How to plagiarism-proof your essay assignments

A short, droll post by Kathy at Edge of the West concerning an instance of the “plagiarism-industrial complex” has, as is the wont of that site, produced a lively and interesting discussion in the commentary. Much of it concerns the merits of the commercial plagiarism-detection services, including their helplessness to detect truly “artisanal” plagiarism. If you’re willing/able to pay enough to have someone else do boutique work for you, and you’re careful never to submit any of your own work for damning comparison, that will probably work for you. Getting other people to do your work for you being the chief advantage of wealth, after all.

(Sad/amusing aside: a number of us suspect one of our best students of the past decade of ghosting papers — not for money but as a favor for friends. Oddly enough, this special critter was a compulsive perfectionist and almost never turned in its own work no matter what inducements we tried — and we became pretty creative — so if we’re right, we only got to enjoy its gifts at an odd second-hand.)

I’ve made a couple of brief comments there about why I don’t use the plagiarism police. For one thing, I think inconveniencing and anxietizing the honorable to intercept the dishonorable is an ugly way to live. For another, on (quixotic) foucauldian grounds that participating in the creation of docile bodies through the installation and extension of surveillance regimes is profoundly self-defeating. But my main reason I’ve only been able to sketch there, and want to elaborate here: I don’t use the plagiarism police because my assignments are functionally plagiarism-proof.

Howzat? There are a couple of key strategies that I’ll get to in a second, but let’s start with an ethos. You have to be loyal to students learning, not to covering content. It’s not impossible to do both, but starting with the second tends to fubar the first. And you have to give up the idea that there is essential content every student must master. Standardization of content outcomes is the single greatest stimulus and enabler of plagiarism there is. What you’ve got to want is for students to learn critical uptake, thinking and production skills in relation to content, where the skills are essential and the content is contingent. If you’re stuck with essential content, you’re stuck with some plagiarism. Take a moment to make sure there’s no way to get unstuck. I’ll wait.

OK. The first thing to notice is that shifting your loyalty to students learning (note: ’students’ learning’ is a different subject) changes the moral environment of the classroom. Why? Because now what you care about is each student, not the material; which, if you communicate this properly and consistently, creates a social psychology of reciprocal obligation among you. It’s just much harder to cheat on someone who cares about you than someone who’s using you as a means to other ends (reproduction of content outcomes). There’s nothing magical or foolproof about this, however, so if you stop here as some of the more touchy-feely teacher ed. fads do you’ll still get plenty of plagiarism; maybe more, once they figure out what a lightweight you are. Furthermore, although it’s good and right to care about the students as whole people, it’s essential to care specifically about their development as thinkers and doers, which means they don’t get to derail the process or skate to passing grades just by dropping by your office to chat about the weather or tearing up over their abusive childhood.

As thinkers and doers students in my experience are a pretty mixed bunch. The ones who already have some critical uptake, thinking and production skills are rarely the plagiarizers, especially once you get them on the hook by caring about them. They can do the work cheaper and better themselves without plagiarizing. So once you’re caring about students learning and you get the moral environment sorted out so they care back, plagiarism becomes obviously something the ones who do it are driven to by missing elements in the necessary skillset. The task then becomes filling in those skills. Essays shift subtly from being a ritually formalized way to test content knowledge to being part of a longer process to develop practical intellectual capabilities. (It helps a lot to ’sell’ those skills. All but the geekiest of them, who will become us later, think the various specific contents of the humanities are useless, they’re right, and trying to argue otherwise is counterproductively delegitimating.) This process orientation means among other things that for students at all but the elitest schools there will probably have to be lots of explicit instruction on how to write papers as a way to organize and communicate thought, including not just rules and recipes but rationales; peer reviewing of drafts (I do both intro paragraph and full draft); and a rewrite option, at least for the first paper until they get their chops together.

