Breaking Point Blog

UPI Exploits Death Again - This Time it's a Little Girl

2012-02-28T09:59:00.007-05:00

I’m quick to grow painfully tired of media buzzwords. Their overuse tends to strip them of all legitimate meaning. It takes a small-scale breaking point for the public to realize this in individual cases, but it will take a major breaking point for the media to recognize the counterproductive effects of their attention-seeking repetition.

I’ve noticed this recently with the word “bullying.” Frequently, when there are stories about children or teenagers who were victims of violence, harassment, or suicide, or who were subject to practically any interactions on the internet, the news media leverages in some sort of comment about bullying, seemingly in an effort to give unifying context to virtually every such story. That wouldn’t be objectionable, but it seems to me that “bullying” is a descriptive term that we apply to a situation only after we’ve identified it as such. If a child is being systematically harassed by a person or group of people, we say that he’s being bullied because that’s simply what the word means.

But that’s not the way the media uses it. Instead, they tend to talk about bullying like it is some kind of disease, which has a very specific set of symptoms and can be identified at any stage in its life cycle by a trained professional. Indeed, the disease corollary may be quite intentional, designed to make modern bullying seem less like an ordinary phenomenon and more like an epidemic, and thus something about which to feel a certain sense of panic. Applying it as a buzzword reframes bullying so that it’s no longer a term that concisely identifies a set of similar situations; instead it is the situation.

Never has the manipulative use of the term been clearer than in the UPI news brief about the death of ten year-old Joanna Ramos after a fight at a Southern California elementary school. The article summarizes the story in a few brief paragraphs, explaining that she and another girl had fought, that she suffered blunt force trauma that resulted in a blood clot in her brain, that her death has been ruled a homicide and that prosecutors have yet to determine whether charges will be filed. Then, after all the details of the actual case have been conclusively stated, UPI adds this as a concluding sentence: “There have been no allegations that Ramos was being bullied, KTLA reported Friday.”

If there have been no such allegations, then why on Earth is that relevant to the tragic story of a young girl being killed? Does her being or not being bullied affect the seriousness of the loss? Does it make her any more or less dead? Does it make the girl with whom she fought any more or less guilty of manslaughter? The only reason there ever could be for pointing out the absence of a particular charge or connection is if that piece of information would have been relevant. In this case, it just isn’t. It might have mattered, for the sake of complete coverage, if the girl was being bullied, but there’s no need to specifically dispel that possibility every time a child is killed. To do so is to suggest that bullying is typically a precursor to death among children and that the absence of bullying in this case is anomalous and therefore noteworthy.

Again, I’m sure that’s intentional. Actual relevance is the only legitimate reason for addressing the absence of allegations, but the media has reasons for that behavior that aren’t legitimate. If it’s a chance to leverage in a buzzword that they think their audience is expecting, that’s evidently good enough for them.

Bullying is a problem. It’s always been a problem. Using it as this catchall term in the media, though, cheapens that problem. It broadens awareness of the issue to the point of obfuscating recognition of actual instances of it. Isolated acts of violence constitute their own problem. And using a girl’s death from such an act in order to push your narrow media narrative is cheap, tactless and unethical. But considering that UPI is the same outlet that exploited Andrew Embiricos’ death back in December, cheap, tactless and unethical is evidently par for the course for them. They don’t set the overall media narratives, though. Everybody’s culpable for that.

Existential Questions and the Hiring Process

2012-02-20T23:36:00.005-05:00

I’m doing some consulting work that has required me to look over some academic materials regarding hiring procedures. This has gone a long way towards reminding me of my personal distaste for formulaic assessment of human worth. Is this symptomatic of the computer age? Are we subjugating even character judgments to algorithms and statistical analysis, in lieu of personal judgment?

In the past, when I’ve taken personality tests and questionnaires as part of the process of applying for run-of-the-mill jobs, I’ve bristled at the notion that my answers to a series of seemingly disconnected questions was trusted as a means of gauging my work ethic, attitude, or personal character. Such experiences also constituted some of the first instances of my feeling cheated by my own ethics, as I worried that interviews and positions tended to go to people who were willing to lie favorably about themselves. I even asked an employer once if their assessments took this into account. Her somewhat sympathetic response was to tell me that the entire thing was handled by an outside company – a fact which I think makes my point even more clearly. Not only are hiring decisions often not made face-to-face, they’re often not made in the same building or within the same professional framework as the prospective job.

The research I’ve lately done on the topic vindicates my concerns at least slightly. Written tests that seek to gauge professional virtue do include a scatter of questions that are designed to judge the honesty of the applicants by encouraging brownnosers to select unreasonably optimistic answers. Still, I think these sorts of tricks are sufficiently obvious that if you’re both dishonest and a careful reader you’ll have no problem exploiting the system despite being a seriously flawed applicant.

My problem with these kinds of practices is that they evidently try to generate a rather nuanced understanding of another person, of the sort that would usually be derived from days or months of interaction with him. And they try to do it at a significant remove, in perhaps as little as a half an hour. Perhaps the best example of this hubris from the materials I’ve been reading is the biographical information blank. As a hiring technique it is apparently almost a century old, though I am not personally familiar with it. It strives to correlate information about the potential employee’s background with indicators of his potential success with the company.

If I were to face the questions associated with this hiring practice, I would feel even more immediately and egregiously misrepresented than I have already felt in the presence of “honesty and integrity tests” or “personality and interest inventories.” I may be unique in this, but I find myself uncomfortable with practically any answer I can give to such quizzes, because there is at least some degree of vagueness behind most questions. Anything that asks me to rank my response to a statement on a scale of one to five prompts a lot of hand-wringing as I try to determine whether to round up or down or how to interpret what would really characterize neutrality on an issue.

One would think this wouldn’t be an issue with a biographical questionnaire, which asks for straightforward short-answer responses to direct questions. But some of the examples that I’ve encountered suggest that my overly analytical nature would make even this distressingly complicated. When it’s printed on paper and I have no opportunity to discuss interpretation with the asker, a question such as “at what age did you leave home?” prompts me to silently wonder what is meant by leaving home. Does going to college count if you remained a dependent of your parents? If a person stayed for several months with a nearby friend and then returned to his family, would that count as having left home? And additionally I wonder, what correlation is such information supposed to have with job performance? But at least that curiosity doesn’t affect how an individual would answer the question.

However, in the case of the question, “How large was the town/city in which you lived as a child?” I feel as though there should be an established standard for how to answer the question if the responses of different people are being judged against one another. It’s easy to answer that question, but it’s pretty likely that different people are going to have different concepts of comparative size. What confuses me about these methods of analysis is the question of how much exposition is needed. I feel like reviewers would want these things to be brief and easily digestible, but I also feel like if they’re supposed to genuinely represent a person’s background they can’t be.

But maybe I’m just insane. I can’t imagine that a lot of other people look at questions like “did you ever build a model airplane that flew?” and think to themselves, what constitutes flying? How much distance does it have to cover relative to its size for it to be considered a successful flight? Also, if it was assembled from a kit, does that count as building it? Is there any way to weight the two scenarios against each other?

I imagine answering to “were sports a big part of your childhood?” and I say, define “big.” Also, define “sports.” And “childhood.” The question doesn’t use the word “playing,” so if a person watched a lot of sports on television, would he get to answer in the affirmative? Is miniature golf as much a sport as football? For the purposes of the question, is late adolescence childhood? If I was heavily involved in martial arts training between the ages of eight and nine, and then again between thirteen and seventeen, does that count?

“Do you play any musical instruments?” Well, how much practice does an applicant have to say yes to this one? What if it’s just the kazoo? Is playing a musical instrument indicative of suitability for the job? It seems to me that even in the case of biographical information an applicant can manipulate the evaluation in his favor by bending the truth to make himself look more impressive than he is. That, however, would never be my impulse. When I face things like this, I need to make myself look as much like myself as possible.

Certainly, I need to reach a personal breaking point after which I’ll be able to let go of some measure of my obsessive need for precision. (I’m not sure precisely what measure of that need I need to get rid of.) But at the same time, I think my neurosis has something worthwhile to say about these types of evaluations, and the powerful elements of society need to reach a breaking point after which they no longer arrogantly think that a person’s background or overall character can be determined from a series of multiple choice questions and short answers. No matter how sophisticated our business literature or computer algorithms, they can’t reproduce acquaintanceship, interpretation, or understanding.

The Tragedy of the Modern Library

2012-02-19T00:31:00.006-05:00

I try to listen to A Prairie Home Companion each Saturday evening, in large part because, despite being politically and socially liberal, I am personally quite conservative and prone to nostalgia and wistfulness for a purer experience of things that it seems I was denied by the unrelenting progress of history. This week’s broadcast featured an episode in the adventures of Ruth Harrison, reference librarian, a character who is rather similar in that regard. She is educated, non-combative, socially permissive, but often silently critical of people’s tastes and a widespread loss of noble ideals.

