Stephen T. Fomba, who grew up poor in Sierra Leone, suggests it:
I didn’t mind growing up this way, for I didn’t mind work and did not know what I did not have. But I hated having to make these walks barefoot because we could not afford shoes. The injuries were too much. I sustained burns from the hot ground and rocks; wounds from sharp stones, thorns, and even broken bottles; infections from unknown bacteria; and various ailments—red skins, open sores that took very long to heal, fevers. Even when hurt or ill, I had to keep walking, often as many as 20 miles a day, usually under a hot sun.
We rarely think about the perils of walking barefoot. But according to one widely cited estimate, some 300 million children on earth don’t have shoes. Many illnesses and infections come from the ground, caused by stepping on sharp objects or touching saliva, blood, or bodily fluids. And it’s not merely those who can’t afford shoes who have to go barefoot; many millions of people around the world own poor quality shoes, but have to be careful not to overuse them to avoid early wear and tear. Shoes are for special occasions.
Blair Glencorse and Brooks Marmon instead focus on the “clear link between this governance failure and the current health crisis”
In places where governments are so rarely willing or able act in the interests of their citizens, we can begin to understand why the disease continues to disseminate. Health services, which barely exist in many places, are shunned because the unsanitary conditions of hospitals and heath centers have made them hubs for the spread of the virus. Many hospital staff — already underpaid and ill-equipped — have become victims themselves. Foreign health workers sent to help are ignored and even chased away by scared locals. A group of Liberians explained to us recently that they think Ebola is a ploy by the government to steal even more money from Western donors.
As a result, the Ebola challenges are now evolving into larger problems of instability in the region. Economic activity has ground to a standstill as borders have closed, movement is restricted, and flights are canceled. This is happening in countries where up to 50 percent of the population already earns less than 50 cents a day. Mistrust, misunderstandings, and ill-will are growing as people continue to die.
Laurie Garrett, who “was in the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1995,” lends her perspective:
How long will this state of siege last? Recent statements from WHO, MSF, Samaritan’s Purse, and other institutions leading the fight alongside the governments warn the world that it will be at least six months, and quite possibly a year, before Ebola can be defeated. Despite all the brouhaha here in the United States and Canada about application of experimental drugs and vaccines never clinically tested for safety or effectiveness to the African crisis, this siege will end not with magic bullets, but smart, heroic strategies that find infected people swiftly, place them behind cordoned quarantine barriers, and bury the dead rapidly after their demise without families’ contact or viewing. Yes, it is heartless and can seem cruel, but strategic isolations, coupled with vast urban campaigns of capture of the infected constitute the only hopes for ending the state of siege.
The ongoing protests and civil unrest in Ferguson, MO, is in many ways a long simmering set of problems brought to a boil. Most acutely, there’s the perfectly justifiable anger and resentment from a black population that, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, still struggles to overcome centuries of entrenched and systemic racism. Black America’s status as a permanent underclass is baked directly into the foundations of our economic and social system, and piecemeal reforms have proven utterly inadequate to the task of fixing the problem. In particular, the criminalization of black young males makes angry conflict with police inevitable. Under such circumstances, the surprise isn’t that protests and civil disobedience have broken out in Ferguson. The surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Beyond the racial dynamics, there’s the growing public realization that the police in America are out of control. It’s a problem that only we, the broad public, can fix. And we are responsible for fixing it because we’re all to blame.
If I sat down to summarize even a year’s worth of police misconduct and brutality, it would take hours and hours. Those of us who follow the news closely know that outrageous behavior by the cops is a daily occurrence. Sites like Gawker and journalists like Radley Balko have spread word of this misconduct regularly, but all it usually takes is a brief visit to Google News. And people, finally, are starting to notice. When even National Review is running a piece like “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police,” you know that the issue is becoming too acute to ignore. What the American poor have been experiencing for decades has become too obvious for affluent America to ignore.
Like so many of our national problems, our deep, perpetual problems with police behaving badly stems in part from 9/11 and the post-9/11 world.
I don’t want to oversell this; certainly, we’ve been living in a culture of deference towards police for far longer. But as we did with the presidency, the military, the intelligence services, and soldiers, we responded to 9/11 by buffeting our police officers with obsequious respect and endless displays of extreme gratitude. We feted them at football games and through parades in their honor. We plastered stickers celebrating them on our cars. We exhorted each other to “thank a first responder today.” We set about to create a culture of unwavering, unquestioning, credulous support for our police, and that has everything to do with today’s problems.
None of this should be surprising. In times of crisis, people often retreat to militarism, nationalism, and extreme respect for authority. This is part of why an aggressive foreign policy is so counterproductive; every time we rattle our saber at Iran, for example, we empower the theocracy and the establishment government and hurt the resistance. Our showy disdain for Russia, the way we layer disrespect on their displays of national pride and celebrations of their history– like we did during Sochi– only causes them to embrace Putin and his narrative more. You might find that foolish, but we did the exact same, affixing flags to our cars and writing our national security state a blank check in the form of the PATRIOT Act and similar legislation. And we told the cops, more or less explicitly: you can do whatever you want. The results are unsurprising.
