Then again…

I was talking recently with a friend who roasts coffee. He pointed out that the best coffees are grown under stress in poor soils at high altitudes. Yield is low but concentration and complexity is great. Valley-grown coffee from well-watered, fertile soils is the bulk crap that fills out low-end consumer coffees like Folgers.

The same is famously true of wine grapes. The best are grown in poor, rocky, badly-watered soils on vines that have been severely pruned. Bigger yields from happy vines produce bland, watery extract for the supermarket plonk.

A few months ago there was an interview in Tennis magazine with Toni Nadal, Rafael’s uncle and coach. He was asked about Rafa’s motivation and talked about deliberately creating stress in his training to toughen him up. “We practiced with some bad balls, bad court, bad bounces. So he learned. When something goes wrong for him, he doesn’t blame the court, the bounce or the strings. He always blame himself for not doing better. So now he’s a very tough person” (Jan/Feb 2009). I seem to remember reading something years ago about Penny Hardaway learning his superb handling of the basketball by playing on very bad dirt courts with terrible bounces. Father Earl Woods is renowned for training son Tiger’s focus by yelling at him, jingling keys and otherwise distracting him while he swung the golf club.

And of course, Michael Jackson ruled the world of pop music before flaming out. Would he have had that same drive and focus without the adversity of his childhood?

My friend was toying with names for this observation about the positive function of stress. I suggested the “Dune” theory, after Frank Herbert’s science fiction novels in which the desert people, the Fremen (modeled after 7th century Arabs), end up ruling the galaxy because of the superior toughness and intensity their hard, marginal lives have cultivated. Actually, much of Herbert’s oeuvre is devoted to exploring the effects of extreme stress and hardship on fully developing human potential. The same could be said of C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union novels. More comically we could call it the “Star Trek” theory after all those times the Enterprise finds an idyllic world of contented people and Kirk violates the Prime Directive to destroy their stultifying happiness and liberate their full potential through exposure to healthy misery. Nothing new to ascetics from various traditions and pursuits about the idea that salvation comes through suffering, of course. No pain, no gain.

I’m struck sometimes by the bind that members of oppressed groups are in as they struggle for recognition. On the one hand the narrative of exceptionality nurtured in shared hardship is affirming and plausible. On the other hand, if what makes you special is your trials and challenges, what happens when those are overcome? Who will you be then? What will you think of your happy, complacent, drifting children?

My own happy, complacent tendency to drift attunes me awkwardly to this question. I admire the edge and drive of the hardlifers, but don’t envy their angst. The costs of this process seem acceptable with beans and fruit, not so much with people. It’s probably the rare human who thrives under extreme and arbitrary stress. You’ve got to be prepared for some waste and breakage if that’s your game. As any drill sergeant knows there is a system to toughening up a batch of slackers without ruining them, and even then there will be some loss. Often stress just beats us up and breaks us down.

It’s probably important that Rafa, Penny and Tiger were all otherwise well-loved and nurtured, and that the best coffee bushes and grape vines are tended with great care. Wouldn’t it just be too boring and stupid if it turned out yet again that the key is mindful moderation and balance?

Creative abuse

It would be totally ok if I never developed or expressed an opinion about Michael Jackson. He stopped being appropriately interesting as a public figure twenty years ago (like everyone else I loved those two albums), and now that he’s returned to biomass (ashes and dust, in the old diction) he’s at one with all the other fertilizer. But this video at Crooked Timber triggered a thought to dump into the storm drain with all the other MJ ephemera. Here we have the Jackson 5, whose cartoon I used to watch religiously as a kid, doing their thing:

Of course it’s odd to have a kid his age at the time done up like a playa and singing these lyrics steeped in the narcissism and jealousy of bad relationships, but there’s nothing unique about that; precocious worldliness is page one of the child-star playbook. What struck me was the lip-syncing. Again, nothing unusual; but in the context of an abusive father and ruptured home life, this is a kid whose formative years were steeped in simulated reality and the disconnect between public and private worlds. His later unraveling just wasn’t much of a surprise, I’m afraid.