In this latest episode she editorialized for a moment in conversation with her twenty-eight year-old intern, Trent (not the other one, Brent, who is thirty-seven) after he had helped a patron find a thriller that showcased truly heinous crimes. Miss Harrison, voiced by the highly talented Sue Scott, commented: “In library school we were taught that the role of the library is to educate, to uplift, not to cater to every whim.” I didn’t even go to library school, but I have always had the same image of libraries.

On hearing that line of dialogue, I thought of the last couple of trips I have taken to the Central Library in the City of Buffalo. It has come a long way from the libraries that were so domestically familiar to me throughout elementary and high school. These days, when you walk around a library, you find that the stacks are deserted but that a sea of people stretches throughout the computer banks. On an occasion when I lost my internet connection, I had to carry my laptop to the library in order to borrow its wireless connection for a day. Doing so made me feel sort of cheap and disloyal, and it also gave me an opportunity to occasionally observe the behavior of the other patrons, which in turn made me feel worse.

I noticed a middle aged couple sharing a long game of solitaire on one computer. Elsewhere, a man about my age was watching Youtube. My eyes have passed over various computer screens each time I’ve been back there, and I find that these are extremely commonplace activities. Many different kinds of games are played in the Buffalo library – first-person shooters, adventure games, bejeweled and similar puzzles. A significant portion of the library patronage these days, perhaps the majority, is evidently poor people who have no access to such entertainment at home and utilize the library for the idle passage of time instead.

Oh, to be poor but also have such free time or the means of transportation to frequent the region’s most expansive library! I understand not reading because you simply don’t have the time amidst your exhausting and low-paying work, and I understand having little access to either books or technology, particularly in a town where everything is so spread-out. But here the people I’ve seen at the library have the opportunity to beautifully enrich their lives with the information and artistry that surrounds them in a variety of media, and they choose to play dull games. It is a tragedy that libraries are used this way, that they are little more than the low-rent internet cafes and LAN parties of the twenty-first century.

Even if people ventured away from the computers, I find that the most prominently featured books aren’t all that much better. I want to believe that there are a few librarians who work in that building and react to the public much as does Ruth Harrison, diligently pointing them towards the popular fiction with easily digestible plots and few themes, then lamenting that she could have recommended Hemmingway or Faulkner. I’ve found that those sorts of lamentations often meet with comments along the lines of, “Hey, anything that gets kids reading.” That’s not the least bit persuasive to me. The mere act of allowing one’s brain to process typewritten words doesn’t in and of itself make for a richer intellectual experience than other alternatives. Is a child really better off reading Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown than watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on DVD or listening closely to a Brahms symphony?

The sentiment of “as long as they’re reading” speaks to what I think is the underlying misconception that drives the degradation of libraries and of collective appreciation of art and literature. It also speaks to the difficulty that we face in reversing the trend. I resent what libraries have become, but I see no way of changing them back into grand temples of information and culture. In order to draw in the public and avoid closure, they have to provide the type of access that people want. And as a matter of principle, anything that qualifies as information or culture should have a place there, regardless of its intrinsic quality. So it’s not as if there is any cause for libraries to restrict people from being able to use them in such frivolous ways. But so long as easy escapism can be found there, the public will surely continue to gravitate toward it.

We need a collective breaking point to overturn the misconception, which drives both trends, that a greater quantity of information is effectively the same as a greater quality. I’m inclined to think that libraries think they are providing an adequate public service and that the public thinks it is adequately utilizing that service simply because, between the books and the high-speed internet, there’s a lot of information that’s directly accessible to the entire public. It doesn’t seem to matter how it’s utilized. But the danger to libraries is the danger to all of society – that as everything comes to be more and more at our fingertips, we will grow increasingly complacent about it and let the petty distractions dominate our attention. Since everything else is still there, such allowances seem to come at the expense of nothing, but in fact they come at the expense of our very minds.

Simplistic Thinking from Educated People: Arne Duncan

2012-02-17T13:17:00.011-05:00

Every time a representative of the government goes on the television or radio to talk about higher education, my blood boils a little at my recognition of the simple-mindedness that governs policy in that area. On last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s guest was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. At the very end of the portion of the interview that went to air (the entire thing is available in three parts on the web), Duncan made the most indefensibly black-and-white assessment of the outcomes of education that I have yet encountered.

First, though, he pointed out that the United States is now ranked 16^th in number of college graduates, whereas a generation ago it was in first place. He further explained that our rate of graduation hasn’t fallen, but has leveled off, allowing fifteen other countries to surpass us. Now, after a good deal of research, I’ve found that different reports come to different conclusions on the exact ranking, and they base those rankings on different criteria applied to different countries, so I can’t pin down exactly which countries beat out the US on this subject, or even whether Duncan is quite correct with his statistics. But it’s certainly the case that we’re far from the top, and some countries can be pretty conclusively identified as exceeding us in provision of tertiary education.

Duncan’s point is apparently that our achievement of benchmark standards for secondary education is insufficient to prepare students for college and university. I’ll eagerly agree that that’s true, but it is unhelpfully presumptuous to assume that that’s the only important factor contributing to low levels of higher education attainment. What of the steadily climbing costs of college tuition and the dearth of public funds to compensate for the out-of-pocket expense for students and parents? Might that not hold back some perfectly capable students from actually obtaining the education that they’re intellectually, but not financially, suited for?

Among countries in the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development, the United States is 29^th out of 34 in terms of how much funding for educational institutions comes from public funds. Not only is this situation accepted by US society, it is lauded by some elements thereof. Private institutional dominance of tertiary education, and indeed of all segments of society, increases competition and improves outcomes, they say. But with the US ranking somewhere around 16^th in educational attainment, it’s clearly not working that way. In fact, among the nations that are fairly reliably ranked well ahead of the US on this point, many are classed as those nations that conservative Americans tend to envision as socialist hellscapes.

Several Northern European countries are variously placed in lead positions on the list, including Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. What’s more, an Economic Policy Institute study of the affordability and accessibility of higher education in various countries concludes that “Finland and the Netherlands should be models for the international community” when it comes to both of these factors.

The correlation between cost and completion rates is not overwhelming, but it is sufficient that it needs to be explored as a factor, rather than being discounted among the ongoing repetition of the claim that if kids are smarter, they’ll always do better. There are other factors, and to deny that is to accept such unforgivably single-minded approaches to solving our problems as will only worsen some aspects of the situation. It’s not just that we’re failing at educating our children, though certainly we are doing that. It’s also that we’re failing to provide our children with suitable opportunities, access, and incentives.

Duncan seems to be under the mistaken impression that the problem underlying our trend of slipping behind the rest of the post-industrial world is just that students are failing at an alarming rate. But it’s not just dropout that account for the low completion rate; the US ranks behind most of the OECD countries in terms of actual enrollment in higher education. And that fact is specifically ascribed in part to rising costs. That should be fairly obvious, especially to a Harvard-trained economist like Arne Duncan. As opportunity costs rise, the rational motivation for people to invest in something goes down.

The response to this would probably – nay, certainly – be that the opportunity costs of not attending college are unquantifiably higher than the material costs of attending. To that I would offer the simple challenge: prove it. The claim is repeated in the media constantly, always asserted, always assumed, but never adequately proven. And it would be one thing if the assertion was just that, on average, people with higher education backgrounds tend to do better without it. But that’s not what representatives of the administration say. Instead, they spread the hideously uncritical idea that if you get a college degree you are guaranteed success, and if you don’t get one you are guaranteed failure.

Do you think I’m mischaracterizing their claims? Arne Duncan said it on the Daily Show: “We have a million young people dropping out of school every year. A million. There are no jobs. None. They are guaranteed poverty and social failure.”

Guaranteed, he says. That there are any guarantees in life is an odious and socially detrimental lie. Virtually nobody would argue that people aren’t better off overall if they’re educated. For my part, I think that education is the most important thing that a person can pursue in life, though I am careful to emphasize that there are different ways of pursuing education, some far less expensive than others, and that education can serve a variety of ends, from vocational training to living a richer, fuller life of poverty. But the universal economic benefit of higher education is a baseless assertion so long as there are other explanations for a portion of the correlation between education and earnings, and other alternatives as to how hiring and job training might take place.

Now, Arne Duncan wasn’t very specific when he said “a million students dropping out.” If he was referring to students who drop out of high school, sure, they have their work seriously cut out for them if they want to be materially or socially successful. However, I’d still consider it irresponsibly closed-minded to say that both poverty and social failure are absolute guarantees for every child who has dropped out of high school in recent years.

Even working at a fast food restaurant can eventually allow a person to make a living wage, as long as he or she doesn’t rush to have children or otherwise climb into a hole that can’t be escaped through years of earnest work and eagerly sought promotions. What’s more, I’ve known people who’ve dropped out of high school and then obtained GEDs earlier than when they would have theoretically graduated. Hell, my ex-girlfriend never finished high school, and she leapt easily from job to job, quitting without notice and being hired for positions with higher pay, more responsibilities, and better titles, all at a time when I, with my fancy NYU degree, couldn’t so much as secure an interview for anything more than an eight dollar per hour retail job. Some people are just lucky; some just aren’t.