After all, when you give any group carte blanche to do what they want, and make it clear that you will support them no matter what, how can you be surprised when they abuse that generosity? It’s human nature: people who are subject to little or no review will inevitably behave badly. No group can be expected to police itself; that’s why the foundation of our democracy is the separation of powers, the way in which different parts of government are expected to audit each other. Ultimately, though, the most important form of audit comes from the people themselves. Only the citizenry can ensure that our systems remain under our democratic control, and this function is especially important concerning the conduct of those who have the capacity to legally commit acts of violence– and to define for themselves what acts of violence are legal, whether those definitions are official or merely ad hoc. Well, we have abdicated that responsibility, and in that vacuum, misconduct, brutality, and corruption have rushed in. The problem is endemic. I don’t believe that all cops are bad, or even the majority, but I also don’t believe that this is a “few bad apples” problem. A few bad apples could not cause a problem as widespread and constant as the one we’re witnessing now.
You may not agree completely with the protesters in Ferguson. You may find their tactics unhelpful or misguided. But you should recognize: they are the front lines in a long-overdue process of reversing this problem and slowly dragging the police back under community control. It’s going to be an enormous task, one that has to occur on both the national and the local level. The acrimony and recrimination that will attend this project will be enormous, as the “law and order” brigades deride those working to rein in the police as radical, soft on crime, or worse. But we have to do it. This problem will never fix itself. The police cannot be expected to reform themselves. And since we as a people had a hand in creating these conditions, it’s our responsibility to change them. If you find the size of the task daunting, you need only think of the alternative, an ever-more unaccountable and entitled gang of men with guns and batons. Or think about an 18 year old black body, lying for four hours in a Missouri street.
(Photo: Police forces intervene protesters, who took to the streets to protest the killing of Michael Brown on August 17, 2014. U.S. Missouri State Governor Jay Nixon Saturday declared a curfew and a state of emergency in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. By Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
In the wake of Robin Williams’ death, Steven Stack reviews research on suicide contagion:
[T]here have been more than 100 empirical investigations of copycat suicide. A review of 419 findings from the first 55 investigations showed that only 35.8 per cent documented an increase in suicide after media coverage. Given that most evidence is not consistent with a copycat effect, a search for the conditions under which a story may elicit imitative suicides has been a key theme in this work.
The most important factor distinguishing studies that report a copycat effect from the ones that do not is whether or not a celebrity is involved. In particular, copycat effects are most likely to be reported in work focused on two distinct types of celebrities: those in politics and entertainment. The analysis of those 419 findings found that studies based on either or both of these subtypes were 5.27 times more likely to report an increase in suicides following coverage.
But he theorizes that “Williams’s gender could conceivably prevent a record number of copycat deaths”:
The more Williams’s suicide is discussed, if all else is equal, the greater the odds of a copycat effect. It is, however, doubtful that the impact will be as great as that of Monroe or Choi. They killed themselves at the peaks of their careers and popularity. In addition, the review of 419 findings in 55 studies determined that research that focuses on female suicide rates was 4.89 times more likely to find a copycat effect than other research.
Margot Sanger-Katz explains how to ethically cover suicides:
Few of the experts’ recommendations make much sense in the case of Mr. Williams. Studies suggest avoiding repetitive or prominent coverage; keeping the word suicide out of news headlines; and remaining silent about the means of suicide. “How can it not be prominent?” [professor Madelyn] Gould said.
Experts also say articles should include information about how suicide can be avoided (for instance, noting that the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255).
They also recommend avoiding coverage that describes death as an escape for a troubled person.
So how should journalists report on suicides? The public interest is best served by simply reporting that a person has died by suicide, with no additional details provided. If that’s too much to ask, then at least such details should not be placed in headlines or featured in a way that calls attention to them. This guidance is found in many ethicalstandards for journalists.
Williams’ suicide has also prompted a lot of constructive journalism about suicide prevention. I am all for that: suicide prevention is one of my research areas. But the most important thing to do is to find more effective treatments for the cause of many suicides: depression. And to find these treatments we need to be conducting more mental health research.
A reader response to Hecht’s video is here. More Dish on suicide contagion here.
Last July, I attended the Council of Writing Program Administrator’s annual conference in Normal, Illinois. While there, I watched a keynote address given by Duane Roen, a vice provost and professor at Arizona State University. Roen’s speech addressed the great need for academics and scholars to be publicly engaged, to share their work with a general audience and to endeavor to make the work we produce in our universities more accessible to the public. Roen referenced Nicholas Kristof’s famous (or notorious) column complaining that academics are too cloistered, our work too obscure to be of use to the general public. At the time, I and others complained that Kristof’s perspective was willfully narrow, failed to recognize a whole host of academics who make their work public every day, and ignored structural economic reasons for why academics can’t or won’t engage publicly. But Roen’s speech made clear that, despite these real reservations, we must continue to press ourselves to be more engaged, accessible, and open in our teaching and our research. Whether the perception that we are inaccessible and secluded from public life is fair or not, that perception must be combated through rigorous public engagement. Roen discussed academics who had, he felt, done an exemplary job of making their work available to a wider audience, and laid out the many benefits of this type of scholarly work.