Some years ago I had the privilege of knowing a family of uncommonly intelligent and creative people. They were delightful and successful; the father was a respected professional and pillar of the local church, the mother was a nurse and educator, the kids had exceptional talents for engineering, law, sports and art. As it turned out, these appealing public faces were projected into the world from an arbitrarily judgmental and incredibly violent home. The imperative to hide this reality was explicit and brutally enforced. Over time three of the kids (that I know of, we’ve lost touch), the most sensitive and creative, cracked under the pressure and developed crippling reality disfunctions. The others were disabled to varying degrees by negative interpretation biases and the energy they had to expend to cope with their anger and anxiety.

Thinking about these friends and Michael Jackson confirms a common observation. Adding reality abuse to literal abuse is bad business. If the kid’s not very imaginative you may get lucky and just end up with a jerk, just another foot soldier of disappointing humanity. But the creative ones are going to take that lesson and create dark realities. It’s especially bad when they use light materials like children to do it, as MJ and my friends’ father did.

Giving offense, again

Hate to repeat myself, so here’s a repost of one of this blog’s earliest posts (go to original for orienting links and context) reacting to a previous blogtastic etiquette poo storm. When things irritate me I either ignore them or try to make sense of them. This is the latter.

(April 28, 2008) As I get more and more drug into the world of blogging I find exciting new friends to swap ideas with. This is a great pleasure. I also find all sorts of tender feelings to trample upon, virtual shoulders covered in virtual chips. I’m still thinking this all through, although, as a lifelong bull in a china shop, I’ve already got some firm ideas on the subject….

It strikes me in a half-baked way (I’m not even sure if I’m just talking about the blogosphere or I have a larger historical point to make) that there are two basic ways to give offense, with corresponding ways to manage courtesy. The first is to offend a role, position, or status with which the person is identified. The second is to offend the individual as such. Following Durkheim (tongue in cheek, since he ended up regretting this formulation), I’ll call these mechanical offense and organic offense. I am not making fun here, although I am personally very hard to offend and emotionally baffled by easy offense-taking. Both mechanical and organic offense are ‘robust’ in the sense that they connect back to the deepest ways in which our societies assign sacred values.

The core of mechanical offense is an idea of special privilege or “honor” within a status hierarchy as exemplified by “nobility.” Those nobles guarded their special privilege with a fierce sense of honor backed up by ritual violence (the duel). One had to be really careful what one said and how one said it to nobles because they were really chippy and spent a lot of time training with the weaponry at hand. Elaborate rules of courtesy were devised to intercept any possible infraction. As the nobles lost control of the means of legitimate state violence during the modernizing process (I’m talking, as usual, mostly about western Europe here) their private honor became even more chippy and even more ritually violent, until eventually you just weren’t a man in central Europe if you couldn’t ‘give satisfaction’ in a duel, weren’t in a dueling society and didn’t have duelling scars on your cheeks.

I’ve noticed a fair amount of dueling on the blogosphere. In a nietzschean way I kind of enjoy it as an enactment of a robuster form of self-assertion. But the core of any taking of offense is insecurity; and most of the offending and defending I see is of the second, more overtly insecure type which I’ve called organic offense. Here it is the individual her/himself who is considered sacred and inviolable, not their role, position or status. Accordingly, the person may assign offendable meaning to anything about her/himself whatsoever; in principle, only she/he can decide when a line has been crossed. This makes any detailed system of courtesy like the nobles had impossible.

It is therefore courteous to announce what one’s delicate areas are, but in the free flow of the web such announcements would need to be constantly refreshed or they would be left outside the reasonable attention of any given interlocutor. This would create quite a lot of clutter. On a blog where there may be dozens of commenters it is unrealistic to suppose that each new one would ascertain the personal rules and boundaries of all the others before posting. As a result, there’s a lot of casual giving and taking of offense, as well as clustering of offense communities. There’s also a lot of not saying anything but ‘excuse me, pardon me, coming through’ as all of the possible hurt feelings are anticipated and intercepted. The fussbudget veto is powerful and the pressure to self-edit is enormous. And the aggregate of offendables is virtually infinite; it may be impossible to say anything that would not offend someone.

