The Dish

The Higher Meaning Of Higher Education, Ctd

A reader writes:

I have a strong liberal arts background. In high school, I read Alexander Pope, Camus, and Sartre; I watched movies by Bergman and Kurosawa. In college I majored in philosophy at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. And if I hear another advocate of the liberal arts proclaim the glories of the humanities, and wax oh-so-eloquent about how enlightening and inspiring it is to read the Great Books, I am going to scream.

First, about those stereotypes about philosophy majors who can’t get jobs. Guess what, they’re true. I have spent many years trying to figure out what to do with my life, and treading water financially, to the detriment not only of my own bank account and well-being, but that of my family, as well. The faculty and administration at my college bent over backwards emphasizing the social justice aspect of the education we were receiving. But the first requirement for being a socially responsible member of this – or any – society is being able to support yourself.

Second, there is far too much emphasis in the liberal arts on teaching people to write.

I’m a very good writer. But, again, guess what – that’s irrelevant for most jobs. Very few jobs – even jobs that require an advanced degree – actually involve writing. What they do require is the ability to organize information and communicate well. Writing is a form of organizing information and communicating – but it’s just one form of either. It’s entirely possible for someone to be very good at organizing information and communicating, but not have to write anything more complicated than an email. Look at the credits of any movie. That’s a list of hundreds of well-paid, highly competent professionals. And at best a handful are being paid for their ability to write.

Third, I was told that getting into a great college was key to getting a good job: the better the college/university you attended, the better the chance you would land a solid, well-paying job. Um, no. I have had dozens of job interviews over the years. I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the college where I got my Bachelor’s degree. I don’t see a dramatic difference between the people I know who went to elite colleges and those who went to good state universities. Actually, I don’t see much of a difference at all.

Fourth, I can define the “crisis” in the humanities in one four-letter word: Dish. The Dish represents the crisis in the humanities. Why? Because it epitomizes a problem for the humanities for which the humanities themselves are responsible: they have created their own competition. When I read the Dish (which I usually do several times a day), I read articles about a wide variety of topics, almost all of which fall under the traditional definition of the humanities/liberal arts. Reading the Dish is, in effect, a way of continuing my liberal arts education. And yet I do so without coming anywhere near a liberal arts faculty member. I don’t think you even quote professors all that often. There are myriad examples of this. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about art, but I never took an art history class in college. Instead, I have spent lots of time in museums and galleries, and have read lots of newspaper and magazine articles about artists I like. If you want to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare, you can take a class in the English department of some university. Or you can watch any of the hundreds of movies that have been made based on the Bard’s plays.

The humanities are alive and well. They’re just not necessarily alive and well in the humanities departments of American colleges and universities. THAT is the crisis of the humanities.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The video above (around 0:50) reveals what appears to be the horrible truth behind this morning’s massacre in Cairo. It seems to have been a largely unprovoked military massacre of Islamist protesters. Tweets in real time here. The best immediate analysis here.

Readers shared their stories of euthanizing their old dogs; Pope Francis spoke of a “globalization of indifference” toward the vulnerable, especially illegal immigrants; and Mos Def showed us how barbaric forced-feeding truly is.

The most popular post was the twelve-year-old Egyptian pundit; the second was The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets. The Dish’s top four countries for viewers today were the US, Canada, Britain and Australia, in that order. In the last seven days, the Dish got 65 pageviews in Mongolia.

See you tomorrow.

Leave No Troops Behind

Fed up with Karzai, Obama is leaning more toward the “zero option” in Afghanistan: no troops at all after next year. I sure hope that’s where we end up. Obama’s election in 2008 was a clear repudiation of the reckless interventionism of the recent past; his re-election in 2012 cemented the shift toward a global American role that is more attuned to our balance sheet and our actual security threats. Leaving remnants of empire behind in places like Iraq and Afghanistan undermines that shift, re-legitimizes the notion that the US must somehow control every nook and cranny of the globe (we can’t and it corrupts us when we try).