Roen was the perfect figure to deliver such an argument, given his long history as a leader and mentor within the WPA world. The night before his speech, my friend Marcy and I talked with Dr. Roen at length at a gathering for graduate students, and I was struck by his warmth and approachability. This, too, is a form of public work, engaging with early-career academics and making them feel like part of the scholarly conversation. I was happy to see that Roen’s speech displayed the same friendliness and openness.
But while I felt energized by Roen’s keynote, I also felt concerned. I had noticed that all of the academics Roen listed were late career, and enjoyed the benefits of both tenure and prominence. During the Q&A, I asked Roen about the dangers of engaging publicly as a grad student or untenured academic, given that public speech tends to be political speech. Roen admitted that the question for the untenured was complicated, and advocated a cautious approach. Afterwards, several other faculty members in the audience addressed the question, and argued that grad students should not fear political engagement. Why would someone want to join a department, one asked, if that department had such little regard for intellectual and political freedom that it wouldn’t hire someone with controversial views? I felt encouraged by that support. But it’s also the case that, after I spoke, I was approached over the course of the next day by perhaps a half dozen grad students, who confided in me that they, too, feel constrained in what they can say, and fear speaking out in public about issues of controversy. They appreciated the support of the faculty in attendance, as I did, but said that with the academic job market as demoralizingly competitive as it is, they could not help but feel pressure to keep their opinions to themselves. They want to engage publicly, but the risks seem to outweigh the rewards.
These questions have taken on particular salience recently. Dr. Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American scholar who studies indigenous history and post-colonialism, had a tenured job offer rescinded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, thanks to a series of tweets he had sent regarding Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. To make matters even worse, Salaita had already resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech, as his appointment at Illinois had already been confirmed. Adding insult to injury, Cary Nelson, a professor in the department Salaita was to join and the former president of the AAUP faculty union, vigorously defended the school’s decision, despite being a self-identified defender of academic freedom. (In fact, Nelson has displayed such intimate knowledge with Salaita’s tweets that it is fair to ask whether he had a hand in the decision.) I wrote a letter to UIUC’s chancellor to protest, as did many others, and as Corey Robin has documented at length, a great number of academics and public figures have condemned this action. (Robin’s blog, in general, has been an indispensable resource in covering this story.) But while I hope and pray that Salaita lands on his feet in a secure tenured job, the damage to academic freedom has been done no matter what the outcome: the millions of academics observing this situation, particularly those who are in the precarious position of being untenured—the vast majority—cannot help but be less likely to speak out on matters of controversy. Those at UIUC who are responsible for this decision are culpable for this chilling effect on free political and intellectual expression.
Nelson’s performance throughout this controversy has been an embarrassment to himself and to his university. He has made it clear that his objection is not procedural but rather based largely on his personal rejection of Salaita’s politics. He has stated, for example, that “he doesn’t consider Gaza under occupation,” which is absurd, and anyway should be totally irrelevant to whether or not Salaita should have been fired. Nelson has taken the typical tack of representing Salaita as anti-Semitic, despite the fact that Salaita has said (in the self-same medium) “My stand is fundamentally one of acknowledging and countering the horror of antisemitism,” ” I believe that Jewish and Arab children are equal in the eyes of God,” “I refuse to conceptualize Israel/Palestine as Jewish-Arab acrimony. I am in solidarity with many Jews and in disagreement with many Arabs,” among other things.
What little procedural defense of Salaita’s firing Nelson was able to muster involved the notion of “collegiality.” As many have pointed out, Nelson himself has not always been a champion in this regard himself, referring to another academic in print as a vampire bat, among other outbursts. Beyond the palpable hypocrisy of Nelson’s take, there is the simply unworkable division between expression and tone. Arguments about tone are perennially utilized to forbid ideas that are controversial or disliked; there is no meaningful distinction between the two. Too often, notions of collegiality and tone become a catch-all complaint that cannot be independently verified. Would Malcolm X be able to serve in Nelson’s university? Would Eugene Debs or Jane Addams or Larry Kramer?
Someone once wrote that “claims about collegiality are being used to stifle campus debate, to punish faculty, and to silence the free exchange of opinion by the imposition of corporate-style conformity.” That man was Cary Nelson. I would like very much for Dr. Nelson to grapple with this: when smart and committed young academics tell me that they are too afraid of the potential professional consequences to speak out publicly, as they have often, it is people like Nelson who are partially responsible. His conduct has directly and deeply damaged our sense of a right to intellectual freedom.
