Little Brother

In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984, we are invited to view a future where Fascism has triumphed. Every aspect of our lives are monitored by the state, and giant posters of Oceania's omniscient dictator plaster the streets with the caption: “Big Brother Is Watching You”! Such were the fear's of a post-war Britain and U.S., and such are the similar complaints made today by the Tea Party and traditional conservatives everywhere.  However, what they fail to recognize is, in the words of Pogo Possum: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I live in a relatively small town, worn out by corruption, unemployment, and a prescription pill epidemic that has garnered it national fame. I am also a writer, who enjoys getting away from the distractions of home to sort out my thought's, and to take in the fresh air where I can find it. Apparently these are two mutually exclusive conditions doomed to inevitable conflict.

Being an indigent community, areas set aside for solitary reflection are few. I am normally left with but two choices, a place along the river or, the city cemetery, which is not the morbid place it might at first seem. It's generally well maintained with many beautiful trees for shade in the summer, and a show of colors in fall.

Unfortunately, these same two places are also warrens for drug trafficking and prostitution, which keeps the local police perpetually occupied. On one occasion, alarmed perhaps by my repeated presence, I was questioned by them. I was somewhat tickled by the excessive lengths they took before approaching me. It took two officers in two police cruisers pinning me (the dangerous suspect) in from both sides, so I wouldn't make a dash for it I suppose, and made up some excuse about suicides in the cemetery to legitimize their action's, although I had never heard of any. They seemed genuinely surprised to find a man simply eating his lunch, and were a bit credulous that I had not been up to something more.

Likewise, the river front offers little difference. More known for prostitution then drugs, visitors are more likely to stare in at you rather than out towards the river as they drive by, the view of which they are ostensibly there to enjoy in the first place. For you see, a parked car there at anytime of day is always suspected of harboring a street-walker, and passersby simply can't help but indulge their prurient side in hopes of catching one at her trade. All of this leads to some questions: How much privacy may we expect in public? And how can we judge the state for its spying when we're happy to do the state's job ourselves?

There is no shortage of debate, both legal and ethical on where the boundary lies. One must assume that, to be in a public place is to expect that one is on display, that one has considered this, and willingly put themselves at the discretion of social scrutiny.

However, this appears too pat. There are various levels of “public”, from what one overhears of a conversation at a distance, to one who consciously crawls on all fours behind the park bench. If one is standing in the middle of an open field we might argue that that person has fully accepted that they will or may be stared at. On the other hand, sitting in one's vehicle with the doors closed may indicate a person's desire to be left alone. The fact that many have their windows tinted would seem to indicate this even, and especially if, the intention is to hide from the law. (That a car is not a private residence is of little matter. Considering the current job market there are plenty of citizens who have been reduced to making their vehicles home sweet home.)

Getting back to my original point, it is less the local police that annoys me then other citizens and their knowing smiles. Everyone is Mother Superior now. The young are merely seeking to catch you in some illegal act for a laugh, the aged consider themselves the arbiters of morality, and thus duty bound to interfere.

When it comes to the elderly snoop I have some slight empathy. No doubt they are often acting out of a sense of misplaced civic responsibility, perhaps even concern. However, the irony of their prying appears lost on the individual. If it is indeed taxes they wish to squabble about, perhaps we should give them their wish, shut down the police departments across the nation, and return to the institution of the Night Watch, were Grandma' and Grandpa' may volunteer to interfere in the action's of their neighbors and make the impersonality, and thus impartiality, of law a thing of the past.

Fact Or Faith

"I have become more and more concerned over the last 10 years by the extent to which even intelligent, even college-educated people can end up being sucked into these little black holes of absurdity." Stephen Law

Those of us of a skeptical disposition are often derided at the first opportunity. So and so saw a ghost in her bedroom, such and such felt a “presence” in their basement. This is quickly followed by the usual self begging question: “How do you explain it?” For them, a personal anecdote is all the evidence they require, and the inability to instantly explain away the tale of someone you've never met, in a place you've never been, in a situation that cannot be repeated without the advent of time travel, is in its self an absolute law. If such were the evidential minimum required of our legal system, many an innocent man would long since have hanged.

This is not to say strange things don't happen, only, what one might find inexplicable, and therefore supernatural, is more often perfectly explicable and very natural with the right skills and the knowledge of what to look for. For instance, we often find our friend the baker assuring us that the red spot on our neck is skin cancer, only to have a dermatologist diagnose a rash.