Classroom time has to make the same subtle shift. There are probably a lot of ways to do that. What works for me is to teach content through skills. So for example in World History I might want to cover some modern African history in relation to the Atlantic complex. Let’s say the skill we’re working on today is reading critically, and we happen to be doing that this time around using a 16th-century letter from the King of Kongo to the King of Portugal. This letter is a pretty subtle little piece of work, with a lot of information to be gleaned about culture and politics in Kongo; activities and attitudes of Portuguese merchants there; early phases of the slave trade; and so on. Of course we’ll need to crack the textbook to fill in some context to better understand what the Portuguese were doing on the coast of Africa, why they were welcomed by the Kings of the Kongo in the first place, what the slaves might have been needed for, etc.

Small groups and competitive/cooperative reporting are good ways to get most of the students involved and invested in the process of puzzling it all out. Classroom work has to be personal and recursive, including for example lots of interaction with the groups during their investigations and pauses to allow students who don’t know answers to find them or think them through, so that each student develops a personal class voice and habit of analysis that carries over to written work. Reasons and foundations always have to be specified, by them and us. Expectations should start high and get higher, so there’s always something of value to be accomplished for every student to be proud of. It’s a lot easier to convey the importance of scholarly apparatus to respect and communicate other people’s authority when the students are in touch with their own. I’ve done this directly with classes as large as fifty, by the way, and with discussion sections for classes in the hundreds.

And still all this is not enough to plagiarism-proof your essay assignments, although it’s a pretty good start. To knock out the last lingering vestiges of moral depravity, bad habit and performance anxiety, the last line of defense is to make it harder and riskier to plagiarize effectively than to write the paper straight. Here’s one way to do that with actual pedagogical value: design essay assignments that are unique to each class, its discussions and resources.

The simplest trick is to require students to write source-supported essays, to use only the course texts as sources, and to use more than one. By ‘require’ I mean if they don’t do it, they fail. This has the pedagogical value of forcing them to: engage with good sources you selected on purpose; mine available sources thoroughly rather than skipping around superficially; crosscheck sources rather than taking one at face value; synthesize information into their own analysis rather than just doing stock book reports; and appreciate the difference between mere opinion and informed opinion. All of these skills are supported by the reading work in class. By the way, this doesn’t help much if you don’t mix up your course texts. Publishers’ text ‘n’ source suites are a nice convenience for lazy teachers and plagiarizers alike, as is keeping the same texts and topics year after year. And stay away from stereotypical topics and sources. The easiest and most tempting paper in the world to plagiarize is yet another reaction paper on famous poem/article/book/event X. When you can google your topic and the first hit is a plagiarism site, maybe it’s time for a rethink.

The idea is to make it vanishingly unlikely that they’ll find any mass market boilerplate that adequately addresses your assignment. Here’s an example of such an assignment: “Using only the course texts for evidence, analyze the relation of agency to happiness in rural Ming China,” where the course texts are a primary source reader from one publisher and a world history text from another. (Research comes later in the term once skills and habits are better, but course texts are always required.) What would it take to plagiarize this? Most of the standard strategies – cutting and pasting generic information on China, e.g. – would result in an incoherent, nonresponsive paper that would fail on its own merit without getting into plagiarism detection. Furthermore, they’d fail without regular and accurate citation of the course texts. (I usually get about a third with this error, innocent or otherwise, in the first batch of papers. I don’t even read papers with epic fails, I just hand them back to be fixed. Obviously you have to know, communicate, and enforce your standards for this to work.)

OK, here we are at the end of this post and I have to confess, it’s still not impossible to plagiarize under all these conditions. Easy, in fact, for the resolute scallawag. Here’s how. As mentioned above, they can pay an artisanal plagiarizer big bucks for completely customized papers. At least three of them, in my classes, which would only be prohibitive for really rich scoundrels if all my colleagues were also plagiarism-proofing their assignments. Or if the determined rabscallion wants to save that bling for beer, they could scour the ‘nets for snippets of information about agency and happiness in Ming China, stitch them together with topically-relevant analysis, then invent plausible citations to the course texts. To do that, all it would take is to understand the assignment and its rationale, properly identify relevant information, produce focused and coherent analysis, and know the course texts well enough to target the fake cites effectively. And at that point they might as well write the A paper those skills indicate they’re capable of writing.