Earlier this year, I got myself in some trouble with my fellow leftists when I asked whether we might take pause at the firing of Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich. I felt no personal sympathy for him, none at all, and I said so. Eich is a rich and powerful person, and I strongly disagree with his opposition to gay marriage rights in California. But I was disturbed at how casually my liberal friends disregarded his claims to free speech rights. “The first amendment doesn’t guarantee you the right to keep your job! It just means that the government can’t come arrest you for expressing unpopular views!” And yet consider what that attitude means. If workers have no expectation at all to the right to hold political views their employers don’t like, how do they enjoy basic democratic political rights at all? In a world in which you need a job to provide for your own material security, the notion that employers have the right to fire you for holding unpopular political views means that you have no right to hold unpopular political views. Indeed: in such a world, the only people who maintain the ability to hold unpopular political opinions are the independently wealthy. How that could be considered a liberal or progressive outcome, I have no idea, and yet those who self-identify as members of the broad left were the most aggressive in ridiculing my questions. Though they and I have little regard for Eich, the fact remains that rights must be universal if they are rights at all, and the procedural precedent set by Eich’s dismissal was, I thought, at least worth discussing.
Under labor conditions in the university system as brutal as we’ve faced, and with the cost of controversy as high as ever, how can academics and professors feel free to work through controversial and unpopular ideas, which is a necessary part of our work? Some defended the Eich firing by pointing out that, as a CEO, he had a special responsibility to be the public face of the company. Eich’s job, in this telling, was in part to be uncontroversial, and he failed in that task. Perhaps that’s true. But for us as academics, having and expressing controversial ideas is our job. A professoriate that feels that it cannot express impolite opinions is a professoriate that has no ability to cast new light on the human condition, no ability to truly grapple with the essential questions that confront the human race. Nor can they engage publicly if they are so busy teaching a huge course load as adjuncts that they have no time in which to research and teach, let along expand their work to the public sphere. My friend Anthony Galluzo, a brilliant Americanist, has written publicly about academics and research before, and I’d like to read more. But he’s been constrained, as so many other bright academics are, by his need to teach an unsustainable course load to survive. There is no way in which we can build the kind of public outreach we are asked to in a context where so many academics are so overworked and underpaid– and no way, incidentally, those academics can be the kinds of teachers they need to be.
All of this might seem like inside baseball, an obscure conversation had by members of a small, unusual industry. But the conditions that academics face are in fact not that different from those of everyone else. After all, it is not merely academics who have a responsibility to undertake public, political work, but all of us who are democratic citizens. By the most basic political philosophy of democracy, citizens are not required merely to vote and leave the debates to the politicians, but must actively engage in the messy work of self-governance. That means that they must feel free to express themselves politically without fear that their boss will fire them, leaving them unable to provide for themselves or their family. In a world where poor job quality, insufficient hours, insufficient pay, ever-expanding corporate rights and protections, sharp reductions in unionism, and the threat of automation all diminish the negotiating power of workers, controversial political engagement becomes a risk few can afford to take. Economic insecurity becomes political insecurity.
In the academic world, there is simply no alternative to reinvesting in the human resource that is the professoriate, expanding the ranks of those who enjoy the protections of tenure. It is possible, even in a context in which we are finally taking the necessary steps to rein in the increase in tuition. Because universities have been so profligate in the recent past, building dorms and gyms and dining halls beyond all sense and employing an army of administrators whose work is tangential to the academic enterprise, there is ample room to cut while still restoring the professoriate, particularly if states decide to reinvest in their public universities, which have been the envy of the world. We must make the choice as a society to privilege teaching and research over fancy buildings and expensive amenities. A commitment to hiring more tenure-track faculty from the ranks of our contingent labor and graduate students will improve undergraduate teaching, as overworked adjuncts teaching five or six classes a semester to make ends meet cannot possibly reach their peak potential as educators, through no fault of their own. It will also revitalize our research mission, and it will empower scholars to do the controversial, political work that is such an essential part of the life of the mind.
In the broader societal view, we must recognize that we have endured four decades of declining workplace conditions for millions of Americans. Flat-lined real wages, periods of high unemployment, and the general casualization and deprofessionalization of our labor force have left us not merely a less prosperous and humane society, but a less free, less democratic one as well. Our people cannot perform their role as citizens in a working world where they have no leverage and no negotiating power. To restore civic participation and public life, we must restore our unions and reinvigorate collective bargaining rights, strengthen our social safety net, and transition to a system of market socialism through a guaranteed basic income. Then, workers of all stripes, academic or otherwise, will enjoy the ability to engage politically without fear that they will go hungry if they say the wrong things. In the end, the projects to improve humanitarian outcomes, to increase personal liberty, and to revitalize deliberative democracy are one and the same.
I have been involved in student affairs at a college campus in some capacity for over twenty years. I have some, not a lot of, experience with sexual assault investigations. Police should always be notified, and it is their job to conduct investigations according to their established procedures. These types of investigations are not the purview of academic institutions. On this we agree.
However, to suggest that academic institutions have no role is mistaken. All colleges have their policies regarding sexual assault and, while the police may not have enough evidence to bring charges, they can determine that a policy has been violated and that this violation merits sanction. Just because the police may not be able to gather the necessary evidence does not mean that institution cannot address the matter for common good of the college community.
You make a persuasive case for the limited impact (if at all) of abstinence programs of many sorts. However, simply providing the instruction about how to have sex is not enough. Young people also need to learn and understand how the male and female bodies work. For males it is often easy to attain physical pleasure. For females it is often not easy. Failure to understand this important difference risks contributing negatively to the emotional dimension of sexual relationships that we too often refuse to discuss.