Regardless, I don’t think Duncan was referring to high school dropouts. The only statistics that I could find on short notice were from the 2004-05 school year, at which time 540,382 students dropped out of school between grades nine and twelve. Unless that number has doubled in seven years, I think Duncan was referring to any student who has dropped out at any level, primary, secondary, or tertiary. If so, some of the Americans who have been guaranteed poverty and social failure according to Arne Duncan include billionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Ralph Lauren, Dean Kamen, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a pretty extensive list of other highly successful individuals in a variety of fields.

This repetition of a shockingly simplistic set of talking points about higher education has got to stop. Is learning good? Chirst, yes! That part is perfectly simple. But it’s not a purely economic good, and to whatever extent it does improve your income potential, that’s not the only factor. There is something to be said for the influence of social connections, environment, work ethic, opportunity, investment capital, employer bias, and plain old luck. Amidst all of that, what I want to see happen is that kids start going to school not because they want to make money, but because they want to learn. Is it really too much to ask that we encourage education on those grounds, rather than trying to deceive every young person into pursuing something that he’s not interested in and at which he’s no good?

In Defense of Lectures

2012-02-16T12:29:00.004-05:00

An article by Daniel de Vise on the Washington Post website today explains that colleges are widely questioning the value of lectures and are exploring alternate ways of structuring their classes. The exposition of the topic strikes me as a strange mixture of common sense and misplaced priorities. But then that probably describes the confused perspectives that researchers and policymakers have on various areas of education.

The anti-lecture movement is based on the belief that conducting classes according to that model drives many students away from courses in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and fails to promote active engagement with the material. I’m inclined to counter, however, with the assertion that nothing can drive a truly committed student away, and that it’s natural that lectures don’t determine how students respond to the material, because that’s not the class’s role. The purpose of the class is just to teach that material.

Part of the objection presented by de Vise, though, actually specifically regards lectures as the most effective way of teaching. It seems to me that that’s a decidedly positive trait, but educational leaders evidently see it as partial grounds for rebelling against the existing models. Granted, efficiency is not tantamount to effectiveness, but when the system is actually designed not only to teach well, but to teach large groups of people, efficiency is one aspect of overall effectiveness.

The problem that’s presented here seemingly not that so much that lectures are not a good way of conveying information, but rather that they’re not a good way of stimulating interest. Again, it is my earnest belief that at the college level it shouldn’t be up to the teacher or the class structure to do this. When I was a teenager, it was always my assumption that the students who went on to college did so because they believed in the importance of what they were studying and were genuinely interested in it.

A love of learning and an active work ethic may be things that need to be instilled in children at the primary and secondary levels of education, but that’s why elementary and high school classes don’t take the form of lectures. By the time you’re a college student, you should be able to sit back and listen to a lecture and then have the motivation to speak to your professor directly if you’re having trouble with a concept or calculation.

De Vise quotes Diane Bunce, a chemistry professor at Catholic University as saying, “Learning doesn’t happen in the physical space between the instructor and the student. Learning happens in the student’s mind.”

That’s right, it does. I don’t see how this makes the case that changing from lecturing to some other classroom model will improve educational outcomes. Learning doesn’t happen in the physical space between people no matter what methodology fills that space. If learning happens in the student’s mind, it is entirely up to the student to take ownership of that learning. It is up to the teacher to teach. He may do so effectively or ineffectively, but that’s a function of his merit and ambition, not of institutional policy.

De Vise goes on to explain that the anxiety over driving away students from STEM majors is based on the fact that only about half of the students who start college pursuing such a discipline actually complete their degree. “There are myriad reasons for the mass exodus,” he says. “The material is demanding. Math-science professors tend to be tough graders.”

The challenge of the material and the presence of objectively right and wrong answers aren’t going to change with classroom methodologies. It takes personal fortitude for a student to excel in a subject area that does not come easily to him, and that is not something that can be given to him by artificial means.

What I believe strongly but many educators seemingly find unconscionable is that some degree of attrition is actually a good thing. I didn’t even study a science discipline at university, but I still found myself constantly surrounded by disinterested and low-aptitude students. My education was rather effective on account of the strengths of my instructors, whether in lecture halls or seminars, but I can’t help but wonder how much better it would have been for all if a lesser caliber of student hadn’t frequently dragged down the tone of the class.

In high school as in college, I find that the majority impulse seems to be to manufacture an illusion of equal achievement, and that lowers the standard of education for all but the few students at the bottom who in all likelihood just aren’t interested in applying themselves to their learning. This impulse is more defensible at the secondary level, when part of the role of education is still to convince young and malleable minds of the value of education. But if you haven’t learned that lesson adequately by the time you’ve enrolled in college, you may not belong there. If there are students for whom lectures aren’t working, that classroom structure should push them towards one of two responses: either they work harder on their own time to keep up, or they drop out of their discipline or their school.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If a class has a particularly high level of student attrition, the instructor is probably doing something wrong. Perhaps his lectures are confusing, or his demeanor is overly aggressive, or he is never personally available to his students. But what’s of issue here is that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such problems can be solved just by changing the accepted model of classroom instruction. Students aren’t generally retained or lost according to the whether a class is a lecture, a seminar, or something else entirely. What matters most is the quality of the teaching.

In fact, alternate methods can create new problems just as well as it can solve old ones. De Vise’s article describes some of the classes that have already moved away from lecture-based instruction in STEM courses, and to differing extents these involve students working together to discuss material or solve problems. This isn’t going to work for everybody any more than lectures have. What happens when an exceptional student is paired with a terrible one? Isn’t it just possible that some students focus better when asked to pay attention and take notes than they do when they’re made to work in groups? Surely, some students perform better when they listen attentively to a lecture and then take that as a starting point for personal engagement with their course of study outside of class.

But to explain the social transformation that is governing this shift, de Vise says, “Gone are the days when the professor could recite a textbook in class. The watchword of today is ‘active learning.’”

The watchword of the day? Shouldn’t that have been the watchword of always? If a professor is reciting a textbook in class, he’s certainly not encouraging active learning, but it’s worth keeping in mind that encouragement is absolutely the most that the professor can provide in that domain. It would be preferable if he taught more actively, but as Professor Bunce said above, learning happens in the student’s mind. Active learning can be applied to coursework for any discipline, no matter what the professor’s methodology or talent. The effectiveness of that active learning will frequently be affected by how good an instructor one’s professor is, but there’s no catchall methodological shift that will make a student’s commitment a foregone conclusion. Student and teacher really do need to meet each other half way with active learning and active teaching.

De Vise later quotes Harvard physicist Eric Mazur to reiterate the pejorative notion of what lecturing is: “You have a professor reading a book to you. It should be insulting. But this model is so ingrained.” Commentary such as this makes me seriously wonder whether this article is talking about lecturing, or just bad lecturing. Maybe I’m quick to defend the old style of education because I’m jaded by how talented the faculty was at my institution. I’ve never known a professor to stand in front of a room and read a textbook. I have many problems with the bureaucracy of my alma mater, but I’m pretty sure that if an instructor did that he would be immediately fired. Indeed, so should be such an instructor who does that at any university. The problem, though, is not that he’s lecturing, but rather that he’s lecturing with absolutely no effort.

A quotation from GWU biologist Hartmut Doebel elsewhere in the article speaks somewhat to my point: “If we want to get that whole human being out at the other end, we have to offer them a variety of experiences. And the lecture is part of it. I don’t think we will ever get away from it completely.”

Nor should be. Doebel’s commentary shouldn’t be so peripheral a notion as it is in the context of de Vise’s article. The notion of providing a variety of experiences for the sake of a complete education is a tragically groundbreaking concept. The value of diverse instruction should be obvious. I hope that it is obvious to the good instructors in the country, and that they’re not caught up in this ridiculous debate about whether they should be lecturing or doing something other than lecturing. I would expect that they would already be doing both.

Near the end, de Vise point out that “other scholars are working to improve, rather than replace, the lecture model.” Well thank God for that. Lecture or don’t lecture; I don’t really care. Whatever you do as a teacher, just do it well, for Heaven’s sake. Be malleable, recognize your own failings in the classroom, and reach out to your students. I’m sorry to be indelicate, but if students are failing in droves, the last thing I’d blame would be the institutional policy as to the structure of classes. It’s far more likely that either the teacher sucks as teaching or the students suck at learning. And as a rule of thumb, I’d advise that you assume the former if you’re the teacher, and assuming the latter if you’re a failing student.

At the conclusion of the article, de Vise gives a case study of destruction of lecturing. “Not all the ideas are new. At the University of Maryland College Park, engineering professors eliminated introductory lecture courses in 1991. Since then, students have spent the crucial first year engaged in actual engineering, building swing sets, helicopters and hovercrafts.”

I don’t understand. Why the hell weren’t they doing that before 1991? The problem was not the ineffectiveness of lecture courses, and the solution was not their elimination. The problem and the solution here is tailoring the content of the instruction to the needs of the class. Engineering students should be engineering. That seems pretty obvious. If you find that that doesn’t fit into a lecture model, very well, get rid of it. But just as easily, a portion of the classes could teach concepts and practices by lecture, so that students may apply the information that they obtain therein to the actual engineering that they do at home or in another portion of the classes.

