sideboot of Trek is a bit like DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earth series, which promised a simplifying reboot of DC’s superhero comics and ended up a bleeding narrative wound, a storytelling Rube Goldberg machine. Precisely because it insists that these are the characters you already know, in the universe that they were originally situated within, but now changed by a single intervention in their timeline, it means that every story that happened to them before is now an open question. If Pike doesn’t go to Talos IV, who will? If Kirk and company don’t go to the edge of the galaxy and have a crew member endowed with incredible psychic powers, will anyone? Who will discover the Guardian of Forever now? Hard to see this Kirk as having the gravitas to fall in love with Edith Keeler if it’s this crew that does find it. Presumably there is no all-Vulcan starship to go inside a giant space amoeba and die. There’s no Vulcan to go to for pon farr, in fact, which is doubtless going to lead to horny, violent Vulcans wandering around the galaxy in confusion like a bunch of salmon confronted with new dam construction.

Then there’s the biggest headache of all: Old Spock. I was kind of stunned that they didn’t find a peremptory way to get rid of him at the end of the film: send him back to his future, drop him ambiguously into a black hole, or just outright kill him. At the least, send him off to exile. But no, he’s right in plain sight, hanging out with the surviving Vulcans, without even the fig leaf of a secret identity. (Kind of hard to do when you’re hanging out with a telepath who is your father.) So on Nova Vulcan, there’s a genius who knows how to make black holes, the Genesis wave, transwarp drives, the USS Defiant, and so on. He knows the locations and useful secrets of many planets and cultures which the Federation has yet to explore. He knows about the Borg. He knows about the Dominion. He’s trying to save the heritage and culture of the Vulcan people, so he can’t afford to be sanguine about galactic-level threats that he’s aware of. Besides, once the word goes out (and can it possibly be kept a secret) that there is one person who is the key to total power somewhere on Nova Vulcan, every galactic nutcase and conqueror will be hunting for him.

And so on. With a clean reboot, none of those questions come up but the good storytelling directions of this movie as an origin story would still be in force. So why do it? Well, there’s the obvious reason of trying to keep the old continuity viable as an intellectual property (same reason DC Comics didn’t just start every single comic over with #1 with Crisis). But I almost wonder, given that Abrams likes to see geeks laboring in the narrative saltmines, if the purpose wasn’t precisely to give Trek fans all those unbelievably nerdy questions to fret and debate about, to launch a thousand convention panels and fanfics. I’m just not sure that this is much fun, compared to trying to learn Klingon or trying to figure out the backstory to green Orion women.

Posted in Popular Culture | 27 Comments »

The Laptop in the Classroom

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Our Lady of Scathing Online Schoolmarmery forgive me, but I don’t think I will be banning laptops in my classrooms in the near-future.

The case against classroom laptops is that they encourage students to divert their attention from class, either to other tasks like email or to total goof-off activities like watching videos or porn. This is viewed as a problem not just for the distracted student but for any students able to see the offending laptop use.

For the most part, I’ve benefited from laptop users in discussions and lectures. Students who have superb search skills have introduced useful material or questions into discussion. In a few cases, I’ve had students find pertinent archival video in response to the drift of the conversation which I’ve then put up on the classroom projector.

I am sure there are students in my classes who have multitasked during a lecture or discussion. I’ll be honest with you. I’ve done the same on my laptop when I’ve been in the audience during conferences or lectures, usually email. I’ve done that in response to being bored, but I’ve also done it as a kind of thoughtful doodling while feeling quite engaged and interested in what the speaker is saying and taking copious notes. So it doesn’t worry or offend me that a student might be doing the same. If it’s because they’re bored, that’s an issue with my presentation. (Though I’m not going to take responsibility for getting universal engagement: you can’t get blood from a stone, and some students are stones.) If the audience is still being thoughtful, taking good notes, and retaining information while multitasking, why should I care?

If a student using a laptop is not paying attention at all, that’s a problem. I think the people who blame the technology may be forgetting that this is an old part of the art of being a student. Equipped with nothing but pen and paper, students have doodled, snuck in magazines, drowsed, written letters, daydreamed behind sunglasses and spent time surveilling other students in preference to watching the professor. The most outrageous example of obvious disengagement that I’ve ever seen in my own classes came last year in a room with about a quarter of the students using laptops. It was a student who brought crossword puzzles to class discussion and dutifully completed them with a bored look on her face.