Another expert on the subject:
I am a college student affairs administrator and work at a private university in the US. I have worked directly for about a decade with the issues you brought up in your recent post on sexual assault on college campuses. In my current role, I serve as a “Deputy Title IX Coordinator” (a title that is becoming more frequent on campuses nationwide) where I have the responsibility of overseeing our investigations into reports of sexual assault (in addition to sexual harassment, partner violence and stalking, which all fall under the same policies and regulations) as well as the staff that are responsible for investigations and adjudicating cases, should they get to that point. As I am at a smaller, private institution, this is just one of the hats I wear as part of my position (which also include oversight of all student conduct issues and other student affairs initiatives).
There are a few points that you brought up that I’d like to respond to. Obviously, I can only speak from my own experience, but I have issues with the perceived assumption that colleges are acting in bad faith.
Speaking as a student affairs professional, those of us in this line of work are doing it precisely because we enjoy working with students. We see them at their best and at their worst, after exceptional achievements and after terrible traumas. In any sexual assault allegation, I have been tasked with investigating, adjudicating or overseeing, and my first concern has been student welfare (of all parties). And the professionals I work with conduct their duties to the best of their abilities. Incidents are not “kept quiet” for PR purposes, as we have an obligation to the parties to protect their privacy (though there are exceptions which may trigger community notification of an incident).
Also, unless the victim has requested it, universities cannot involve law enforcement outside limited exceptions. I don’t see why we’d want to change this. It’s important to keep that decision with the victim and give them the opportunity to make their own decision.
In situations I’ve been involved with, none of the students who have been dismissed/expelled for sexual assault have ever been charged with crime. This fact in no way shakes my confidence that the university did the right thing in each situation. Our campuses were safer without those students, something I say unapologetically. What I don’t understand is why people are shocked that these disparities happen. In conversations with colleagues at my current institution, they can go back almost 20 years and note that not a single sexual assault allegation a student has brought to the local police has resulted in a charge, never mind a conviction (we do not have a sworn police department on my campus and rely on the local PD when an arrest has to be made). Yet people are surprised when the university is asked to take steps, or why a victim feels more comfortable discussing these issues with a college administrator or counselor who will actually listen and provide options, as opposed to getting poor treatment at the local PD (of which I have plenty of stories).
Which leads to another area of disagreement: the belief that if something is a crime, then it should only be dealt with by law enforcement. Putting aside the assumption of law enforcement expertise in incidents of sexual violence that I do not share, colleges and universities deal with students who commit crimes all the time. Underage alcohol possession is a crime. Two roommates who get into a fistfight is a crime. Someone stealing a video game from a residence hall room is a crime. Giving alcohol to minors is a crime.
The list goes on an on, and universities have been dealing with these issues for decades and longer. What makes sexual assault different? Is it the discomfort for all involved? I know plenty of universities, especially “elite” universities, would like to get out of the sexual assault response business because it’s unpleasant, but why would a university provide all sots of services and assurances of a safe community but just stop at sexual assault? Keep in mind that this obligation to address student behavior is not a new thing, and has been supported by state and federal courts for decades. There is even a professional association for student affairs professionals who do this work, the Association for Student Conduct Administration. I’d like to direct you to an oft-cited federal court opinion from the 1960s that other courts cite as a foundation for this obligation, the General Order on Judicial Standards of Procedure and Substance in Review of Student Discipline in Tax Supported Institutions of Higher Education. It says in particular:
The discipline of students in the educational community is, in all but the cases of irrevocable expulsion, a part of the teaching process. In the case of irrevocable expulsion for misconduct, the process is not punitive or deterrent in the criminal law sense, but the process is rather the determination that the student is unqualified to continue as a member of the educational community. Even then, the disciplinary process is not the equivalent to the criminal law process of federal or state criminal law. For, while the expelled student may suffer damaging effects, sometimes irreparable, to his educational, social, and economic future, he or she may not be imprisoned, fined, disenfranchised, or subjected to probationary supervision. The attempted analogy of student discipline to criminal proceedings against adults and juveniles is not sound.
I can agree, however, that the web of regulations is becoming incredibly difficult to navigate, particularly at smaller institutions that do not have separate offices that handle diversity and equity, regulatory compliance, etc. I have become the de facto compliance officer on my campus, because I have a good knowledge of our obligations, speak about them effectively, and my pre-higher education background. While you listed many of the federal mandates universities are dealing with (Title IX, VAWA, the Clery Act, FERPA, etc.) and one that may come our way if it makes it through the legislative meat grinder (CASA), keep in mind that several states have individiually enacted their own laws (for many of the same political reasons your post assigned to the feds). At least four states that I know of have either enacted or are looking to enact their own legislation (CA, CT, NJ, and NY). This, plus proposed increased enforcement, makes our jobs much more difficult. I’ve been involved in an OCR investigation. It’s an incredibly difficult experience, and when OCR sets up shop, it makes it almost impossible to do your actual job, because of the amount of time and amount of data they demand.