That’s the change Obama represented to the next generation: a pragmatic adjustment to a reality that has nothing to do with the neocon and boomer mindsets of the past.. He has delivered, by and large. But the clarity of the departures is what will help define the future: a future of limits.

Defining Dopamine

Bethany Brookshire gets technical about the neurotransmitter:

[M]any people like to describe a spike in dopamine as “motivation” or “pleasure.” But that’s not quite it. Really, dopamine is signaling feedback for predicted rewards. If you, say, have learned to associate a cue (like a crack pipe) with a hit of crack, you will start getting increases in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens in response to the sight of the pipe, as your brain predicts the reward. But if you then don’t get your hit, well, then dopamine can decrease, and that’s not a good feeling. So you’d think that maybe dopamine predicts reward. But again, it gets more complex. For example, dopamine can increase in the nucleus accumbens in people with post-traumatic stress disorder when they are experiencing heightened vigilance and paranoia. So you might say, in this brain area at least, dopamine isn’t addiction or reward or fear. Instead, it’s what we call salience. Salience is more than attention: It’s a sign of something that needs to be paid attention to, something that stands out. This may be part of the mesolimbic role in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and also a part of its role in addiction.

But dopamine itself?

It’s not salience. It has far more roles in the brain to play. For example, dopamine plays a big role in starting movement, and the destruction of dopamine neurons in an area of the brain called the substantia nigra is what produces the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Dopamine also plays an important role as a hormone, inhibiting prolactin to stop the release of breast milk. Back in the mesolimbic pathway, dopamine can play a role in psychosis, and many antipsychotics for treatment of schizophrenia target dopamine. Dopamine is involved in the frontal cortex in executive functions like attention. In the rest of the body, dopamine is involved in nausea, in kidney function, and in heart function. With all of these wonderful, interesting things that dopamine does, it gets my goat to see dopamine simplified to things like “attention” or “addiction.”

The above trailer is from Awakenings, a film based on the true story of Oliver Sacks’ breakthrough with L-DOPA, a chemical used to increase dopamine concentrations in the treatment of ailments such as Parkinson’s disease and encephalitis lethargica – from which Sacks’ patients “awoke”. Watch the entire film below:

When Art Becomes Dated

Tom Vanderbilt tackles the topic:

“What makes a work of art seem dated is a sort of overdetermined reliance on the tropes, whether of subject or style, of the day—a kind of historical narcissism. … Datedness runs in all kinds of temporal directions. Science fiction, the genre that should seem the least dated, can often feel the most, because the future as depicted came to pass and looked nothing like that. In the same way that period films often commit the mistake of showing everyone driving shiny new period cars (as those are the only ones that have survived to the present), science-fiction films often assume that the future, to paraphrase William Gibson, will be “evenly distributed”—that everything, from computers to clothes, will represent a radical break from today. A film like “Blade Runner,” however, reminds us that periodicity can be messy. As Gibson has written, the best way to write about the future is to write about the present.

The Privilege Of Paris

In a dispatch from Paris, Ta-Nehisi contemplates privilege, writing that it “is like money–when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn”:

We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing–and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don’t want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.

But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there–perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you.

Dreher, who spent last October in Paris, chimes in:

I don’t deserve Paris, I don’t deserve my writing career, I don’t deserve my wife and children — and that is reason to rejoice and be glad for having been given all these things by God. And not only given these things, as a divine favor, but given the wherewithal — morally, spiritually, materially — to help make our dreams come true. To believe that the game is entirely rigged, that the only reason anybody ever does well is because of pure chance or cheating, is to deny the active role we play in the creation of our lives, though of course some have more room to act than others. But to believe that we deserve all of it, that everything comes to us as the result of natural justice, is to be prideful, and to risk serious spiritual corruption.

Face Of The Day

Glen Doyle a member of the Wuriniri Dance Group performs during a public NAIDOC celebration at Hyde Park on July 8, 2013 in Sydney, Australia. NAIDOC is a celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and an opportunity to recognise the contributions of Indigenous Australians. By Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images.