I didn’t make a fuss about that behavior, so I’m unlikely to make a fuss about laptops, either. I’m not a student’s mommy and I’m not a student’s nanny. If they want to waste four expensive years, I’m not going to shake a reproving finger at them or humiliate them impersonally in the style of The Paper Chase’s Professor Kingfield. (I completely approve of those professors who want to do that, mind you. It’s just not my style.)

About the only thing that strikes me as distinctive about laptops is that a student viewing movies or images would be a unique annoyance to other students around them. If I thought that was happening a good deal, I’d be more inclined to consider a ban, or to take action against the offending student. (Swarthmore students and alums reading this post: am I right in thinking this is fairly uncommon behavior? Or have you been in my classes or other classes here fuming in annoyance over some guy watching YouTube and wishing the professor would do something about it?)

I know that my institution’s classrooms are not at all typical of the wider world of academia. Distracting laptops in lectures delivered to three or four hundred students in large universities or a night course at a community college where some students are trying to get professional retraining after working a full day are a different matter than laptops in a twenty-person discussion course at an elite college. I suspect in some institutions that the misuse of laptops is more common on a per capita basis.

At least some of the time, however, I worry that anti-laptop sentiment at other institutions is a red herring meant to distract from the real culprit: a pedagogy built around the droning delivery of static lectures (or PowerPoint slides) to huge audiences of understandably disengaged students. You could ban every conceivable distraction and order students strapped into their seats but that alone is not going to compel engagement or learning if the professor doesn’t take on the burden of keeping students engaged. The devil laptop is sometimes like the demon rum: an alibi for sins commenced long before the hated object made its appearance.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 35 Comments »

Nobody Expects the Black Swans?

Monday, May 4th, 2009

I liked The Black Swan better than John Holbo and much of the Crooked Timber commentariat. But I completely agree with a lot of the criticisms. The book itself is not a good read because Taleb gets so caught up in invective against a world that has scorned him: at times it reads like Victor von Doom’s critique of Reed Richards and Tony Stark rather than an exploration of prediction and probability. It’s also perfectly right to say that the economic events of this last year were not unpredictable nor were they unpredicted: there were quite a few analysts out there who called some aspect of the current crisis well in advance of its unfolding. If no one cared to listen, that’s an institutional and political problem, not a problem with knowledge itself.

If I find the book useful, it’s probably because I just discard all of that filler and distraction and use the book to affirm some working inclinations that I have already developed. I do think that Taleb is right that there are sudden or significant shifts in history which are in some sense both unpredictable and in retrospect, perfectly comprehensible.

My current simple take on complex-systems theory, emergence and related ideas is that this body of thought is applicable to some but not all historical transformations. I think there are some moments in human history where the simultaneous actions of many independent agents have created a relatively sudden and unexpected “phase change” which has altered the social, economic and political environment in fundamental ways which none of those agents planned or anticipated, where one system or structure of human life gives way to a significantly new system.

This is what I end up thinking of as “black swans”: moments where some novel structure of feeling or being crystallizes from a great many independent forces and actions and surprises everyone involved. I think it’s very easy to overstate how much historical change is best described in this way. What is important when this description applies, however, is to resist the usual impulse of social science to isolate determining causes, to find the real or underlying reason why change happens. This kind of change is not incomprehensible or inexplicable, but it equally can’t be picked apart into discrete causes which can be given differing weights. If we’re talking about a “black swan” in the past, we have to find a way to appreciate the total process of change, to hold as much as we can in view at one time, because it is the simultaneity of interactions between many agents and actions that produces these unexpected changes.

Change the perspective to predictive rather than retrospective analysis. What I take from my understanding of “black swans” is that this kind of transformation limits the potential horizons of predictive social science and policy built on that kind of social science. Inasmuch as there are ever black swans of the kind that Taleb describes, you can’t build a better mousetrap and plan for them. We might learn to adapt to them, to live with them, but not master them. This is fine with me, but I think this proposition sits pretty ill with a lot of scholars, to be told that you can only go so far with knowledge, that there isn’t any tool or method or research that will get you past this problem. This is where I stop to let a kind of Romantic, Counter-Enlightenment attitude get on board my personal train, and it’s in that spirit that I read Taleb’s book.