Teaching philosophy

I’m inclined to agree with Academic Cog, whose various statements about teaching I admire, that “teaching philosophies” as required for job applications and tenure/promotion files tend to be “vague, general, and dorky-sounding,” ranging from inane to robotic. I especially dislike the ones that respond to explicit or implicit questions about “innovative” teaching. I’ve seen and developed some pretty fancy ways to deliver lecture and discussion over the years, but until someone figures out a way to teach the humanities that isn’t a variation on lecture or discussion (knowledge pills? cortical implants?) –

– I may add some tricks to my bag but I’m holding fire on innovation cred.

Re: innovation (or not), here’s the statement from my introductory world history syllabus, under the heading “teaching/learning philosophy as I learned it from world history:”

“If I give a student one corner of a subject and he cannot find the other three, the lesson is not worth teaching.” — Confucius

“When we renounce learning we have no troubles… when there is abstinence from action, good order is universal.” — Laozi

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” — Walter Benjamin

“Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be: — a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad.” — the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” — William James

“I don’t believe in living in the past. The past is for cowards. If you live in the past, you die in the past.” — Mike Ditka

“And it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. God knows but you do not know.” — the Qu’ran

“The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous.” — Shunryu Suzuki

These are not meant to be linear. My classes are ’some assembly required’.

Insofar as I have anything like a formal teaching philosophy I fall into the general category of humanists who think learning is good and it’s possible, in principle, for every student to learn; and of pragmatists who think this is better accomplished actively than passively. As for specifics, they vary. I use my classrooms as teaching/learning laboratories, so I’m always trying out new (to me) strategies. I also do a lot of reading and reacting with particular students and groups of students, which means that the instancings of a general approach may be quite different even across sections of ‘the same’ class. Finally, I have noticed that just about any way of teaching will work pretty well if the teacher is excited about it and fall flat if they’re not. So I never teach ‘the same’ class twice because I use each class as an opportunity to learn new things and I periodically cycle out of even very successful teaching strategies to keep myself fresh. I think that teaching stops being about technique and starts being about feel and fit and mindful interaction pretty quickly.

Still, as a member of several search committees I have read some pretty inspiring teaching philosophies. Occasionally at the interview they even turn out to match the practices of their authors! But it’s practices we care about in the end, isn’t it? So perhaps we should ask for statements of teaching practice. As to that, I indicated in the previous post I think it’s important to think through what we actually want our students to learn in our classes and teach directly to those objectives. For my students the most important outcome is the ability and disposition to learn independently and to read, think and write critically. I reported out an example of how that looks in practice in my earlier post, Ninja Reading, which is currently my favorite teaching statement and not at all inane or robotic.

Big stigma, little stigma

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have me thinking about stigma. Here’s Erving Goffman in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963):

And even where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of disqualifying many persons. For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective, this constituting one sense in which one can speak of a common value system in America. Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable. The general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living.

Goffman’s project was to ‘decenter’ stigma by noting that in some dimension almost everyone is one-down and painfully aware of it. Just about everyone has a touch of double consciousness, and the management of that eerie social disconfirmation of identity is a game known and played by all; his text is a handbook of familiar rules and strategies. Since the culture wars of the sixties even the white boys have started blushing, or at least bristling, under the onslaught of the stigmatized stigmatizing back.

It may look like Goffman is talking about what I’ll call ‘little stigma’, contingent embarrassments, and one of the standard criticisms of the book is that ‘big stigma’, structuring identities like race, class and gender, operates at a different scale with different dynamics. I think the genius of the book is how he is able to show big structural effects emerging from little interactive causes, but that’s a long technical discussion. Read the book. More immediately, the question this election and some of its key players raise is whether big stigma is eroding into the mass of overcomeable little stigmas like height, weight, age, education, accent, cultural style and so on that irritate, hinder and even incapacitate us without ever rising to the level of structural disqualification. I am not therefore suggesting that racism, sexism and classism have been overcome and are now stigma-free, but that the scale of that stigma may be changing in the U.S.. (I am also not suggesting that weightism, ageism, etc., are trivial burdens.)