Sorry for the long-winded response, but while I cannot write from the perspective of a survivor or an accused student, I can definitely write from the perspective of someone who is part of this issue, and being asked to administer it. Thank you and Andrew. As a long-time reader, this provides a good reminder to renew my subscription.
Thomas Frank bemoans the tendency of his fellow liberals to yuck it up over Jon Stewart’s jokes about conservatives, congratulating themselves on their enlightenment, while missing “a substantial chunk of political reality ourselves.” He points to the example of a recent Russell Sage Foundation study that median household wealth in the United States fell by 36 percent in the 10-year period ending last year:
Now, you can blame the risible, Ayn Rand-reading Tea Party types for this if you like, and you can also blame the George W. Bush Administration. They both deserve it. But sooner or later you will also have to acknowledge that there are two parties in this country, not just one; that the Democrats held significant power during the period in question, including (for much of it) the presidency itself; and that even when they are not in the White House, these Democrats nevertheless retain the capacity to persuade and to organize. For a party of the left, dreadful news like this should be rocket fuel. For the Dems, however, it hasn’t been. Why is that?
Well, for one thing, because a good number of those Democrats have not really objected to the economic policies that have worked these awful changes over the years. They may believe in the theory of evolution—hell, they may savor the same Jon Stewart jokes that you do —but a lot of them also believe in the conventional economic wisdom of the day. They don’t really care that union power has evaporated and that Wall Street got itself de-supervised and that oligopolies now dominate the economy. But they do care—ever so much!—about deficits and being fiscally responsible.
Bring up this obvious point, however, and you will quickly discover what a dose of chloroform the partisan style can be. There’s a political war on, you will be told; one side is markedly better than the other; and no criticism of the leadership can be tolerated. Instead, let’s get back to laughing along with our favorite politicized comedians, and to smacking that Rick Santorum punching bag.
I hadn’t realized that one of my favorite novels, Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, turned 70 this year. It’s not a very hip book to love these days, but it charms me in so many different ways – Maugham’s sketches of life in Paris, the knowing observations and incorrigible social climbing of Elliott Templeton, and, above all, the spiritual pilgrimage of protagonist Larry Darrell. In the novel, Larry is a military pilot whose jarring and scarring experiences during the Great War set him on a search for meaning – he comes back from Europe refusing to hold a conventional job or settle down and marry, instead pursuing a peripatetic, bohemian life of voracious reading and wide traveling, including to India, where, not to give too much away, he finds enlightenment. It’s a convincing account of how someone becomes a saint, how a “conversion” can happen. Mick Brown, noting the novel’s anniversary, offers some background on its writing:
Maugham may have been successful, but he was far from happy. The jaundiced tone that infects his work reflected his view of the human condition. His time as a young doctor in the slums of London had disabused him of a belief in God. But behind the carapace of cynicism, the search for faith, or meaning without faith, would be a recurring theme in his life and work. “It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with,” he wrote in his memoir Summing Up.
When in December 1937 Maugham set off for India, on the journey that would plant the seed of The Razor’s Edge, he was furnished with introductions to wealthy maharajas from his Riviera neighbour the Aga Khan, but his steamer trunk was also laden with books on Hindu philosophy and L D Barnett’s translation of the Upanishads. He was in search of more than just material.
Readers and critics have long speculated about whom Larry was based on, with Christopher Isherwood – another novelist who turned to the East for wisdom – usually being mentioned. I’m fairly certain that’s not right; Isherwood denies it, and Maugham, to my knowledge, never indicated that was the case, though the two did know each other. Instead, Brown makes a convincing argument that, in part, Larry was based on an experience Maugham had on his trip to India described above, where he met Alan Chadwick, a British disciple of the guru Ramana Maharshi:
Chadwick told Maugham that he considered Ramana to be the greatest spiritual figure since Christ, and described how he passed his days in the ashram. He spent many hours sitting in the hall with the Maharshi, though he seldom spoke more than a few words to him in a week. The rest of his time was spent reading, riding his bicycle and in meditation. He told Maugham he was trying “to realise the self in him in communion with the universal self, to separate the I that thinks from the self, for that, he said, is the infinite”. Maugham was bemused. “I had thought to discover something of the truth about him from what he looked like and from what he said,” he wrote, “but I came away completely puzzled.”
Maugham and Chadwick had been talking for some time when something curious happened: Maugham fainted.
He was carried into Chadwick’s hut and laid on a pallet bed. At length he recovered consciousness, but felt too unwell to move. Ramana had been told what happened and that Maugham was not well enough to see him. Instead, Ramana came to the writer. “His mien was cheerful, smiling, polite,” Maugham remembered. “He did not give the impression of a scholar, but rather of a sweet-natured old peasant.” For a few minutes, Ramana gazed with a “gentle benignity” at Maugham, then shifted his gaze, and sat in motionless silence for perhaps a quarter of an hour, before asking whether Maugham wished to ask any questions. Maugham replied that he felt too unwell to say anything, whereupon Ramana smiled and said “silence is also conversation”.