Human beings cannot bear to be without explanation, and so they grab the quickest one to hand when all others seem to fail in magnitude to the response. Certainly emotion plays its role in the rush to judgment, and those already predisposed to believe a certain way will more quickly interpret any unusual experience through that very personal lens. It is for this reason Mexican Catholics see the Virgin Mary in tortillas but not the Buddha.

Lack of objectivity is the problem but critical thinking can in large part by a solution. To examine any experience properly, or belief for that matter, we must always be willing to play devil's advocate and consider its opposite. Most people believe they are fair, but when it comes to giving the benefit of the doubt, that same majority are all too quick to hand in their verdict. We know these people, may even love one or two of them, and for that same reason hope, not to change their minds, but give them the means to change them for themselves.

To the believer belief is enough. Disagreements are matters of opinion, an argument is a string of obscenities, and the mindset of the believer is such that they “feel” they are incapable of being deceived. Basic critical thinking skills are so rare that they can be forgiven an ignorance of logic, but to not concede that one can be mistaken is to turn Papal Infallibility into a commonplace. Have they never seen a magic act?

Yet, the fact that this is a faith belief is not the crux of the matter. Faith is beyond proof, if it were not so it would not be faith. And, though the skeptic may grow irritated by the use of this intellectual dodge most of us are willing, in a person to person context at least, to lower our sword's and play nice.

However, this is not enough, the believer must have it both ways, both faith and fact, and in the attempt to have it so they unknowingly break all the basic rules of argument. What makes for even more frustration is that you cannot bring them to see that there are any rules at all. They cannot be fooled, and in believing so break the first rule of the examination of any argument: they can't be wrong.

It is the skeptic who is immediately accused of arrogance and close-mindedness, but if the believer can never be wrong who is being truly arrogant?

The Meat Grinder

In the past few years a number of books have appeared attempting to account for the astonishing fact that most college graduates appear to be leaving school with as little knowledge as they went in with. The most impressive of these, and the only study apparently ever conducted to specifically determine what students learn, is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.ⁱ It's authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, studied 2,300 students at a diverse number of four-year colleges only to find the majority graduating with no significant improvement in learning gains. But, most important was the poor performance in the core skills of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.ⁱⁱ

These are skills not secondary to one's degree, but are regarded as the principle qualities every student should show some improvement upon. They are the crucial stepping-stones to personal enrichment, individual thinking, and the fundamental distinguishing characteristics between one who has had limited to no education, and one who is said to be “educated”.

Traditionally it is the humanities which held this task in trust, although the sciences now play their part as well. However, it is those very same disciplines in the humanities which are now under threat as funding for their departments and faculty disintegrate. The last result of the increasing corporitization of higher education.

No longer do we go to college to seek enrichment and personal growth, it has become much too expensive for that. Rather, we go now for a course of “training”. This is of course a necessity in a capitalist society. Businesses, if they are to be run effectively must, like the government, require bureaucrats. The more esoteric practices of the humanities, and many of the more speculative sciences are too abstract to be of any immediately perceived value. In other words, they make no money.ⁱⁱⁱ

A direct consequence of this corporatization of universities has been the expansion of them throughout the country like fast food franchises. From cause to affect, the need to keep up with demand requires a steady supply of PhDs to in turn manage these training stations. And thus, in very little time the importance of quantity over quality becomes paramount.

As with all abstract concepts, a little illustration is useful. There are many professors now (and they know who they are) who, being the products of similar institutions, are as poorly equipped with the skills described above as their student's will be when released into the world. They are often easy to distinguish. They have the reputation for being the “easy” teacher, and have published little or nothing by the way of genuine research through peer review. Having landed the perfect position they can gratify their ego's with the title of professor on their door, without putting in the effort the duties such a title have come to imply.

Their “research”, as it is so called, is often research in name only. Usually related to some aspect of popular culture such as vampires or conspiracy theories, these studies can be useful when used in conjunction with other disciplines, or serving to elucidate a small part of a larger thesis, but more often are intellectually inbred, remaining within their own tiny spheres of meaningless minutia that, viewed without the prism of a doctorate to lend them some form of legitimacy and seriousness, are exposed as the pedantic concerns of, for lack of a better term, nerds.

While many of these “scholars” will plead that teaching, and not publishing and research are their main motivation for a life in academe, this would merely be a slap in the face to their colleagues throughout the world who are required to publish to improve their pay and secure their increasingly endangered position's. Ambition too is a motivation, a useful virtue which aids progress by striving for excellence. Likewise, it should be remembered that not every soul can be content with mediocrity, nor lucky enough to find an employer who cannot tell the difference.