All of this ties back to a more general feature of modern societies, again diagnosed by Durkheim. As traditional role and status hierarchies break down and the division of labor creates massive networks of functional interdependence, the individual becomes the focus of societies’ sense of sacredness. We just don’t know enough about each other to regulate each other, so self-regulation becomes the norm (within general systems like professional ethics and civic morals). These new morally-empowered individuals therefore enjoy all the personal sense of entitlement that the old nobilities did, only now there are millions of them, all out there with their fierce sense of personal honor, their chippiness and their sense of violence when violated. Yet it’s hard to really feel special when what makes one so is shared by everyone else.

What a mess.

Blogwars theme song (with bonus video)

Blah, blah, sucking my energy, bad bad, whatevuh. For all you trolls and grey vampires out there, this one’s for you. Maybe you’ll finally get the point if it’s in catchy song-lyric form. Huffamoose, “Everybody Else” (listen to it free here, track 18).

Isn’t it a shame
When’s she gonna get her act together
She’s got no one else to blame
But herself

Why’s she gotta lie
Can’t she be straight with me
What’s the deal with her anyway

Did you hear what she did
(Did you hear what she did)
It’s the latest in a string of screwups
Guess she thought she’d get away with it
Not anymore

‘Cause I’m not gonna take it again
She’ll have to change if she wants to remain friends

Sure I’ve had my ups and downs
(We’re not talking about me)
But now I think I’m pretty stable
(I know I am)
I feel good about myself every day

That was a long time ago
(I can barely remember)
Now I’m different and it’s all behind me
(I know it is)
I’m not a loser
Not like her

I’m not gonna take it again
She’ll have to change if she wants to remain friends
Nobody takes me for granted
Nobody gets one over on me
I’m a new man and my new problem
Is everybody else

I’m not gonna take it again
She’ll have to change if she wants to remain friends

I’ve got a good idea
Maybe I’ll help her along just a little bit
Show her how to deal
With herself

‘Cause now that I’ve recovered
I don’t have the time or the patience
Everybody’s gotta be like me or else

I’m not gonna take it again
She’ll have to change if she wants to remain friends
I’m not gonna take it again
She’ll have to change if she wants to remain friends

Nobody takes me for granted
Nobody gets one over on me
I’m a new man and my new problem
Is everybody else.

Got a project? Awesome. “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”

Tuco Ramirez, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

History and the moment

Ricky Barnes finished the third round of this year’s U.S. Open today with a bogey on 18. Hit his tee shot in the fairway, then just missed his second shot and ended up in heavy rough greenside; hit a great out to about five feet below the hole to set up an easy par putt, then misread and pulled it left. Threw away a stroke in a major championship. You could wake up screaming over a hole like that.

Ricky Barnes is ranked 519th in the world. His best finish this year was a tie for 47th. His win in the 2002 U.S. Amateur was his last significant success. If Ricky pays any attention to history he will realize, like everyone else, that he has no business contending in the U.S. Open. He’s got no record of success at this level and an immediate past memory of failure at the 18th.

Despite this inconvenient history, Ricky remains the leader by a stroke and is in the driver’s seat to win the tournament. He has played more good shots and holes than anyone else in the tournament. Like all professional golfers, he is very good at the game; he can excel, and has, on any given shot, hole, and day. If you had told him before the tournament that he’d be one up after three rounds, his reaction would have been ecstatically positive. If he can forget his inconvenient history, there is no other reason he can’t win.