A War Of Words

As hostilities rise in Egypt, Marya Hannun sees a parallel fight playing out on Wikipedia:

“To describe the events which allowed Morsi’s rise to power as a ‘revolution’ but those which led to his downfall as a ‘coup’ is clearly biased and violates NPOV [neutral point of view],” one user writes. “A number of the comments by those defending the use of ‘coup’ in the title and trying to shut down discussion frankly strike me as Wiki-lawyering.”

Others have argued that it’s biased not to call the overthrow of Morsy a coup: The “military removing the president and installing a new one (even if not military), suspending the constitution and seizing control over various state apparatus, e.g. state TV fits the normal definition of a coup, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be anything in the constitution or other legal basis for these actions (to be clear I’m only referring to the legal aspect not the ethical or moral or whatever),” one Wikipedian points out. “It is called by the reliable media a coup d’état,deposing a president especially elected is a coup d’état ,and wikipedia only goes with neutral naming,” another notes. …

For what it’s worth, the debate isn’t limited to English-speaking Wikipedia users. The corresponding Arabic page on Egypt’s political upheaval is entitled, “The coup of July 3, 2013 in Egypt.” And the first heading under the corresponding discussion frantically reads, “Revolution or Coup?!”

The Young And The Shameless

Nick Coccoma reviews Sofia Coppola’s new film, The Bling Ring, which he describes as “perhaps [Coppola’s] most biting, damning portrait of society yet”:

The Bling Ring depicts Hollywood culture yet again … The kids in Coppola’s current picture don’t even possess the elemental soul powers to know they’re fucking nothing. They’re parodies of people, but they don’t seem to care. After all, that’s what celebrities are, isn’t it? And The Bling Ring is yet another hilariously terrifying reminder that a huge segment of America wants to be just like them.

What’s most disturbing is the utter simplicity of these kids’ motivation.

As Coppola presents them, they’re living proof of anthropologist René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. They want the Prada, Chanel and Gucci because it’s what other people want, famous people. (And this despite the fact that most of their families already have more money than God.) They seem to come prepackaged with these desires; we don’t see any process by which the kids become what they are. And with the slight exception of Marc, none of them displays even the faintest hint of hesitation—the exactitude with which Rebecca, Nicki, Chloe, Sam, and Emily case the joints and carjack Mercedes’ makes you simultaneously laugh and gasp. Coppola shows depth upon depth of material vacuity. …

Coppola shows you the insanity of a world in which people fall on their face so publicly and then turn even their bad girl/boy behavior into egomaniacal redemption stories for the press. Nicki is the apotheosis of this cult of the self, played to delicious perfection by Emma Watson. Her performance is at once tongue-in-cheek and shot straight from the hip; she’s so intelligent in her ditzy portrayal that you can almost hear her saying, “Can you believe this girl?” What you do hear from her mouth are lines that boggle the cerebral apparatus. “I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being,” she tells an E! News camera crew outside the courthouse. “God didn’t give me these talents and looks to just sit around being a model or being famous. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country, for all I know.” The only thing more stupefying than these words is the fact that it’s what Alexis Neiers, the flesh-and-blood basis of Nicki’s character, actually said.

The article on which The Bling Ring is based is here. Previous Dish on Coppola here.

When Flattery Gets You Nowhere

An attempt to crowd-fund a tribute to Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are – in which thirty-something Max returns to island of Wild Things with his daughter in tow – did not go over well with Sendak’s publisher, causing Kickstarter to suspend the campaign. Joe Mullin isn’t surprised:

It’s one of the great ironies of copyright in the digital age that it’s easier to express disdain than love for a work. If [writer Geoffrey] Todd and [illustrator Rich] Berner had written a scathing book review or a parody of Sendak’s book, HarperCollins wouldn’t have liked that, either–but there probably wouldn’t have been anything they could do about it. There would be substantially better legal protections.

The takedown of this project demonstrates that when push comes to shove, creators of “fan fiction” don’t have much support under current copyright law, and platforms like Kickstarter hardly want to have their back in a potentially complex dispute over fair use. Copyright has been used in many instances to control additional works in the “universe” in which a book or other work is set, even when the actual text and images in the new work are wholly original.