That race has become little stigma is certainly the argument of Obama’s candidacy. Faced with the presumption that big structural racism would disqualify him categorically from the presidency, his response is ‘I don’t think so, let’s see’. He hasn’t made race an issue because he doesn’t think race is an issue [or rather, a special issue that needs to be his issue]. Although Clinton’s candidacy had to have the same premise regarding gender, her and her supporters’ demographics pushed toward a more old-school rhetoric of embattled exclusion.

Big stigma entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright have tried to push Obama the same way, with no success. The barbarism of schematized identities (a terrific concept from Jennifer Cascadia found here) and their associated stigmas is that life without them cannot be imagined. Obama is imagining this life, and attempting to live it. So far something like half of this country, millions and millions of people, would like to help and join in with that.

Perhaps Tocqueville will turn out to have been right yet again when he wrote that “When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. When everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.” — Democracy in America (1835/1840). Perhaps our tolerances have grown very fine. We’ll need to get to work next on sexualities, the last of the ‘acceptable’ big stigmas which remains structurally excluding, at least in national politics.

Wordle pedagogy

The commentary on Rough Theory’s wordle post of dissertation chapter 1 stimulated a further thought about Wordle, which its creator describes as “a toy.” I’ll agree with that to start with, because it’s fun to play with.

The “beautiful word clouds” generated from our more ’serious’ work feel like they capture something, however. As Lynda said ironically at RT, “it’s all there, and presented much more eloquently than I could ever do with bothersome things like sentences.” NP wonders if they could be submitted in lieu of an abstract, and Lynda says “*Now* I know what my thesis is about.” I had the same reaction, including that shiver of embarrassment about certain words that should have been inconsequential turning out to be heavy in the distribution (Wordle removes linguistically common ’stopwords’ and weights the rest by frequency).

Still, in principle it should matter what order and relation we put words in; otherwise we could all just stop with the bothersome sentences and write word lists for wordling. For example, frequency is not the only index of importance; sometimes a word that appears only once is the fulcrum of a whole argument. In fact, this transition from lumped word clusters to organized thoughts is pretty much what I’m trying to teach during my day job. I get papers that read like wordles all the time; if the words are well-enough chosen, they sometimes even pass. Now I find myself wondering if I could use Wordle itself to graphically represent to the students the difference between a word dump and a fully-articulated paper.

I’d welcome thoughts on this. Just as a first impression, I imagine requiring students a week before an early-semester paper is due to come to class with a Wordle printout of their introductory paragraph. I would then put them in work groups and have them attempt to interpret each others’ wordles to see how close they could get to the author’s intended meaning. In the process I think they would be clarifying in their own minds what ‘extra’ is needed beyond mere words to communicate a meaning and frame an argument. The additional benefit is that this would move their procrastination window up a week.

If this seems like fun, we could always experiment with my chapter wordles here or NP’s at Rough Theory….

Throwing stones

I admire and enjoy the work Max Forte is doing at OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY. His post on shooting kids is typically interesting and provocative. It’s working from this video shot from the cab of a U.S. military vehicle in Iraq, in which a soldier narrates his thoughts about a series of Iraqi children throwing rocks at him and eventually breaking his windshield. Those thoughts are, as Max notes, not pretty (strong language alert):

Like a good anthropologist and especially as the engaged anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist kind, Max’s empathy tends to slosh toward the locals. He’s aware of the soldiers as humans, but because they’re in big trucks, have guns, and are members of an occupying force of dubious legitimacy, their troubles are their own and easily solved by getting the flork out of Iraq. He wonders why we should ’support the troops’ in doing this bad thing that they’re doing. Stop doing it, The End.