Is Ricky the guy who beat all comers to win the U.S. Amateur? Is he the guy who has hit thousands of great shots, made thousands of birdies, and outclassed the best players in golf for three rounds at the U.S. Open? Or is he the low-grade also-ran he’s been his whole professional career? Can we reduce Ricky to any part of this history, or an elaborate calculus of its components? Translating Harman translating Latour in Prince of Networks, Ricky is ongoingly an event in the moment: he’s always what he is right now, in exactly this situation. He will or will not grasp the moment and ally himself or not with his clubs, the ball, the clump of mud on the ball; the wind, the grass, the contours of the turf; the dewpoint, the crowd, his adrenal glands, the lactic acid in his hamstrings. Not as he always did, and not once and for all, but each time as he finds them and they find him. Paraphrasing the paraphrase:

The world resists our efforts even as it welcomes them. Even a [round of golf] is the lengthy result of negotiations with the world, not a triumphant [Tiger Woods] who tramples the details of the world to dust. The labour of fitting one [golf shot] to another obsesses a [Nicklaus or Palmer] for decades, and even then the polished final product will be riddled with errors detectible [sic] by a novice. The same is true for our prisons, our gas and water infrastructure, the sale of potato chips, international law, nuclear test bans, and enrollment in universities. Systems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain (PN p. 22).

And through this process right now, today, Ricky Barnes will recruit his ‘true’ history to him, that of failure or that of triumph — until the next time.

Eureka!

I’m in a reverie about categories and coherence, brought on by my cold, a hot humid day, and no doubt “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato;” my thoughts stimulated and given spectral form by Dave Mazella’s point about the troubles with ‘Enlightenment’ as a category in his comments on the last post, and the great multiblog discussion of Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World (in which categories like Continental and Analytical philosophy, idealism, realism and anti-realism are being worked over). My feverish brain made this connection:

“For Weber, and contrary to a whole millennium of Christianity, we must refuse to make sense of the whole world and take that meaninglessness on us as far as we can. The world, for Weber, can ultimately not cohere; the danger that confronts us is that we will constantly be tempted to want to make it cohere.” Tracy Strong, “Weber and Freud: Vocation and Self-acknowledgement,” in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 473.

To me this is a beautiful quote. Tracy’s right about Weber, and Weber is right. But what are the dangers of this desire for coherence? Why ought we to resist its tempations? Well, categories make procrustean beds on which we chop and whittle off the stuff that doesn’t fit.

Stop yer wiggling, this won't hurt a bit.

Reasonable people may differ on the value of what’s lost, and when the category in question is something momentous like ‘the nation’, ‘the race’ or ‘the Volk’ the macropolitics of categorical inclusion and exclusion get pretty consequential. Even the micropolitics of more local categorizations (I like this better as a verb than a noun, a doing than a being) can get ugly. Of course if we’re just talking about ‘Analytic philosophy’ or ‘the Enlightenment’ as scholarly shorthands maybe not much is at stake, although it’s worth remembering that until recently it was easy to talk about the whole intellectual history of the European 18th century without noting its and its earlier historians’ categorical exclusion of women and various non-European Others.

Then again, no categories at all means nothing is anything in particular, which can be fatally inconvenient. I can quibble about the exact contents of the category ‘food’. My cats and I will agree on excluding bark at all times, but they will include dead voles under all circumstances while I will do so only under rare ones. Humans too are made of meat but this means different things to my kitties and me. In any event when we get hungry there’d better be something in that category around.

See, they ran low on meat at the cat food factory, and the cemetery was right there, so, y'know, badabing.

Oh so anyway, what was my point? Hmm, lost it. Something about intellectual flexibility and moderation, I expect.

The problem with history education

This past week I was again in Fort Collins, Colorado, as one of hundreds of readers of the World History Advanced Placement (WHAP) test. This is a test that mostly 15-year-olds take to see if they can earn college-level credit for a (ideally, unusually rigorous) high school course. And although that may sound like a barmy idea, and for the many students who bomb the test probably is a barmy idea, enough students write essays surpassing in knowledge and analysis what I normally see from my university students to legitimize the whole shebang at face value. The collateral elevation of standards and expectations is also probably a good thing, insofar as it doesn’t just ratify class-and-culture hierarchies in ‘public’ education. Long discussion, that.

The reading itself involves a solid week of scoring about a hundred or so essays a day, from 8am to 5pm, with breaks for snacks and lunch. Most readers read the same question all week; both years I’ve read the ‘continuity and change over time’ essay, last year on trade in the Indian Ocean, this year on the Silk Road. We are trained and do the scoring on a standardized rubric, with accuracy the first priority and speed closely following. For me it’s a good reality check to see what ambitious high school students are being taught and what they’re actually learning, plus it pays pretty well for a week of hard work.