These pseudo-scholars don't submit their idea's to their peers because they simply have none, and are blessed with a captive audience of credulous, ill prepared students who lack the critical thinking skills to call them out on it. Thus, like the worm that evades the hook they survive un-baited, and can bask in the undeserved praise of students and witless small town citizens, while continuing to bulk up and rarefy with pretension their little hobbies at the expense of parents and the state.

Arum and Roksa cite studies which point to a lack of rigor, or the feeling of being challenged in most students, who find to their surprise that college is far simpler than they had at first imagined. It is suggested that students generally prefer to be challenged, however, when given the choice of the easy course over the more difficult one, the majority almost always take the former over the latter as a matter of human nature. I imagine it is much the same in the pseudo-academic examples given above. Why engage with truly demanding concepts when one can listen to what amounts to repeats of the History Channel in a more pretentious setting, and delude one's self with the belief one is still doing meaningful research.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. As colleges are now businesses, their only concern, without government intervention, is to acquire all the consumers of its “product” that they can with all the rhetorical enticements that they may. If the product they offer can be delivered on the cheap, all the better for their profit margins. Their concern is merely to fill seats, not provide the quality attention and instruction to keep you there.

Finally, as a purely business enterprise, most colleges have no incentive to improve the condition of current primary education, and likewise, public education sees preparing students for higher education as secondary to their goal of scoring their own badly needed government funds. This institutionalized system of self-interest may also help explain the increase of the assembly line PhD if they too began their educations in our sub-par public school system. Nevertheless, public schools have much to answer for in their apparent failure to properly prepare students for education beyond High School, the inevitable outcome of a government whose priority is to make bombs and not books.

Academically Adrift has helped to reveal that students, like their teacher's, have become uncritical products with a shiny gloss giving the appearance of knowledge on the packaging, only to find the contents of small value to justify the advertising. Much like the sausage business, you only get the quality to come out that you put in.

iRichard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University Of Chicago Press, 2011).

iiKevin Carey, “‘Trust Us’ Won’t Cut It Anymore,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2011, sec. Commentary, http://chronicle.com/article/Trust-Us-Wont-Cut-It/125978/.

iiiFrank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, 3rd ed. (Fordham University Press, 2008).

Household Words

Some time ago I was directed to the trailer for a new film soon to be released.  Its name, Anonymous, appears to tell the tired fable that Shakespeare didn't write the works of Shakespeare, but rather some apparently more worthy aristocrat.

The thesis has long ago been shown to hold little but hot air by established scholarship.  In fact, it is looked upon by the main stream in the same light as Creationism is by Paleontology.  The fact that such crackpot theories exist does not surprise me so much however as the people who hold them.

Many actors, including the otherwise perspicacious Derek Jacobi, who gives the prolog for the film, have fallen victim to this spell.  However, as actors are not the best thinkers, to take such a position should not surprise us.  They are creatures ever greedy for praise like trained dogs, and snobbery plain and simple must always be the motive for action in a soul which has no meaning outside of applause.  What does surprise me is the credence given to such ideas by no less than the likes of Mark Twain, who wrote a brief book on the topic, Is Shakespeare Dead?

At first one would think the phenomenon that was Samuel Langhorne Clemens would be the first to root for the boy from Stratford.  They both had similar backgrounds.  Both were born in the country, and never forgot it.  Both were given the barest education (in Twain's case even less).  And both are seminal figures in the literature's of their respective nations, who arose from backwater towns to great wealth and renown.

Yet, I think the motive is plain to see when one digs a bit deeper.  Like the self-hating Jew, there is a similar self-repudiation that often arises in the poor boy who does good.  So ashamed of their origin's they are quick to turn their backs upon members of their former caste, embarrassed to have ever been associated with them.  This I think is the real source for his judgment, a hidden humility.  Twain, like many who have come after, could not accept such gold arising from such dross.  Such concerns are perhaps what fed his secrecy in later years to preserve his image at least within his lifetime, and consign his true opinion's to an age that perhaps would no longer care, as witness his autobiography which was only released in the past year.

Shakespeare's contemporaries had no doubts about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare.  Few even recognized the miracle that had walked amongst them to have bothered with a coverup.  His great contemporary Ben Jonson was moved to call him "Soul of the Age", but still felt enough his better to chide him for his "small Latine, and lesse Greeke".

Perhaps there is something to be learned from both of their example's.  Genius is often not "to the manor born", and human shame and human envy are all too human things to ever die.