I want to fiddle with Max’s take on the video and the situation (comments on the thread itself have also been excellent, go see), but only in a more general context of agreeing with his principles and project. What I say here is meant to balance the analysis from a different perspective, which I believe is what a good anthropological community ought to do. It could be that a more balanced analysis blunts the thrust of Max’s politics, and here we may find our disagreement. I’m not much persuaded by righteous critiques of righteousness, which is why I wrote the post before this one. To me Iraq is a vivid but otherwise ordinary case of a lot of people acting in moral good faith according to different understandings of what the content of morality is, and a lot of other people acting out their habitus, and the rest kind of improvising. Taking a stand here makes sense for many reasons, but for me to join in with all that would just add clutter.

To start by clearing a little clutter, ’supporting the troops’ and ’supporting the mission’ are two different things. Max is able to collapse those together because he assigns full, intentional responsibility to the troops for being there as agents of the mission. I’m actually sympathetic to this kind of strong moral ascription as a regulative ideal, but it is an ascription of an ideal. As such, it’s not very anthropological. Max is appropriately not much interested in the anthropology of the troops, but I am. I teach in Fayetteville and work with these soldiers from Fort Bragg all the time. They matter to me. They’re smart and dumb, moral and expedient, reflective and unreflective, likable and repellent in just the same proportion as most folks. They’re in the army for a range of reasons, not mutually exclusive, including passionate love of their country, a sense of duty and honor, group solidarity, class struggle, anxiety about their masculinity, social betterment, economic expedience, a poor sense of options, and occasionally sadism.

The narrative offered by the soldier on the video is chilling at face value. As far as we know from what he says, the only reason he’s not shooting a bunch of Iraqi kids or giving the wheel a little jog and running them over is that his sergeant told him not to. Who knows what he’d do if he thought he could get away with it, and so on. If we take what he says at face value, this guy is a dangerous sociopath with a barely restrained god complex. Just like the United States?

I know very few people who are so reflective and controlled or unreflective and simple that I can (or in kindness should) take what they say at face value. I watched the vid with my wife Rachel, who isn’t a big fan of militarism but used to be married to a soldier at Bragg and hung out with those guys a lot. We both had the same reaction, which was “poor guy.” That soldier is no psycho. Crude and a knucklehead, yes; not defendable. But he’s scared, tired, frustrated and hurt. Maybe feels like he’s there trying to do a good thing and being dragged down. He’s probably not fully invested in the ideology of liberation from tyranny; few soldiers I know are. But he’s familiar with the chaos of collapsed order and he does know he’s in a no-win situation. He’s blowing off some serious steam here, and probably pumping himself and his buddy with the camera up. But he’d no sooner shoot those kids than he’d shoot his sergeant, who he also no doubt cusses out behind his back on choice occasions. He’s disciplined with a pretty good discipline in comparison to, say, a warrior in Chinggis Khan’s Mongol hordes or a thug in Nasty Somoza’s Nicaraguan National Guard, either of whom would have had a much less restrained idea of how to apply superior power.

And the thing is, the kids know it. They don’t even bother ducking or running away once they’ve hucked their rocks. We may well admire their initiative and pluck in resisting the occupiers (I’d want something a little more structured and thoughtful if they were my kids), and they are certainly earning themselves some bragging rights (the guy who broke the windshield is a folk hero for the next little while), but they’re basically punks getting away with symbolic acts of defiance to authority. Good for them, but not what I’d call Resistance with a capital R. Their impunity is evident in their relaxed posture, their mocking tone, and the fact that this particular corner is known by both ’sides’ as the one where you come to stone the Americans. I can see where that would be fun and affirming, under the circumstances, a thrill of transgression for sure and a ready tie-in to a typically othering notion of group solidarity. Of course, they are also in a larger sense in a no-win situation, which brings us back to Max’s point — yikes. U.S., just get out.