It doesn't matter what means of instruction the professor chooses if he uses it well. The student will work to master the material if, but only if, he's genuinely committed to doing so.

Twitter Breaks News First, Often Makes It Up

2012-02-15T10:56:00.007-05:00

Mediabistro led its newsfeed today with praise for a Twitter user who broke the story of Whitney Houston’s death an hour before the Associated Press did. The story began:

Twitter has long-established itself as the ‘go to’ place for breaking news, and this has never been so clearly demonstrated following the sad passing of music superstar Whitney Houston on Saturday.

Other celebrities whose sad passing I recall Twitter been the first to mention include Cher and Zach Braff, both of whom are still very much alive. If Twitter is anyone’s go-to place for news about anything, they are courting rampant misinformation. A network on which any user can post any claim they want is not a news service, it’s a rumor mill.

That is exactly the way Twitter functioned in the case of Whitney Houston’s death. The tweet that “broke the story” was from user @BarBeeBritt, and said only, “Is Whitney Houston really dead?” News reports, by their very nature, do not take the form of questions. There isn’t supposed to be any uncertainty about the essential facts of the story; it’s only news if you’ve confirmed the story with a reliable source and you’re certain that you’re not playing an inadvertent hoax on the public.

If CNN functioned as Twitter does, an anchor would come back from commercial break, look squarely into the camera and say, “We think Katy Perry might have been crushed by an anvil this morning. If anyone knows anything about this, please send us an e-mail.” If that ever happened, or the New York Times ever ran a story along the lines of “Australian Possibly Engulfed by Giant Fireball: Will Confirm/Deny for Tomorrow’s Edition,” I hope that a mob of angry, truth loving citizens would grab torches and clubs and destroy the infrastructure of the organization. Then, when all the media goes that way, we can just rely on a nationwide game of telephone to disseminate every fact-like piece of possibly-information.

Yeah, Twitter was the first to mention the story of Whitney Houston’s death, but speed cannot possibly be the only criterion we have for what constitutes the go-to source for breaking news. There’s got to be a place for reliability. Thirteen minutes after @ BarBeeBritt’s tweet, user @AjaDiorNavy tweeted, exactly thus: “omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in tub . such ashame & sad :-( “

That actually counts as information, but the trouble is that there’s no way of knowing that at the moment that it’s tweeted. On Twitter, anyone could have said that about any celebrity just to get attention or cause a stir, and many have. I expect that when someone sees mention of a significant event on Twitter, his first impulse is to turn on the television or check a professional news website. And if a person doesn’t do that, but just takes whatever has been tweeted at face value, he is disturbingly naïve and gullible.

The old saying applies about a stopped clock being right twice a day. But also, a stopped clock will tell you it’s eleven o’clock long before it actually is. It’s easy to be the first on a story; it’s not so easy to get it right. I’d rather wait a little while for news that is relevant, accurate, and thorough, and I’m much more likely to focus my attention on the media outlet that misinforms me least often, rather than on the one that informs or misinforms me most quickly.

It was forty-two minutes after the tweet by @AjaDiorNavy that the Associated Press used Twitter to break the story by indicating that the news of Houston’s death came from her publicist Kristen Foster. Forty-two minutes past hearsay and fifty-five minutes past the intimation of rumor. I know that the world moves fast these days, but is one hour really too long to wait for information that’s been vetted by an organization whose very purpose is to provide the public with news? Is there no lower limit breaking point at which the rapid speed of the news cycle is no longer worth its resulting unreliability? Personally, I think we should have hit that point long before anybody had the gall to describe Twitter as the go-to source for anything other than rumor and idle chatter.

A Negative Breaking Point on Youtube

2012-02-14T00:07:00.003-05:00

The other night, I discovered a new and enormously popular viral video in which an irate father exacts revenge for a Facebook post made by his teenage daughter. Naturally, it's of interest to me, because it depicts somebody hitting a breaking point and embracing it completely. It just so happens that I don’t approve in this case.

More than by anything in the video itself, I am struck by the enormous string of comments beneath it. While I have a pretty strongly adverse reaction to the video, my discomfort with the cheerleading in the comments is mitigated slightly by the awareness that it indicates that people widely see the appeal of breaking points and are genuinely desirous of them. There’s something positive in that; the trouble is simply that people may not realize that the satisfying feeling of watching somebody follow through on something like this doesn’t always mean that it’s good.

It’s shocking to me how unquestioning people are in the face of their own gleeful reactions to cool acts of vengeance witnessed at a safe distance. Comments siding against the unseen teenage girl dominate the comments on the video by a factor of something like thirty to one. That almost suggests a bullying mentality on the part of the crowd, and certainly it indicates a penchant for knee-jerk reactions. The daughter isn’t in this video to defend herself and we don’t know what her home life is. To my mind, it’s always good practice to give the benefit of the doubt to the one who is absent.

Even if the situation is exactly as it’s presented in this video, she’s just a teenage girl expressing her frustrations. Her frustrations may well be unfounded, but there’s a role for direct communication in setting her straight. This petty vengeance on the father’s part is just passive-aggressive, and it’s spectacularly passive-aggressive, as he seemingly goes out of his way to avoid addressing her directly (she’s not likely to see the video, after all) while still demonstrating serious aggression by discharging a fucking firearm.

Fostering a breaking point is only worthwhile if what arises from the destruction is significantly better than what was left behind. I don’t really see that happening in this case. In my experience, this sort of thing fosters resentment more than anything else. Wanton destruction coupled with virulent browbeating and public humiliation is pretty likely to drive a deeper wedge between parent and child, and the gap will widen still more as this man’s daughter acts out in more serious ways, generating still more outbursts from dad.

I’m rather sorry that people like this so much. It’s sad that people are so eager to watch a man snap and to live vicariously through it, while more nuanced, social, political, or cultural notions of breaking points evidently remain inaccessible to the masses. There is a role for bald aggression sometimes, but that role is not in parenting. Parenting should entail far more patience than this. The various commenters don’t seem to recognize that patience does not translate to acceptance or capitulation.

The point of patience in this is only that while the world provides us numerous just targets for cathartic vengeance, our children are not among them. There is no place for vengeance or pettiness in parenting. Those are things we should withhold from our children in the interest of seeing that they never misuse them either.

"Weak Statement. Stonger Statement."

2012-02-12T23:39:00.002-05:00

I often fear I’m destined to be a conservative. Many of the breaking points that I look forward to are reversals of modern trends. They’re usually not political, but they are conservative in more of a personal, romantic, yearning-for-an-imagined-past sort of way. In all probability, I’m just cynical. I have a habit of looking with scorn on things that are new and seeing the worst examples with particular clarity. Meanwhile, I tend to focus almost exclusively on the best elements of things once they are comfortably in the past.

I know it’s a flawed way of engaging with the world. I don’t think it’s altogether incorrect, though, only skewed. I’m just more optimistic about legacies than about trends. I like to believe that my perceptions of good and bad are still accurate, even if they aren’t counterbalanced in either case.

I can be quite unforgiving with the negative observations that I make of culture and the arts. I’m sure that history will vindicate the best that music, literature and film currently have to offer, but while I’m living amidst it I see so much more dreck. It gives me the impression that our collective standards are getting lower. The least sophisticated works of art gain the greatest popularity. Perhaps it’s always been like that, but such beautiful things have grown out of the past; how did they avoid being corrupted by pablum?

I don’t read what seems to be bad literature. There is far too much excellent literature to read for me to waste my time, and I don’t read enough anyway. So I don’t have a thorough sense of what linguistic or stylistic features are characteristic of bad artistry, beyond what is apparent on the surface. But as a result of reading modern writing more generally, I worry about the trajectory what is accepted as literary language.

I am fairly proud to admit that I’m rather snobbish about grammar. I’m probably prone to error, but I am the sort of person who will stop and correct myself in mid-conversation if I end a sentence with a preposition. (I know that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I know that my third clause in this post ended with a preposition.) So I’ve noticed some trends with which I am snobbishly uncomfortable. One of these is that sentence fragments seem to be commonly accepted, even encouraged in published literature these days.

I was reading the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction, and I found in one article several examples of short, declarative, ungrammatical phrases, which decidedly limit how seriously I can take the writing. Early in the article, the author writes:

“California is among the states that require judges to divide the community property perfectly equally between the divorcing parties. No matter what.”

Now, I recognize that the author is trying to give particular weight to that latter phrase by isolating it from the rest of the sentence, but I think that that’s a lazy way for a writer to evoke the intended response from his or her audience. But this author does it again later:

“She followed and shot him again. And again.”

(Nice phrase, let me re-use it.) And again:

“Maria got revenge. And six years in state prison.”

Thinking about it now, I’m quite sure that I’ve seen numerous other examples of this in published work elsewhere. I am uncomfortable with a literary landscape in which this sort of cutting of corners is considered effective and is widely accepted by editors.