You should read Brown’s wonderful short essay, and then turn to The Razor’s Edge itself. And if you still want more, read Isherwood’s terrific article that describes why Maugham’s book is so successful as an account of the religious search, “The Problem of the Religious Novel,” which can be found in his collection The Wishing Tree: Christopher Isherwood on Mystical Religion. I recommend them especially because, like many Americans today, Maugham and Isherwood had reacted against institutional Christianity, yet still hungered for meaning, still searched for God. And they managed to find in variants of Hinduism an alternate spirituality – non-dualistic, less moralizing, and more concerned with practices like meditation – that gave them what they needed. The spiritual life of both men, especially Isherwood, totally fascinates me, because they side-step the tropes and dead ends of so many American religious debates. They offer an account of the religious life that seems new and fresh, reminding those of us who have well-worn arguments about Christianity ingrained in our psyches to see, as if for the first time, why the path to sainthood is one worth treading and what it might look like.
Lev Grossman praises C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as the “ground zero” of modern fantasy novels and “a powerful illustration of why fantasy matters in the first place”:
I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they’re exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
He continues, “The thing about the Narnia books, is that they’re about Christianity”:
I grew up in a household that not only lacked Christianity—there was very little Christianity in our house, even though my mom was raised Anglican—there was almost no religion of any kind. Religion was, and to some extent has remained to me, a totally baffling concept. I wasn’t experiencing the book in any way as stores about religion: I experienced them as psychological dramas. This sleight of hand in which an apparent escape becomes a way of encountering yourself, and encountering your problems, seems to me the basic logic of reading and of the novel.
(Photo of C.S. Lewis statue in East Belfast via Flickr user klndonnelly)
Michael Schulson is rather amused by a recent paper in the journal Biology Direct that “suggests that the impulse behind some religious rituals could be driven by mind-altering parasites.” His quick summary of the authors’ argument:
Essentially, [researcher Alexander] Panchin et al. have noticed that some rituals spread germs. (They’ve mostly ignored the many, many cleansing rituals that seem to do the opposite). So, they ask, what if germs, looking to spread, drive people to perform rituals? This isn’t quite as outlandish as it sounds. Many germs really do alter their hosts’ behaviors in ways that help the germ spread (think of rabies, which spreads by biting, and which alters the brains of infected mammals to make them feel very, very aggressive; or consider Toxoplasmosis, a protist associated with cats, that seems to cause infected rats to feel less fear of felines).
Of course, the urge to bite your fellow mammals is, perhaps, a shade less nuanced than all the possible reasons that might motivate a person to take communion, or kiss an icon, or travel to Mecca and mingle with strangers.
He sees such a notion as part of a long history of reducing faith to a kind of mental illness, a comparison he finds wanting:
[T]hinking of religion as an illness of the mind gives an enormous amount of power to abstract ideas, and very little credit to individual people. Unlike, say, the experience of having a virus, we can usually exercise some choice over our religious lives. When we can’t exercise that choice, the constraints are as likely to be sociological as they are the result of some multi-tentacled idea that has become lodged in our brain (or in our gut). And, unlike a virus or a gene, we can take the religious practices given to us and consciously shape them, change them, deploy them in new ways, and use them for practical ends.
One feels, reading the Panchin paper and its viral ilk, not that they’ve plumbed the psychology of the religious impulse, but that, unwittingly, they’ve revealed their own total bafflement at why someone might actually want to do something spiritual. Fortunately, there’s a cure for that bafflement. It’s called interacting with human beings who are different from you.
Though not about bacteria, Patrick McNamara details his work on the neurological basis of belief, especially dopamine’s place in our spiritual lives. The origins of why he started digging into this topic:
I had a lucky break during routine office hours at the VA (Veterans Administration) Boston Healthcare System, where I regularly treat US veterans. I was doing a routine neuropsychological examination of a tall, distinguished elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease. This man was a decorated Second World War veteran and obviously intelligent. He had made his living as a consulting engineer but had slowly withdrawn from the working world as his symptoms progressed. His withdrawal was selective: he did not quit everything, his wife explained. ‘Just social parts of his work, some physical stuff and unfortunately his private religious devotions.’
When I asked what she meant by ‘devotions’ she replied that he used to pray and read his Bible all the time, but since the onset of the disease he had done so less and less. When I asked the patient himself about his religious interests, he replied that they seemed to have vanished. What was so striking was that he said he was quite unhappy about that fact. What appeared to be keeping him from his ‘devotions’ was that he found them ‘hard to fathom’. He had not stopped wanting to believe and practise his religion but simply found it more difficult to do so.
Last Sunday we featured Nick Spencer’s argument that the rise of modern atheism had less to do with the advance of science than the fallout from the entanglement of religion and politics in early modern Europe. Kenneth Sheppard pushes back with a number of qualifications and questions:
It is an oversimplification to suggest, as Spencer does, that the major scientific developments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries were “hardly atheistic at all.” Yes, Copernicus was a priest. So was Galileo. Yet David Wootton has argued that Galileo was in fact a closet unbeliever (Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, Yale, 2010). Yes, Bacon argued that his new natural philosophy was really an aid to theology. But did all his contemporaries think likewise? Christopher Riggs has argued that Bacon’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, was an unbeliever for reasons related to the new science (The World of Christopher Marlowe, Faber and Faber, 2004). What about more challenging examples, such as Hobbes or Spinoza? Surely it would be difficult to sustain the claim that their deeply heterodox – and perhaps atheistic – views had nothing to do with recent developments in science? No, the history of science does not fully explain the history of atheism, but it is misleading to suggest that the two are unrelated.