Whether or not that happens any time soon, I think it’s worth going back and cleaning up that standard left-wing critique of the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy for supporting rather than toppling nasty dictators. Saddam was one of those, and according to the Cold War rhetoric of critical opposition to cynical U.S. imperialism the neo-cons actually did the right thing, for once, by taking him out. We could have gotten at the oil and kept Iran in check much easier by making up with Saddam over Kuwait and letting him get on with exterminating the Kurds. Despite all the war’s stupidity and barbarism, and the very real danger of a plunge into civil war and anarchy, Iraq is much closer to popular self-determination now than it was under the Sunni Ba’athists. So it turns out we on the left do not actually want a muscularly unhypocritical U.S. democracy. We should get much clearer on what we do want, and thanks to Max for working toward that.

What’s left of philosophy

In my little dreamworld the best thing this blog can do is cross-connect some questions and conversations that otherwise would miss each other. In that spirit please take a moment to visit Savage Minds, an excellent anthropology blog, to check out Chris Kelty’s post on experimental philosophy, a newish development that has some philosophers “exploring the possibility of actually talking to people.”

Philosophy used to include everything, and in its self-conception still does. In the history of knowledge-formation, however, over the last few hundred years philosophy has been getting whittled down by the spinning off of the sciences, history, law, economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, psychology and so on into separate disciplines. Each of those has some practical field of competence about real human relations in the world; indeed, it could be said (and was, by a defender of philosophy on that thread who may or may not have grasped the irony) that any time philosophy identifies a field of potentially-practical study about humans, it gets spun off into a different discipline. Cognitive science as the practical spinoff of epistemology is a recent example.

(I am being kind to philosophy here. In the last hundred years at least the sub-disciplining of the human studies has had very little at all to do with conceptual innovations in philosophy, and the reverse is increasingly true.)

What’s left for philosophy as such? Old unanswerable questions, abstractions, speculation, and no practical applications that can’t be better addressed by one or more of the successor disciplines. A playground for nerds, geeks, and bores.

Reading

Mikhail at Perverse Egalitarianism, who incidentally along with his colleague Shahar has the best booze-fueled pretentious intellectual schtick I’ve ever seen, is reading a book on reading and not reading which is reminding me how odd our process of engaging with others and learning from/with them can be.

In a later comment Mikhail says

Seriously though I’ve been rather disturbed by Bayard’s book about talking about books you haven’t read – I thought it was going to be funny and tongue-in-cheek but it’s quite serious for the most part and addresses an issue I really haven’t seen in print before, that is, how we really don’t read the book we read or claim to have read – nothing psychological or super-theoretical, just the basic fact that we forget the books we’ve read in a very short time and then we read them again and selectively, so each of us has a very different memory (not just interpretation or a perspective) of the same book… In a sense, we’re all talking about a different book when we discuss, say, Kant’s first critique or Marx’s Capital.

So much for the Enlightenment! I like to own the books I read because then I can mark them up as I go. It’s like having a conversation with the author in the margin. Also the piles of them on the floor are festively decorative. When I go back to books I haven’t looked at in a while, I sometimes just take my own word for it and zero in on the parts I’ve blocked or commented on (e.g. when I’m refreshing for teaching), and then I’m usually alright. But if I actually re-read, I often find myself perplexed at why I picked out what I did, or what my train of thought was when I wrote what was clearly at the time a self-evident remark in the margin. It’s as if some stranger with different priorities and agendas had spritzed the book with his traces. Sometimes that guy was pretty smart, and sometimes he was a dead dunce.

For one thing I’m usually reading more than one book at once, seeding my environment with them, a pencil stuck in each to keep my place; so my reading ends up being an accidental conversation among me and several authors, which produces some terrific collisions but would be very difficult to reproduce, including for me later when I’m trying to explain why I think what I think. Not to mention all the ‘live’ conversations I’m having at any given time. We never enter the same stream of consciousness twice.

When I’m revered after my death little disciples will want to figure me all out and that will be funny as hell. They’d have to go back through all the books I’ve read, decode the marginalia, and dope out what order and circumstances I read them in. My head is bricolaged all the way down. Incidentally I tried to do this with Gramsci, whose personal library is preserved at the PCI archives in Rome. Turns out that because he grew up poor, with a reverence for the book, he wouldn’t have dreamed of writing in one. Bummer. But I guess we have that to thank for the Prison Notebooks.