Writers are different from spoken word artists. We should be able to convey our ideas and leave an impact upon our audience by more nuanced means than pausing for dramatic effect. If an author wishes for there to be strength in a subsequent observation, he should convey it with the strength of his language, and his words should punch his audience in the gut or grab it by the testicles, not merely slap it on the ear.

I’m sure that I have little cause to worry and that these trends will fade in the history of modern literature, but so long as I’m in the midst of it, I’ll demand better from the here-and-now. Perhaps it is the persistence of those demands that keeps the worst of our culture and art from being as visible in retrospect as it is in the moment.

What I've Been Watching: Twin Peaks

2012-02-10T23:30:00.001-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any commentary about film or television here. Toward the end of changing that, it seems worthwhile to point out that I recently finished watching the entire run of Twin Peaks. It was wonderfully compelling, in large part because of the skillful blend of soap-operatic, don’t-miss-an-episode plotlines, potentially revelatory themes, and wonderfully artistic imagery. Despite an almost perfect pilot movie, a thoroughly satisfying season and a half, and a finale that was the most eye-poppingly surreal bit of television I’ve seen since the last episode of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks has also allowed me to experience, twenty years after the fact, one of the most rapidly disappointing declines in television history.

I am assuredly not going to be saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times since 1991, but it is stunning how clearly season two of Twin Peaks demonstrates the destructive potential of television networks. If any controlling interest in work of fiction has ever made a more glaring error in judgment than ABC did in insisting upon a solution to the Laura Palmer murder, let me know about it. I cannot fathom how anyone could have thought that that would be a good idea, when even the most casual observer should have recognized that that was what held the show together, that without unresolved questions about the slain prom queen the show didn’t really exist.

If they’d wanted to resolve the storyline out of some sense of duty to their audience, I suppose I can understand that, especially if they were confident enough in the rest of the series to expect it to maintain its appeal on its various other merits. From what I understand, though, the network never had much faith in the show, even when the public was obsessed with it. Of course, the ratings at the end of the first season and the beginning of the second should have made it clear that the accountants and executives didn’t know what they were talking about, and they should have thus been motivated to stay the hell out of the way.

I can begin to understand insisting on the resolution to the initial A storyline, but how in God’s name could anyone see value in ending it mid-season? I started viewing the show in almost complete ignorance as to what to expect, and I certainly didn’t realize that the murder would be solved when it was. Even so, the revelation was extremely powerful for me, and I was quite disappointed in myself for not determining who the killer was ahead of time. But upon viewing that extremely early climax and knowing how many episodes were still left, I assumed that what I had watched was just the beginning of the end, and that the rest of the season would entail the characters pursuing a killer whose identity the audience now knew. I also assumed that they would continue to piece together layers of the mystery, tying the minor storylines into narrative of Laura Palmer’s death.

It’s not that the latter half of season two is bad, but when neither of those things happened, and when the primary driver of the plot was wrapped up very quickly and neatly, I was utterly disoriented. I imagine that the majority of fans of the show, like me, had to force themselves past that point just to see what happened next. Once I came to terms with the fact that the bottom fell out of the show, I rediscovered its appeal from a completely different standpoint. But even though it remained good television, what could hurt a series more than several episodes of the audience collectively wondering why they were suddenly watching an altogether different show.

Because of the catastrophic effect of ABC’s insistence on something that was about as obviously bad as bad ideas come, it’s a terrible disappointment that Twin Peaks didn’t constitute a breaking point in the tradition of interference by moneyed interests in art and media. But unfortunately that was just a particular high water mark in a still-ongoing history of networks and studies derailing promising projects and preventing good stories from becoming great.

Twin Peaks was still great, but it could have been great for so much longer. Oh, there were other problems with the post-resolution portion of the show, too. The recovery period might have been quicker and smoother if it weren’t for the fact that even minor storylines were dropped and new ones with new characters had to be unexpectedly introduced in large part, based on what I’ve read, because Kyle McLaughlin was unabashedly shitting where he ate. Nevertheless, all of this built through the development of a beautifully complex mythology to a final episode that kept my mind constantly racing to keep up with a parade of nightmarish riddles.

And that final episode was intellectually gratifying but emotionally devastating. David Lynch and Mark Frost had apparently arranged to put multiple characters in peril in hopes of generating demand for continuation to a third season. This also was something I didn’t know going into it, so I, and presumably many of those who watched it when it was on television, was expecting a closed ending. But when I read the final scenes that way I came away from the show grappling with the implication that there are dire personal consequences for trying to do good in a world that possesses precious little hope.

I heard whispers that the film, Fire Walk With Me might provide some resolution to the oppressively bleak ending of the show, but it didn’t. It tauntingly hinted at the possibility of a resolution, but it didn’t follow through with it, so I get the impression that David Lynch just enjoys screwing with his audience for kicks. That said, I’d be happy to be screwed with again. Hopefully I am part of an ongoing growth of retrospective interest in Twin Peaks. If so, I honestly think Lynch should revisit the town, since Twin Peaks has the unique distinction of having specifically placed one early scene twenty-five years in the series’ future. That’s right around the corner, underneath the sycamores, behind the red curtain.

Talking to Twenty-Six Year-Olds

2012-02-09T22:04:00.002-05:00

This is something of an addendum to my post from the other day about talking to twenty year-olds about the future, particularly with regard to post-college expectations. I got to thinking more about my social interactions with youth after I wrote it, and I’ve come to realize that I have an adjacent set of frustrations to contend with when I talk to certain people who are not younger than me, but rather exactly my age.

In my previous post, I wondered whether I was as naïve when I was twenty as are people I know who are twenty now. As I suggested, it’s easy to be when you’ve had two solid decades of people painting an uncompromisingly optimistic picture about your trajectory in life. Maybe, then, the difference between them and me is simply the measure of how much one’s life and attitude change in the space of six years. Although, I was really much more cynical and morose in previous years than I am now, so maybe I should make that “in the space of two years once you’ve entered your twenties.”

When I put things into a larger context, though, I begin to doubt whether that’s the case. Disillusionment is only one possible outcome when you’ve started life with tremendous ambitions and had some of them dashed along the way. From what I’ve seen, maybe the response to disappointment that the naïve resort to is to pretend that things really did work out all along. That is the frustrating attitude that I encounter from my peers at times. Some of them are in objectively poor situations but have convinced themselves that they are happy there by pretending that what they have is what they were working towards all along.

My last job before I became self-employed was in a meat shop. (As an aside here, most people find that hilarious, because I have been a vegetarian for a long time; I take pride in the belief that I thus had the clearest example of a subsistence job.) The place is a small, privately-owned business. A husband and wife pair runs it, I worked in the back producing the merchandise, there were two or three part-time clerks in the front of the store, and one young man who worked there full-time and was considered the front-of-house manager.

That other full-time employee was exactly the same age as I, and I came to find out that he had gone to a local area college and studied business management. In conversation with this young man, he expressed to me the belief that his degree was the reason why he had been hired by this small-business retailer and entrusted with the position of management. But I know from conversation with the owner that that is bullshit. Education was not a relevant section of the application.

The owner hired my fellow graduate because he had claimed (falsely) that he had worked as a chef. Experience in food service was the only thing that was of value since he was going to be working in food service, regardless of managerial responsibilities. And anyone would guess this by observing what the responsibilities of the young man’s job are. He works with food. Any managerial tasks that he performs could have been taught to a reasonably bright young person in the space of a week, and nothing that he could have learned in a classroom could matter to what he does from day to day.

Nevertheless, my then-coworker had the utmost confidence that his four years of education had thoroughly paid off once he acquired a low-wage job with no benefits that carried the purely cosmetic title of manager. I, on the other hand, knew full-well that my own esteemed education did me no favors when I applied for that job so that I could keep a roof over my head. Quite the contrary, it served as a red flag; it made me a gamble, just as it would have done with any of the previous potential employers who had declined to hire me, or to interview me. As it happened, it was a gamble that paid off for my employer, as he would no doubt attest to. Still, I couldn’t avoid thinking every time I entered that place in the morning, and every time I walked into the other jobs I’d held in the same vein, that I could have more easily obtained that work had I simply proceeded to it after high school, and I wouldn’t have been four years older, and everything I earned would go towards my future and the enjoyment of my life in absence of debt and lost time.

I guess eschewing that kind of awareness helps to make one’s life far more manageable, but I just can’t submit to that kind of self-delusion. That’s all that it is, and it’s far worse than anything that I see in people who are still twenty years old and in college. Their self-delusion is forward-looking; it is grounded in limited interactions they have had with the full-fledged adults around them; it remains to be either gratified via good fortune or shattered by reality. Or, apparently, it may come to neither end, but be cushioned against reality by one’s persistently softened perceptions.

It is most certainly persistent, as it’s not just in twenty-six year olds that I witness this impulse, but it is in everyone. Particularly since I live in Buffalo, it is not difficult to find notable examples of it. A town like this is filled with people who claim that they live in it because they love it, because it’s home, because once you stop and peer through its cracked and fading surface, you’ll find some really great hidden gems of community and experience. But when you press many of those people for the stories of how they came to be where they are, it becomes clear that circumstances weighted them down, that they were compelled to return to a former home, or to reside where they had planned to simply pass through.