—————

Holbo takes on another aspect of Taleb’s argument, which concerns the evolutionary psychology of prediction and probability. Again, I completely agree that the argument as it is made in the book is pretty crappy.

I’m no fan of evolutionary psychology in general, moreover. But there is a kind of salvage job of Taleb’s points that would work pretty well for me. What I understand him to be saying is that in our current world, black swans happen more often than they once did, due to the density and size of the modern global system. Human beings, in his view, are cognitively adapted to an environment where black swans happen far less often.

On one level, I think that’s more or less on the money. As a species, we’re inclined toward identifying patterns and then making meaning from those patterns. We see coincidences as a hidden map of secret intentions, and try to make probability fall into regular beats and rhythms. When we predict, we usually do it by extrapolation, by guessing that the future will be like the changes we’ve recently lived through, only more so. So in this sense, we’re never going to be good at anticipating highly improbable or unexpected transformations. There’s always going to be a disconnect between our emotional inclinations about probability and our scientific understanding of it.

On the other hand, Holbo and CT commenters are completely right that in the past, black swans happened all the time at the microhistorical level of individual human lives. Maybe premodern societies were less prone to black swan events at the macrolevel, but in any past society, ordinary human life was constantly shadowed by unpredictable change, by moments where many forces and actions converged to produce a new way of being or living or thinking for one person or for a small group of people. In this sense, black swans aren’t a unique affliction of modernity, nor can it possibly be true that we’re seriously maladapted to them. Maybe we’re not inclined to expect such transformations, but at the same time, we’re often able to roll with the punches when they happen. In the aftermath of both microhistorical and macrohistorical black swans, the really amazing thing is the extent to which an abruptly strange and alien past is quickly forgotten or reimagined to conform to the newly normal.

Posted in Books, Miscellany, Production of History | 4 Comments »

Why Can’t You?

Monday, May 4th, 2009

I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question I’m still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why can’t they create it? Wouldn’t it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study?

I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking about it during the conversation, I tried to map out the range of existing answers that scholars and critics have offered at various times. Here’s what I came up with off the cuff as variant kinds of responses to this issue, quickly sketched.

1) Yes, it is better to have creative experience if you aim to critique or teach about expressive culture. So there are some who would say that a cultural critic should have at least tried to create the form that they’re primarily interested in. There are some branches of academic criticism where there is a greater number of people with that kind of experience in the form.

2) Scholarly criticism is just a refinement or deepening of the critical response of audiences in general. Since audiences form stable, long-running views and understandings of expressive culture (which most creators acknowledge are important, since they depend on audiences or actively want to affect or please them), scholarly criticism derives legitimacy from the distinction between audience and creator, representing the response of the audience.

3) Consumption of culture and creation of culture are interdependent activities but they are also strongly distinctive from one another in both their form and their function. Criticism has its own norms, integrity, theory, character and aesthetics. I’d say this is the most common, orthodox opinion among scholarly literary critics over the long haul.

4) Cultural creators do not have a transparent or expert knowledge of even their own creations, let alone the creative or expressive work of others, experience does not create communicable knowledge that can be shared with others. That takes scholarly study, which can create knowledge which the producer of expressive culture may not have, even about their own work. Variant form: just because you’re experienced at making something, you may not be capable of teaching others how to do it or explaining what other creators are doing. Taken to its extreme, this view suggests that criticism is the higher-order activity, more intellectually demanding. The “intentional fallacy” and “the death of the author” live somewhere within this precinct as well.

5) Academic or expert critics study less of the content or form of expressive criticism and more of the sociology, economics of publication or performance, history and psychology of expressive culture. E.g., this proposes a straightforward division of labor (the creator knows about the work itself; the critic knows about all the external conditions which govern the work).

6) Creating culture is an independent activity of high worth; criticism a dependent one of less worth. Criticism is separable from creation, but it’s lesser and ought to be humble about its dependency on the first-order activity of creators. Possibly this line of argument also includes a charge to critics that they be respectful about the difficulties of creating culture. Unsurprisingly popular with some authors and cultural producers…

7) It’s important to have cultural criticism, and a critic should know something about doing work in a given medium, but some media do not allow for individual acts of creation due to technological or financial barriers.

More?

Posted in Academia | 17 Comments »