Spencer is right to look to politics as an alternate source for an explanation of atheism’s history, but he does so in rather simplistic terms. Apparently atheism emerged in France because of its supposedly intellectual and political backwardness, was avoided in Britain because of its antipathy to absolutist and revolutionary France, and was effectively negated in America because of the separation of church and state. But this way of looking at the history of France, Britain, and America rests on taking French anticlericalism, British whiggism, and American exceptionalism at their word. What evidence does Spencer offer here, other than a series of declarative statements with fairly thin evidentiary argumentation?
Sheppard is definitely right to point out how complicated this period of history was, especially with regard to religion. In my previous life as an academic, I studied early modern political thought, which led me to explore a number of the personalities and issues he mentions, though admittedly my focus wasn’t on the history of science. But to take an example he mentions that I did study with some care, Thomas Hobbes, I’m still conflicted about where to draw the line between mere heterodoxy and a more subversive atheism, or how to determine when the appearance of piety was, well, just that – an appearance, undermined by the many subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle criticisms he leveled against traditional Christianity, or the way he reworked Christian doctrines almost beyond recognition.
And let’s say Hobbes was an atheist; it’s still worth noting that half of his masterwork, Leviathan, takes on the rhetoric of religion, discussing everything from angels to what Hell might be like. His arguments about the Bible amount to one of the first examples of the historical-critical method – and yet his political vision culminates in a “Christian commonwealth.” Transposing our categories and preoccupations onto the past is always problematic, but it seems to me that it’s especially fraught when it comes to religion in the early modern period. Hobbes is just one example of this. Sheppard mentions others, and still more examples could be multiplied.
So I’m inclined to agree with Sheppard that we should avoid oversimplification, and I’d go further and say that that’s case whether you want to argue, as Spencer seems to, that the emergence of modern science owes much to the work of believers, or, from the opposite point of view, you want to claim modern science constituted a break with our benighted religious past, our emergence from the fog of superstition and credulity. For me, the more I read about this period of history, and the more I’ve realized the complicated ways religion interacted with science, politics, and culture, the more I’ve become resistant to linear narratives from partisans of both faith and unbelief. We tend to want all good things to come from those in the past who seem to be on “our side” – but that’s just not the case.
All that said, I still would argue that Spencer does seem to be onto something when it comes to the impact of politics on the rise of atheism, Sheppard’s questions notwithstanding. The former’s argument reminds me of this passage from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
Christianity, which has declared all men equal in the sight of God, cannot hesitate to acknowledge all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concatenation of events, religion for the moment has become entangled with those institutions which democracy overthrows, and so it is often brought to rebuff the equality which it loves and to abuse freedom as its adversary, whereas by taking it by the hand it could sanctify its striving.
What Tocqueville realized, much like Spencer, is that when Christianity was put in the service of a political regime – here, he especially means undemocratic forms of government, whether aristocracy or monarchy, or some blend of the two – its eventual fall meant it took Christianity down, too. It became impossible to separate, practically speaking, religious faith from the oppressive and unjust regimes with which they were in bed. When throne and altar are joined, a protest against the former can’t help but implicate the latter.
Tocqueville was writing as someone who thought religion was good for democracy, and so his description is as much a warning as it a dispassionate reading of the past. He was admonishing Christians especially not to put themselves on the wrong side of the real moral, political, and scientific advances of his day. The psychological thrust of his point seems true to me: the more religion meddles in political affairs, or the more religious leaders seem obtuse and retrograde, the more it gives people reasons extraneous to the core tenets of the faith to reject it. Political trends shift without warning, leaders fall out of favor, revolutions happen – why hitch Christianity to any cause that doesn’t directly relate to the message of Jesus? Tocqueville insisted, again and again, that Christians, especially ministers, distinguish between what was and what wasn’t essential to the Gospel. If they didn’t, Christianity increasingly would lose its credibility. It’s hard to see how he’s wrong on this point. It seems axiomatic to me that the horrible behavior of far too many Christians over the last few centuries contributed to religion’s relative decline in the West.
I read Spencer, then, like Tocqueville, to have the present in mind almost as much as the past – or rather, to find in the broad patterns of the past a real lesson worth pondering. Any sweeping statement about “religion and politics” in the past can be quibbled with, as Sheppard shows. And certainly the advance of science makes unbelief possible in new ways as more and more of the world gets explained apart from the divine – I wouldn’t argue against that at all. But I wonder what emotional resonance this has, especially for those outside the confines of elite intellectual circles, compared to seeing priests cozy up to corrupt and brutal rulers in the 18th century, or, today, seeing hucksterish reverends preach nonsense about gay people or the age of the earth? Such actions go a long way toward making decent people everywhere doubt the truth of Christianity, or any religion.
It’s not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they’re exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
The Dish 