Over time, such people have to choose between resigning themselves to a situation that falls far short of what they’d wanted out of life, fighting against it even at the expense of happiness, comfort, and health, or convincing themselves that what they have really is what they want. I never intend to be that latter sort of person, who chooses the comfortable explanations over the correct ones, but I’m sure that many of the older men I’ve met who did so didn’t want to when they started out. I’m sure that the impulse towards such delusion becomes stronger the longer things remain difficult and frustrating and unfair, but based on much of what I’ve been seeing in my peers, it starts young, too.

Poverty in Politics - Either Used or Forgotten

2012-02-08T10:59:00.004-05:00

I originally wrote this piece to be posted elsewhere, so the comments and events it refers to are a week or so old now. I still thought it worthwhile to post it here.

I think it’s honest of me to identify myself as coming solidly from the left with all of my political writing. But I certainly don’t make a conscious effort to fit myself into a particular camp, so even while I acknowledge my liberal tendencies, I won’t hesitate to begin an editorial with my own criticisms of fellow liberals or the Democratic Party. One party obviously contradicts my ideals more often than the other, but I have no love for political parties in general. And there is plenty of common ground on which I think both Democrats and Republicans routinely fail to serve the country’s interests.

It’s cheap politics for the DNC to utilize Mitt Romney’s remark that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” and to make a campaign ad out of it. In that ad, the quotation is very conspicuously cut off, and anyone who views such things objectively ought to immediately recognize that it both mischaracterizes Romney’s remarks and allows the Democratic Party to dodge the need to present a clear distinction between their policies and his. Taken out of context, Mitt Romney’s comment sure does portray him as callously out of touch. And indeed, I believe he is just that. But he didn’t say what he’s being accused of saying.

What Mitt Romney really said was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That’s quite different from simply declaring that you don’t care one bit about a particular segment of the population. Romney’s not saying that society has no responsibility for the poor; he’s saying that we already do enough for them. I don’t think one needs to twist that argument in order to criticize it. It would be cartoonishly villainous for a presidential candidate to say, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death,” but it’s not exactly saintly to say, “as long as the poor don’t starve to death, I’m satisfied.” It worries me that the Democratic Party feels the need to mischaracterize Romney’s remarks so they sound like the former statement, because that implies that they don’t see the latter as being sufficiently divergent from their more liberal views.

It says something about the alienation of liberalism in modern American society that commentators like Rush Limbaugh unabashedly deride Romney for defending the very existence of the social safety net while Democrats merely pretend that he doesn’t defend it and make that the focus of their criticism. If liberalism were genuinely at home in American politics, somebody would be quoting Romney’s words exactly as he said them and using them to express indignation at the idea that the poor are sufficiently taken care of. Not only is no prominent politician or commentator saying that in this case, no one ever says it.

After his misleadingly shocking sound bite, Romney went on to say, “We will hear from the Democrat Party: ‘the plight of the poor.’” But will we? Honestly, I can’t think of any Democrat who has reliably expressed lofty ideals about ending the epidemic of homelessness or providing assistance to the poor that goes beyond food stamps and unemployment insurance and that attacks the actual system that keeps people poor, by providing public works employment, for instance.

“You can choose where to focus,” Romney said, ostensibly differentiating his campaign from that of Democrats and other Republicans. “You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” I don’t believe him when he says that his focus isn’t on the rich, but that aside, I find that everyone in politics today pronounces their focus to be entirely on the middle class. And that’s easy to understand, since not many votes are found on either extreme of the income scale. In fact, given how broad and flexible different people’s conceptions are of “middle-income,” that’s where all of the votes are. Frequently, Americans, whether sitting comfortably within the top five percent of income earners or walking the poverty line like a tightrope, view themselves as middle class. So when a politician talks about defending middle class Americans or putting his political focus on their interests, citizens will tend to think that he’s talking about them. And there’s little doubt that politicians know this.

President Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast regarding the Christian obligation to help the poor were striking precisely because they are so anomalous in mainstream politics. The sentiment seemed earnest and was well-placed at the event, but the fact that the DNC ad was released on the same day compels me to view it with a great deal of cynicism. The ad is a transparent attempt to score points by leaping on an easy way of portraying the Democratic Party, fairly or unfairly, as having more compassion for the poor than their opponents. I can only hope that the prayer breakfast speech was genuine, and not a more subtle example of the same – a quick response to Romney’s ostensible gaffe the day before.

If it was intended as a response, that illustrates the very problem with political treatments of the issue of poverty and economic disparity. The best that the Democratic Party can do most of the time is wait for a Republican to say something objectionable, and then issue a response that says, “We’re not like that; we care about everybody.” I’d be far more convinced if they took the lead, if they actually demonstrated their commitment to solving society’s ills from the bottom up, rather than from the middle out. As it is, the commitment to helping the poor is only something that is claimed, and rarely something that decides policy.

The DNC ad was framed entirely as part of a negative campaign. It cites nothing that Democrats have done or plan to do in order to eradicate poverty, homelessness, or hunger. It points out the initiatives that Romney would likely undertake that would hurt the poor, and it is right to do so, but a preponderance of negative campaigns risks miring us in negative government, wherein the avoidance of harm is considered a good unto itself. I trust the Democratic Party to avoid willingly making life worse for the nation’s poorest citizens, but I do not trust them to undertake truly original initiatives to mend what is broken within American society.

So long as I have reason to believe that the choice in American politics is between the party that doesn’t care about the poor and the party that cares about them only enough to make themselves look good, I won’t be much inclined to take empty pronouncements on the topic seriously, not matter which side they come from.

Talking to Twenty Year-Olds

2012-02-07T19:47:00.002-05:00

As much as I like to be topical and political, I need to start pointing this blog back in the direction of analytical commentary on things that I observe in ordinary life. That kind of thing really is my bread and butter. And I believe that the changes and breaking points that we can realize in personal behavior and social tendencies are ultimately more meaningful. The most significant changes are organic, not imposed, and intellectual, not legal.

I have plenty to say about education and labor policy, but I’m more concerned with and more frustrated by private citizens’ attitudes toward individual instances of education and jobs. My frustration is especially pronounced when I interact with people who are about twenty years old, and I’m beginning to realize that it’s more likely that I’ll reach a breaking point whereby I stop speaking to young people than it is that any of them will abandon naivety for anything short of purely personal experience.

I’m honestly not sure to what extent my frustration is focused on trying to reach others with information that they refuse to listen to, and to what extent it’s focused on defending myself against the implications of their obstinance. I’ve become fast friends with a few college students in the years since I graduated from school and into abject poverty. At the outset of any such relationship, I feel that the insight of my experience puts me in a unique position to be able to provide counsel to people younger than myself regarding what’s wrong with the world they’re growing up in and what they can do to either change it or safeguard themselves against it. Nobody listens.

At every turn since I finished with NYU and faced one dead-end job search after another, I’ve found myself stuck between a crowd of highly educated people with severely limited prospects and a crowd of bright-eyed youths who believe that they are on the fast track to success and who will entertain no statements to the contrary. Perhaps it’s the cynicism talking, but when I try to talk about real life with that latter group, I can actually see them go rigid and put up walls around their minds in order to defend against any early assault on their illusions. By contrast, the lawyers, teachers, and engineers with whom I’ve talked about betrayed promises recognize the subject matter with such casualness that we may as well be talking about the weather.

The cocksure attitude of twenty year-olds towards their future success boggles my mind, and it makes me wonder whether I was like that six years ago. I’m not sure how I would have responded to cautionary tales when I was twenty, about six or so years ago. But at twenty-one, I was experiencing a series of personal setbacks and existential crises, so I don’t think I could have been characterized as cocksure about anything. I’d been forced out of school because I was too far ahead on my education to continue it before graduation, so I had a pretty disillusioned perspective on things working the way they’re supposed to. Nonetheless, I did believe that my degree was going to lead me somewhere, and that once I worked one more menial job and then graduated from my “new ivy league” university, I would be starting a fulfilling career.

However, the question is not whether I believed in what I was doing; it’s whether I believed in it with such blind conviction that I wouldn’t have let evidence stand in the way. When I was in school, nobody questioned the outcome of investing in one’s education. It always paid off, and in indeed life couldn’t pay off if you didn’t make that investment. If someone had come to me when I was a sophomore or a junior in college and told me that he had gone to a school with a better reputation than mine, had excelled there, graduated, and proceeded to fruitlessly look for professional work for months or years afterward, I like to think I would have stopped and wonder, “well, hell, if that can happen, what am I doing here?” I didn’t enroll in college as a crapshoot; I thought I was enrolling in it as a certainty. And it’s clear from the commentary of twenty year-olds today that they are doing exactly the same.

I had a girl of that age say to me just last week, “I’m going to make a lot more money than most of the men I know.” She wasn’t expressing a plan or a dream; she clearly stated it as a fact. Meanwhile, my own failure comes as no surprise to her. Indeed, I am one of those men she knows, whom she expects to always outpace in earnings. Evidently, the reason in her mind is that I plainly made a mess of my life by studying philosophy and religion at NYU, whereas she is in the process of getting a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Buffalo State College, and is therefore destined for greatness.