Tragedy and pathos

By accident the sports page got this right. They described as tragedy the catastrophic injury and euthanasia of Eight Belles, the filly who came in second at the Kentucky Derby this year.

(Actually, it’s entirely possible to purify a definition of tragedy where animals don’t qualify no matter what. Nowadays our community with the other critters of nature is a welcome theme, so I’ll just go ahead and include her in.)

Eight Belles suffered compound fractures to the ankles of both front legs and collapsed shortly after crossing the finish line. There are a couple of amazing things about this. Thoroughbreds are bizarrely inbred speed specialists with incredibly fragile lower legs, but breaking both ankles at once is unusual even so. It’s likely that she broke one, then kept running and broke the other one while compensating for and aggravating the first one. Most critters would stop running after the first injury, and it could well be that her original injury was treatable. So here’s the tragedy part.

It was her own courage and fundamental nobility of spirit that did her in.

Nowadays it has become customary to say something is ‘tragic’ as a way of saying ‘especially sad’. There is a word for that, but it’s not tragic. It’s ‘pathetic’. For something to be tragic, in the classic sense, the bad thing that happens has to be traceable to some active expression of a higher virtue of the critter it happens to. Tragedy does not happen to ordinary critters, only to extraordinary ones. It’s an active, ironic yet enlightening kind of hurt. You can’t just be sitting there and have a meteorite fall on your head and get ennobled by that. You’re just a poor sad schlug there.

Strictly speaking, the only potentially tragic figures in the 9/11 attack were the terrorists on the planes and the rescue workers who lost their lives or health trying to help. They actively chose their fate. Everyone else just had bad stuff happen to them. Very sad. Pathetic, in fact.

In these days when survival is the new excellence this can be hard to get a brain around. As I pointed out in the post on giving offense, everyone wants to claim nobility, for good historical reasons but still kind of missing the point. Everyone could in principle be special, but just being unique won’t get you there. So describing as ‘tragedy’ the little indignities of a life we live as victims is a peculiarly ‘modern’ sort of compliment we pay ourselves. There’s nothing noble about being pathetic, so it offends our vanity; but it really just refers to having bad stuff happen to you that you couldn’t control, which is quite a common refrain. Call me old-fashioned, but I think we should know ourselves better.

Sorry, you can’t be both a victim and noble. Take your pick.

Move your feet.

Something my Dad told me many years ago when I was just a tyke Carl Dyke has always stuck with me. It’s a good example of how I do much of my thinking analogically, as for example in the last post on “getting clear.”

He was talking about how he played offensive guard on the football team in high school. He was a tall, skinny kid and guards are supposed to be the massive road graders of the offensive line so this was really an unlikely thing. What he told me was that the key is to move your feet. If you can keep your feet moving, he said (and of course I don’t remember his exact words), you keep your balance and leverage so you can maintain your position while never giving the other guy a clean shot to knock you over.

This is just beautifully (although of course imperfectly, as are all analogies) an image of metastability. There’s lots of shifting, preferably unpredictable in specific moves without being indeterminate in a larger sense, within a bounded range. No trouble keeping track of him continuing to be the same player playing the same position, but he’s otherwise not staying still or letting himself get pinned down.

As is so often the case during this, my blogging apprenticeship (N. Pepperell is my Yoda :-) ), a thread on Rough Theory prompted this thought. The thread points to recent ‘theory wars’, which is a sort of thing I’m familiar to ennui with as an intellectual historian, although not the current instance. We all have to figure stuff out sometime, somehow.

The discussion on NP’s thread is worth perusing. In a very general sense it’s about how to ‘ground’ theories in real, sensuous histories without merely turning them into curios or losing an aspiration to broader engagement and relevance.

So it’s about our relationship to the ground. And it all made me think – move your feet. The problems come when we try to plant in one position. Too easy to hit from a blind side and get knocked over that way. Go ahead and stay where you are, but keep your feet moving. Keep turning, shifting, engaging.

Move your feet.

Giving offense

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 (see, e.g., this post and this page).

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.