Edward Gibbon, Mythbuster

The Temple was destroyed A. C. 70; the attempt of Julian to rebuild it, and the fact related by Ammianus, coincide with the year 363. There had then elapsed between these two epochs an interval of near 300 years, during which the excavations, choked up with ruins, must have become full of inflammable air. The workmen employed by Julian as they were digging, arrived at the excavations of the Temple; they would take torches to explore them; sudden flames repelled those who approached; explosions were heard, and these phenomena were renewed every time that they penetrated into new subterranean passages. This explanation is confirmed by the relation of an event nearly similar, by Josephus. King Herod having heard that immense treasures had been concealed in the sepulchre of David, he descended into it with a few confidential persons; he found in the first subterranean chamber only jewels and precious stuffs: but having wished to penetrate into a second chamber, which had been long closed, he was repelled, when he opened it, by flames which killed those who accompanied him.

The passage above comes from Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and concerns Julian the Apostate's failed attempt to rebuild the Jewish Temple. For much of Christianities history, the failure of this last pagan emperor to discredit scripture by attempting to contradict the word of Christ, was seen as a miraculous vindication of the faith.

Two millennia later, the English historian Edward Gibbon, equipped with the tools of the Enlightenment, made perhaps the first secular analysis of an event earlier treated by Church historians with little scrutiny.

In the following excerpt he gives a more reasonable explanation that fits the accounts, and in the process reveals what a little time and knowledge of chemistry can do to bring down ancient perceptions:

It is a fact now popularly known, that when mines which have been long closed are opened, one of two things takes place; either the torches are extinguished and the men fall first into a swoon and soon die; or, if the air is inflammable, a little flame is seen to flicker round the lamp, which spreads and multiplies till the conflagration becomes general, is followed by an explosion, and kill all who are in the way. - G.

My intent in discussing the excerpt above and the footnote that follows it were not so much to display a great writer's powers of observation and irony so much as to display those qualities of the Enlightenment at work here in miniature.

Gibbon characterized himself as a “philosophic historian”. Much has been made of this title, which I won't go into depth about here, but briefly it is a change in the way in which historians did history. No longer were explanations for events to be sought for in the divine will or superstition, but evidence was to be judged and scrutinized without recourse to theology or fate. As with the birth of the sciences, explanation for phenomena were to be sought in nature and no longer simply passed over as mystery. For much these same reasons the writing of history would pass from the hands of educated gentlemen of leisure such as Gibbon, and become the sole province of the “specialist”.

Whether we have lost or gained by this arrangement I leave it up to the reader to decide.

Tolle Lege

It has been well over two years since I purchased, what has come to be generically termed, an e-reader. I have written two previous articles on the topic, and since then, I have had little reason to modify my original judgment's. To a bibliophile of the first water it has become a simply indispensable tool in my daily life, has in fact become almost a part of myself, and with a minimal investment to purchase, has in the long-run saved me perhaps hundreds of dollars. Yet, cynics and misapprehensions remain so I wish to set about clearing them away.

One complaint I continue to hear is the fear of being “locked-in” to a device, as though one were shackled to it till the end of time like Satan in his adamantine chains. This is only true within a limited context. If you own for example, as I do, an Amazon Kindle, there are thousands of titles you might purchase directly through Amazon's online store. This is the contentious part as, once purchased, you cannot technically then read those books upon any other e-reader (although you can still access them through any computer with a free reading app) due to something called DRM or, digital rights management. This is a bit of encoding that prevents you from easily doing what ever you wish with what you have just purchased. I say easily for, whatever a man hath done another may undo. A copy of the book can be quickly enough downloaded to your computer, ostensibly for “manual” uploading to the device, but this copy can then be released from DRM's protective custody and make its way in the world.

Again, with the Kindle, its MOBI format is incompatible with any other e-reader but, there are multiple methods of getting around this by simply converting the MOBI file into some other format. The means of doing this are so numerous and effortless to employ that, if you have any trouble doing it yourself after a little practice it may be doubtful if you should have a computer at all.

Most of these points are largely moot to me, as I have purchased only a few books from Amazon as they intended. The overwhelming majority of books at any one time on my device are what are colorfully referred to as “bootlegs”. Due to the ridiculous price of many e-book titles and the enormous restrictions placed upon what you may do with your purchase once you've purchased it, many see it as a duty to spread the wealth wherever they can, much as the bootleggers of prohibition saw it as their duty to drink to protest an unjust law---right.

As to the ethics, or lack of such, for this practice I have few qualms. As a writer who has never expected any payment other than a few patient readers, the dream that someone would wish to possess my words by going to this trouble to obtain them would be worth more than the few cents I would receive in royalties.