Of course I can’t prove it, but I’m quite confident that if the situation were reversed and I was destitute after studying biology at Buffalo State while she was pursuing liberal arts at NYU, she would account for my failure by saying that I hadn’t gone to a good enough school. The very nature of this kind of self-delusion is that twenty year-olds contort logic in whatever direction they need in order to explain contrary evidence as anomaly. There’s never any doubt about the economic value of a college education, so every young person who hears my story chases down a series of explanations of what I must have done wrong to mess up that guarantee.

They accuse me of picking the wrong major and I explain that NYU was the top-ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world, that I wrote more essays in one semester than some students do in their entire time in college, and that thinking analytically is kind of a useful skill in policy, publishing, journalism, advertising, and any office whatsoever. They ask whether I blew off the opportunity for internships and I explain that I worked full-time in a Manhattan office in lieu of a semester of school. They ask me if I even applied for jobs, and I restrain myself from slapping them.

I’ve been chided for my college majors and told that they made me deserving of my unemployment by someone who was majoring in communications at the time. She had the utmost confidence that when she finished her college education, she would go on to a lucrative career, but she didn’t know what it was yet. I’m not speculating about that. She stated that she didn’t know what kind of job she was going to have. But not knowing what she wanted to do with her life was no impediment to her certitude that life was going to work out as expected.

I think there’s actually a lot of breaking points that we need to get to with the way we talk to and teach our children. Many of them fall under one rubric: recognizing that we don’t do children and young adults any good by coddling them and insulating them from the facts of life. There are a lot of uncomfortable truths that people need to face up to as they grow, not the least of which is that there are absolutely no guarantees. Everything you do is, on some level, a gamble, and sometimes even the most rational, well-intentioned actions come to nothing, or worse, bring you to harm.

We tend to tell children the exact opposite. In fact, we tend to spread that delusion to adults who will listen, as well. We say that if you work hard, you will be repaid with wealth, opportunity, and respect. Bullshit. Most of us, as we age, encounter skeins of people who have worked themselves to the bone every day of their lives and still have nothing to show for it. We say that if you are good to others, you’ll get back what you give. Bullshit. Some of the most powerful, richest, most beloved people in the world are psychopaths for whom even generosity is about self-interest. By contrast, some of the most selfless people I have ever known have lived their lives having next to nothing to give, and have given it anyway.

We say that if you go to college you will be employed, and the better the school or the more technical the discipline the better your employment prospects will be. Bullshit. That’s just not always the case. I’m living proof of that, and I’ve met or otherwise heard of many others who are as well. It may be statistically more common for college-educated people to make much of life, but it’s not sufficient grounds for twenty year-old college students to say, “I’m in college, therefore I will never want for money or purpose.”

Yet we tell our children these things. Perhaps it is in hopes of encouraging them, and perhaps it is in hopes of insulating them from the existential pain of growing older. Likely we have both sentiments in mind. But in pursuing those ends, we fail to realize that insulating our children from hard truths that they will inevitably realize ultimately makes it more likely that that realization will damage them in the long run. Fostering ambition need not come at the expense of preparing a person for the possibility of disappointment. Neither should seal their minds off from alternative ways of observing the world.

I guess I can’t blame the twenty year-olds I speak to for dismissing my warning that things might still go badly despite the fact that they’ve followed all the rules so far. On the one hand, I did as well or better than they up to that stage in my life and then fell from my own perch of naivety, so my perspective ought to carry some weight. On the other hand, that weight is on the opposite side of the scale from the testament of virtually every adult a twenty year-old has encountered from childhood through adolescence.

Maybe, despite what I want to believe, I wouldn’t have listened to me either. That’s all the more reason why the chorus of mandated delusion needs to be silenced and we need to start providing our youth with a more balanced, rational way of looking at their lives and the world as a whole. By giving them nothing but optimistic visions until such time as they might come crumbling spectacularly down, we’re actively blinding them to some of the problems of the world, which, if they could recognize and anticipate them instead, they might be able to help fix while they’re still young.

Super Bowl Ads

2012-02-06T19:53:00.002-05:00

Last night’s Super Bowl provided a nice opportunity for me to visit with family and watch the game, but I must admit that the better share of my motivation was to watch the commercials and keep a critical eye upon them. Despite that, when I made my way to my father’s house, I forgot to take along my notebook, so any comments that I have to make will have to be by memory. I suppose that’s appropriate, considering the intended roles of advertising. Also, I like to assess both the good and the bad, so I think I’ll pair my reflections so that I give one bit of praise and one bit of criticism on the same topic.

The Cola Wars

Pepsi was one of the first companies to run an ad once the game had started, and its style was eminently recognizable from previous years. There seems to be no plan behind high-profile Pepsi advertisements other than to pour money into acquiring odd collections of whatever celebrity guest stars they can get to sign a contract, and then piling them on top of one another in some display of spectacle without substance, in hopes that every member of the audience will see somebody they recognize well enough to stare at for up to sixty seconds.

I wondered aloud on seeing last night’s Elton John-centered absurdity, is this strategy really working for them? I guess either Pepsi has to reach a breaking point in its patience with its advertising agency, or I’ve got to reach a breaking point in my expectations of the television audience. It would be sad to think that the modern consumer brain runs on nothing but facial-recognition. I think they’re still capable of reflecting, thinking rationally, and grasping themes.

Of course, on that latter point, I suppose Pepsi’s advertisers are in agreement, as they did try to build some reference to the Zeitgeist into the bizarre scene that they crafted for their commercial. It concludes (at least prior to Flavor Flav putting his uniquely discomforting punctuation mark on it) with Melanie Amaro refusing King Elton John’s begrudging offer of “Pepsi for you,” and insisting instead, “Pepsi for all.”

It is arguably clever to try to tap into far-reaching frustrations over upper-class greed, but hinting at a socio-economic revolution doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose in a Pepsi commercial. It’s not as though Pepsi can somehow be viewed as a commodity that is cruelly withheld from the poor. It’s just a carbonated soft drink, and it’s already familiar to all of us, rich and poor – poor especially. Adding the class conflict dimension to a Pepsi commercial just adds another level to the acid nightmare that makes up their advertising.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola advertisements have been genuinely satisfying for years. This year in particular, their Super Bowl spots clearly aimed for continuity while Pepsi continued to deliberately eschew just that. Rather than focusing their expenditures on celebrity endorsements, Coca-Cola widely spread out two or three million dollars among a few timeslots throughout the event, so as to retain the audience’s attention with a series of installments of the same campaign, as opposed to just grapping the audience’s attention with one swift, bewildering slap in the face.

And Coca-Cola’s continuity curves around a tagline, and thus an overall theme, that is simple and effective: open happiness. That is precisely the sort of concept one should seek to attach to a soft drink. It should conjure the idea of refreshment, or leisure, or camaraderie, or enjoyment. And Coca-Cola makes a plain declaration of enjoyment, and then backs it up by making their Polar Bear commercials thoroughly enjoyable.

Nostalgia

If there’s one unique social trend amongst my generation, it is an unprecedented obsession with nostalgia. Budweiser’s ads utilized this fact delicately and artistically, while Samsung did so in a clumsy way that highlighted the worst aspects of our delight at remembering the past.

Budweiser is an absolute champion among Super Bowl advertisers, and a pair of their commercials this year were quite ambitions in connecting their brand to a long and romanticized past. First, their Clydesdale commercial depicted the end of Prohibition, and thus both allowed a young audience’s imagination to recede into an historical moment and connected that imagery to a larger theme of the end of hard times, which was no doubt expected to resonate with people throughout the country in the midst of this persistently difficult economy. Indeed, the same basic concept was repeated frequently by the American car companies and others.

Later in the game, Budweiser ran another commercial that effectively continued from where the Prohibition spot left off, tracing the presence of their brand throughout the twentieth century in America. It was a distinctly ambitious advertisement, and it theoretically made that impulse towards nostalgia accessible to everyone between the ages of twenty-one and seventy. I don’t know whether it was among the most effective commercials of the game, but it was certainly among the most affective. No one who was paying attention would have failed to find something that they could relate to, either experientially or imaginatively.

Interestingly, Samsung went in quite the opposite direction, which may in fact be appropriate given that their target demographic is certainly young, and comprised mostly of young urban professionals or current students, for whom cutting edge technology is of paramount importance, but for whom nostalgia is as strong a pull as it is for anyone else.

I do not understand why the singer from the band The Darkness appeared in the middle of that commercial. And while I recognize that many people roughly my age probably responded to it, I don’t understand why that would be. The bizarre thing about the increasingly strong nostalgic tendency in American society is that it’s also increasingly close. Thus, Samsung saw fit to make the hook for their ad a rock song that was unreasonably popular for a while seven years ago – not recent enough to be at all fresh, but not old enough to be what you might call a blast from the past.