Each year there’s a professional development speaker. Last year it was Bonnie Smith, whose work I have long admired. This year it was Sam Wineburg, who I had never heard of but should have. Sam is a cognitive psychologist with a background in theology and experience teaching high school history who researches history education and runs the Stanford History Education Group. He also spoke at the OAH this year. His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (1991), looks like a good read. He argues that the way historians think critically, in terms of sources, contexts and corroboration, is quite distinctive and possibly valuable, although he allowed as how any number of cultures have managed to get along just fine without much of a historical consciousness. He doesn’t think there’s anything natural or automatic about knowing how to think historically – it must and can be explicitly taught. He thinks the same about knowing how to teach history. If you want people to know how to do things, you have to teach them.

Sam’s talk was a rhetorical delight. He softened us up by telling several long autobiographical shaggy-dog stories, in the tradition of great Jewish comics like the young Woody Allen,

in which he subtly developed the point that even very bright and accomplished people can know a lot of history without knowing how to think like a historian. Knowing facts and knowing what to do with them are distinct cognitive operations. He then demonstrated this with a number of examples from his research, in which he found that top high school students often outperformed trained scholars in content knowledge measured by multiple-choice testing. But when presented with primary sources the professionals were able to ask questions about authority and context that extracted far more information and meaning from the texts.

Incidentally, this discrepancy in factual mastery mirrored my own department’s struggle to satisfy ongoing assessment requirements related to accreditation. There’s a push to norm our students’ learning outcomes by national standards, but the main available test to do that is a multiple-choice exam of content knowledge, most of which we do not teach or even think is important. Recently we took the test ourselves to get a better understanding of it and perhaps compile evidence of its ir/relevance to our work. We did relatively poorly; for example, the many questions on minutiae of U.S. political and diplomatic history were a challenge to those of us whose training and interests are in the social and cultural history of other parts of the world. We did not see any useful correlation between knowing the random factual junk on the test and being ‘historically literate’ or an ‘educated person’, although this may just be our dumbass sour grapes.

Sam gently lampooned current outcries about the ignence of our youth,

pointing out that such fretting itself has a history as old as mass education. The biggest problem in history education is not that our students are factually ignorant, but that factual knowledge is still taken and imposed as the measure of historical education. (Ironically, nothing says ‘ignorant’ by the standards of historical scholarship like thinking that historical literacy is being able to answer factual questions about names, dates and events.) Focusing on content coverage at the expense of knowledge development skills makes for easy assessments but is cognitively counterproductive. We’ve got to stop chewing up the worms for the baby birds and teach them how to get their own.

Sam got cheers from the crowd with his critical remarks about Bloom’s taxonomy. Apparently the high school teachers have it coming out their ears. He thinks knowledge cannot possibly be the foundation of the cognitive hierarchy, because you don’t actually know anything until you’ve gone through all the steps of investigation, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Knowledge is the output, not the input. I think he’s right, with the proviso that I’d see the process more dialectically: each new investigation is informed in part by the knowledge developed in previous ones. He says as much in his emphasis on the ways trained thinkers use background knowledge to zero in on salience and rough out context in their readings. I suspect he’s pointing toward something more like William Perry’s classic cognitive scheme but I’ll need to read the book.

Practically, Sam identified source assessment and contextualization as the key historical skills, recommended engagement with primary sources as the high road of history education from sixth grade forward (he and his team have had success with their curriculum in an experimental elementary school), and offered a basic rubric of questions to work into classroom practice until they become deep cognitive habits. These include subsets on sourcing (who wrote this, when, why; is it believable), cross-checking (other pieces of evidence, different versions of the story, comparative credibility), and context / perspective (imaginitively reconstructing the lives and perspectives of past others). It’s comfortingly similar to my own reading rubric, which I have gradually been making more and more central to all my teaching. So I agreed with Sam, which is no doubt why I enjoyed his talk so much.