Finally, after all of these technical considerations I would like to talk about the medium of reading as a medium. As someone who considers himself to be a scholar, books are more like the paint one might use on a canvass than the canvass itself. A painter could care less about the appearance of the container in which the paint arrives, although they may quibble about the merits or demerits of a brand. Many bookish people, often ultra-liberal in other things become downright old-fashioned conservatives when it comes to the printed codex. I myself was at one time so enamored with it in this way I forgot its the paint that matters and not the tube its dispensed from.

In another essay I briefly detailed my old method of carrying a small, to put it lightly, library with me wherever I went. For anyone who reads as deeply and widely as a scholar must, any such arrangement becomes terribly circumscribing, and finally unsatisfactory. Besides the problem of portability, there is the factor of cost. The vast majority of my reading is naturally taken up with academic books and, for anyone who has gone to college even briefly can testify, they are not cheap. And so, unless one lives near a well-supplied academic library, or can afford to buy the needed volumes on demand, the amount of work one can do becomes increasingly limited. Texts beget texts as no scholarship arises in a vacuum, and the very frequently free digital copies of otherwise cost prohibitive tomes I can make away with, makes life just a little sweeter, and the scholarly drudge can use all the sweetness he can get.

What is more, as my title for this essay suggests, to have your library in a single space and at your command at any hour wherever you may be encourages an intensity and frequency of reading I had rarely known previously in my life. You no longer simply read books, you devour them.

Is Jon Stewart Conscious?

[For a related post see: The Daily Grind]

As all private media has only the bottom line of profit as its goal, it has become a prerequisite of modern discourse that one be entertaining if one seeks to be heard for very long. As a consequence of this our greatest social critics are almost inevitably entertainers, mostly comedians. Such a state of affairs is accepted with joy by many on the left, as humor is an excellent way of quelling dissent. However, there are consequences not readily recognized of turning the institution of the public intellectual into, what is in reality, a branch of the entertainment industry.

I will begin, for those not familiar, with a simplified description of the Marxist concept of false consciousness. It is essentially a state of acceptance of the status quo as a byproduct of growing up within a capitalist society. From birth one is indoctrinated with the ideology that capitalism is all that has ever been, and that no alternatives are possible. It is for this reason that the working poor so often vote against their own best interests. It is in the interests of those at the top to keep those at the bottom from considering the possibility of change. In this way capital forestalls revolution by keeping the would be revolutionaries in a state of disillusionment. In the case of wage slavery, where one must live week to week without the ability to save, the worker also falls into a form of dependency where one becomes resigned to continue as one always has rather than risk the uncertain outcomes of change.

Where in this does the comedian as public intellectual stand? All major media outlets are the possession of capital. What capital legitimates the media legitimates, and the public, conditioned to accept the authority of media, confirms capital in its prejudices. This is not to imply some hidden agenda agreed upon in advance by capital, it is merely the way in which capital unintentionally undermines its own critics by commodifying their popularity, making them in effect advocates of the status quo despite themselves.[1] And so, although there are many examples of criticism and satire in the media, their audience is either too small or too unsophisticated for collective action. The very existence of such voices however, serve to quell dissent as demonstrations that free speech is alive and well, yet the dominant voice always heard is the voice of capital, and capital speaks for the status quo.

Again capital, seeing any phenomenon in society that draws conspicuous attention to its self, by its nature attempts to commodify that phenomena.  It is here that I now turn to the example of Jon Stewart to illustrate my point.  In entertainment, the entertainer becomes the product.  You are not just selling your skills or talents in the ordinary sense considered under labor power.  It thus becomes even more important to create an "image".  Stewart illustrates for us this point by changing his name.  Born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, it is often explained that his name change was due to a poor relationship with his father.  This is understandable but perhaps too simple.  It would seem odd then that he simply would not have changed it to Laskin, his mother's maiden name.  The problem is that this is still a Jewish name, and for someone wishing to enter the entertainment industry any such association becomes a handicap.

Stewart has argued that he is merely a comedian, but his influence belies this attempted dismissal of responsibility. As a product he has become alienated from himself, and his professional need to be entertaining and his, no doubt, honest desire to tell hard truths have created a conflict of interest that does a disservice to both aims.  Is it fair to say this is a form of false consciousness, that Stewart, having grown up within the system is unable to recognize his own part in it?  If nothing else it perhaps reveals the near impossibility of obtaining influence outside the power structure of capital.