I’m not saying that it was a poor move; I’m just saying that I can’t comprehend the appeal. I’d rather there hadn’t been such a commercial to remind me of the irrationality of certain young social trends.

Sex Sells

I love the Fiat commercial all the more because I hated it for the first several seconds. As I watched it, I started wondering if there was something wrong with me, given that such male fantasies as it depicted just tend to confuse me. It made for another instance where I had to remind myself to divorce myself from the target audience and recognize that that sort of overblown sexuality does have an influence on many potential consumers. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that what I was watching was just ridiculously over-the-top. Then, lo and behold, the hilarious turn reveals that that was exactly the point. I’m guessing the advertisers read the study from about a year ago that indicated that men’s brains do indeed respond the same way to cars as they do to women. Even if one thinks that comparison is hyperbole, though, Fiat’s utilization of the parallel was hilarious. It may very well have been my favorite commercial of the night, though admittedly the competition was quite slim.

By contrast, the sex-focused ad campaign for Go Daddy wore thin years ago and it just keeps getting more obnoxious, so those were probably my least favorite commercials. If the company thinks that the suggestion of nudity is helping to sell their domain hosting, I think somebody should urge them towards the breaking point of realizing that the reason why their sales figures are good is that they have essentially no competition. The Super Bowl commercial could consist of nothing but fifteen seconds of their web address flashing on the screen and they would probably still get a spike in traffic. Pretending that there’s a naked woman off camera does nothing to sell the service. The men to whom it might appeal can imagine nudity without Go Daddy’s help, and probably already were.

Supernatural

Audi’s vampire party commercial came on early and was so satisfying I was worried I wouldn’t have room for anything else once it concluded. Headlights are an odd feature on which to focus your sales pitch, but it probably is the sort of arcane status symbol that purchasers of high-end car brands would want to be aware of.

The entire structure of the commercial parallels that focus on – if I may call it this without sound pejorative – snobbishness. It grabs the attention of anyone who is aware of current popular culture, and lets them wonder what direction it’s going. I feel as though when vampires are put on screen in front of a diverse audience, one portion of people lean in and hope people start fucking, and the rest of us lean in and hope that people get massacred. It was those of us who are completely annoyed by the modern vampire obsession who were satisfied, in part because it came at the expense of the rest. Right now, someone who feels very good about himself because of both his taste in literature and his taste in consumer goods is seriously considering purchasing an Audi.

On the bad side of usage of the supernatural in Super Bowl commercials, there’s Cars.com. I appreciate the shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but really, what the hell were they thinking? “Haunting” is not necessarily a negative label. You can make your message haunt your audience in a good way. This was not an example of that.

I think the above constitute a pretty good cross-sample of last night’s advertisements. I hope this is far more thought than the rest of you put into it. After all, very few of the ads were especially impressive this year, whereas the actual game was terrific. Nevertheless, it is more fun to analyze social trends and consumer manipulation than offensive rushing statistics.

Suicide and Deontological Ethics

2012-02-03T12:57:00.008-05:00

This is interesting. I’ve hit a rare breaking point in my philosophical beliefs. Yesterday, Jack Marshall wrote about Don Cornelius’ recent suicide, and today he took it as an opportunity to recall a post from years ago regarding Hunter S. Thompson having killed himself in 2005. In the first place, Marshall was making the point that the social ethics regarding suicide may have to change as a deeply flawed health care system makes the last years of people’s lives burdensome to their families and communities. But Marshall reposted his comments about Hunter S. Thompson in order to make it perfectly clear that he has an unforgiving attitude towards suicide outside of the special cases of extreme old age and infirmity.

I appreciate the pointed focus on ethics of Jack Marshall’s blog, and I read it frequently, but I find that I am often at odds with his politics, as he is quite conservative, and I am sometimes at odds with his ethical theories, as he is unambiguously utilitarian. That latter fact explains why Marshall is able to conceptualize ethics as so flexible that suicide may be wrong in every case for one generation, but circumstance-dependent in another. I have never been comfortable with the idea that the rightness or wrongness of actions can change. I don’t believe that ethics are so flighty and inconsistent, so I have always subscribed to a deontological outlook, considering actions to be right or wrong entirely unto themselves.

Thus, I disagree with Marshall about the idea that the ethic of suicide may be different in the future than it was in the past. But as it happens, I also disagree with his aggressive assessment of the current ethic. I think the cultural revulsion at the idea of taking one’s own life is overblown and lacking in compassion. Despite using the term “victim of suicide,” we frequently tend to portray such people only as perpetrators, never as victims.

Most people, Jack Marshall certainly among them, describe suicide as the ultimate selfish act, but I consider that claim to be irrational. For something to be selfish, one must be able to expect that he will personally benefit from the act, but what personal benefit can there be if the end result of the act is that you cease to be, and thus cease to be capable of either benefitting from or being harmed by anything? I would say that in all probability, suicide is generally neutral with regard to self-interest, and indeed that the vast majority of suicide victims genuinely believe that other people will either not be affected by their deaths, or will be affected positively. Thus, I would ascribe the same motivations to most or all suicides that Jack Marshall ascribes to the theoretically defensible suicides among the elderly of the future.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always felt this way, though it recent years my forgiving stance on the issue has been helped by being on the other side of it. I have contemplated suicide extensively, and while I certainly would not encourage anyone to follow through where I have held back, I also would not pass judgment on anyone who did so. There are motivations, and mental states, and circumstances to consider, and the entirety of what drives a person to forfeit his own life cannot be adequately known. But I suppose that the essential reason to give a suicide victim the benefit of the doubt is an ethic of live and let live, live and let die. That is, there’s something to be said for the idea that one’s life is one’s own to either hold onto or cast off. And since I don’t believe in utilitarianism, the incidental, secondary consequences of suicide are not sufficient cause to judge it as unethical.

But my breaking point comes of realizing that it’s hard to make deontology mesh with attitude that says suicide might be okay. After all, my aversion to utilitarianism is clarified by any thought experiment in which murder is made okay by the promise that it will save other lives. Now, that’s the very thing that helps to convert others to utilitarianism, because it’s hard for people to imagine how a worse outcome can be associated with a better moral decision. But it is my strong intuition that we are morally culpable primarily just for our own actions, and if there are exceptions to the hierarchy of right and wrong, the entire system of morality falls apart.

I realize now that by allowing for the ethical rightness or neutrality of suicide, I am contradicting my belief that killing is wrong in its own right, rather than because of its outcomes. My natural inclination is to equate killing with murder – to think of it as an externally directed act. Yet suicide is barely different; it is an act of murder in which the same person is both victim and perpetrator. Unless I go to great lengths to explain why a self-contained act of murder is morally different from an externally directed one, it seems rationally incumbent on me to accept that suicide is wrong not only in general, but even in cases where it would end severe pain and suffering.

It’s not impossible to make that distinction. I could say that actions contain their own normative value only by virtue of their being externally directed. That’s tempting and I’ll give it some more thought, but it also seems like a manipulation of my own moral theories. To build such an exception into the concept of the intrinsic wrongness of a type of action is to approach dangerously close to utilitarianism and thus to be left with what I consider an incomprehensible moral code. And in fact, my willingness to consider circumstance in eschewing moral judgment of suicide could itself be easily labeled as utilitarian.

So it’s not easy for me to reconcile my intuitions toward suicide and self-harm with my belief in deontology. Now that the two ideas have been brought into conflict, I’m inclined to drop my existing attitude toward the specific case. The only other options are demolishing my ethical framework or twisting it to accept a contradiction, and either such action would be rationally unjustifiable. At least until I come up with a better solution, I feel compelled to declare that suicide is wrong no matter what. That extends even to the exceptions that Jack Marshall is willing to make for elderly people who feel they must take their own lives to avoid becoming a burden within the healthcare system.

However, I can see no intrinsic moral value in declining to preserve or prolong life, and that should adequately reconcile the deontological view of suicide with the utilitarian concern about becoming a societal burden. No moral imperative compels the elderly and infirm to pursue treatment, or even to actively keep themselves safe and healthy. And fortunately for my intuitions, the same goes for anyone who has motivations for suicide other than old age. It’s wrong to kill oneself, but it is not strictly wrong to accept one’s own death, to will it, or to actively pursue it.

This too is the sort of hypothetical which will drive some people fast away from deontology but that recommits me to it. It will strike others as inconsistent that euthanasia can be considered wrong while allowing yourself to die by other unnatural means is considered acceptable. But as far as I’m concerned, at a sufficiently deep level of analysis it is the only view that is consistent. And in fact it’s delightfully consistent because it appears to reconcile not only contrary intuitions but also deontological and utilitarian theories. Not only that, but it satisfies both my rationality and my romanticism. The idea that courting death can be right even as forcing it is wrong gives moral weight to the way that I hope to one day die. It means that Hunter S. Thompson, who left a suicide note lamenting the end of football season and shot himself at 67 while on the phone with his wife, is subject to ethical judgments, but that I should admire Ambrose Bierce even more than I already do for getting involved in the Mexican revolution at age seventy-one and disappearing after leaving behind a final letter that said in part:

Good-by -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!