Sliding down the banisters of the ivory tower.
5 reasons you should watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
Billy: I want to be an achiever…like Bad Horse.
Penny: The Thoroughbred of Sin?
Billy: I meant Gandhi.
Get thee hence.
Impressively, in the last few days I’ve been chided both for failing to recognize the divine jazz-like looseness of blogging and for failing to recognize the requisite statistical rigor of blogging. The former accusation is harmless enough; the latter is the same argument used since time immemorial to wave aside cultural criticism on the whole — indeed, any knowledge that isn’t quantitatively generated — and that’s a problem.
It’s impossible to gather enough data to meet statistical standards while understanding the context that generated each point in that data. That’s the purpose of statistics in social science: to create discrete phenomena out of messy reality in an attempt to generalize where generalization is helpful. But generalization will never get you more than a few good options for what circumstances generated that data, a few strong correlations (which, the statisticians so ceaselessly remind us, is not causation). If you want to talk about not just the what but the why, you need to venture into conjecture anyway.
And conjecture based on those same generalizations doesn’t draw from nearly as deep a knowledge base as knowledge based on more comprehensive understanding of particular situations. Maybe those situations are anomalous — though in this case, the fact that I was using personal experience to illuminate a broader statistical study whose results lined up with that experience indicates that “fluke” is putting it strongly — and they’re certainly statistically insignificant. But until we can invent statistics to explain connections we don’t yet know exist, we’ll never be able to use them to explain social forces and cultural trends, only to record them after the fact like starlight on an Earth-bound telescope. Cultural criticism is by its nature tentative and speculative and flexible, but to say you can only explain a phenomenon after you’ve zoomed out too far to really examine it is missing the point entirely.
David Broockman thinks Kay Steiger’s post on women in academia could be turned into an argument against affirmative action. Maybe that’s true, but only because I think she infers too much too readily. Here’s the gist:
Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various “service” commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research…I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.
On the face of it, I can see why it’s easy to read this as a simple affirmative-action narrative. But I’m surprised that Broockman didn’t pick up on the fact that the affirmative-action motive is inferred, and start thinking if there might be something else going on. Especially because he’s in the Yale Political Union, where a similar phenomenon takes place, and there is very definitely something else going on.
You see, the YPU on the whole doesn’t have anything close to gender parity, at least among active members. And at any given debate, women are much less likely to speak than men are. But the Union’s executive board has represented something pretty close to a 50/50 split during the three years I’ve been around, and the top three positions have been held by more women than men during that time.
But here’s the result, as in Steiger’s example: while women end up running the show — managing, that is — men are able to devote themselves to success in the field as the field itself defines it (for Steiger, research; for the YPU, debating prowess), and therefore continue to be labeled “leaders”. This is only progressive in the same way that, say, thanking a housewife for the hard work she does is progressive: it’s nice to have the recognition, but it’d be nicer to acknowledge that maybe she’d rather be doing something other than housework.
But even to get the acknowledgment, women have to get noticed and taken seriously, which is tricky in an environment where they’re underrepresented. And often, the way to get noticed and groomed for leadership is to get things done, and get them done well. It’s hard to mount an impressive track record in intellectualism as a freshman, because intellectualism doesn’t lend itself to track records; it’s much easier to hang posters and organize events and do other things that mark one for “management.” Like female academics, they get siphoned out early and therefore miss the chance to get everything they can out of the environment they’re in.
So I really can’t see this as a reason to oppose affirmative action, but rather to ensure that the pools from which candidates are selected are of equal size, so that women don’t feel the need to “prove themselves” in male-dominated settings. Much more importantly, though, we need to recognize that in plenty of fields (academia, sure, but what about advertising? Programming?) many of the roles that get marked as “service”, “management” or “administration” aren’t positions of authority in the least; rather, the managers are those who keep things running so that other people can do what they came to the field to do in the first place, and get all the glory in the long haul.
I’m all for specialization, but let’s be honest about it. Appointing a junior academic to the position of program coordinator, regardless of gender, isn’t a promotion but a qualitative job shift. I think many of the problems that affirmative action hasn’t fixed or has exacerbated might be addressed if we stopped thinking purely in terms of organizational flowcharts but also in terms of social capital or personal fulfillment. And I certainly think that the trends Steiger notices might begin to reverse if tenure committees et al. had it brought to their attention that their actions were the ivory-tower equivalent of telling their daughters: “Oh, no, little girls can’t be doctors. Why don’t you pretend to be the Head Nurse instead?”
I am (slowly) catching up on my missed reading. There has, in my absence, been a lot of silliness.
The Absurd — Bill Kristol, in eulogizing Tony Snow, writes:
For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones… We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Melancholy? Has the man read “The Myth of Sisyphus“? (I suppose it’s his father who was the Marxist intellectual.) That’s the least melancholy passage of the entire book — the statement that there is meaning and heroism in struggle even in a struggle you know you’ll lose makes it a powerfully optimistic close. Call this the Applebee’s salad bar of literary criticism.
Justice is Sweet – Obama seems to get the hint:
I said I wouldn’t give because of the FISA vote, and the caller instantly launched into some talking points about how the law expired in August, which is why Obama voted for it even though it wasn’t a perfect bill.
Luckily, if we want to know more we can just ask AT&T for a transcript of the call!
My Cold, Dead Hands — Details of proposed DC gun legislation:
Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.
“Just hang on a sec, Mr. Burglar — I have to unlock, reassemble, and load my gun.” Yeah. Really effective.
The Doctor May Dance — But he doesn’t smoke. I will, however, make an exception on the basis that the Tennant eyebrow-raise looks good on Julian.
Puppy Love — I am heartened to hear that the Obamas are getting a dog, but this phrasing makes me suspect either insufficient copy-editing or a wicked sense of humor:
While we don’t disagree that it’s important to choose a dog that matches well with the family, mixed breeds should certainly be considered along with pure breeds.
I Don’t Care If You Burn — San Francisco legislators propose to prohibit tobacco sales in pharmacies and limit outdoor smoking:
“Tobacco remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S. - period,” [Mitch Katz, director of the Department of Public Health] said. “It’s government’s responsibility to protect people from obvious risks.”
Then just outlaw the damn thing! Enough of this namby-pamby combination of death-in-a-box rhetoric and irritating-but-ineffective legislation.
Try to do better next time, world.
I spent most of the last week sick in bed, which means that in addition to accumulating empty packs of cigarettes (Will) and water glasses (mostly me) on the porch, we have been surviving on takeout and ramen.
The first order of business, once Cipro returned me to some semblance of normalcy, was real food. (Well, maybe second, after catching up with work.) Luckily, there has been substantial discussion on this topic, and well-fueled with theory we traveled Whole Foods-ward.[1]
Tonight, we made — by which I mean I made and was observed while making — John’s fantastic Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage. Due to a shocking lack of pancetta, it was actually with bacon, and I only used half the butter called for,[2] but it was delicious. I might reduce the amount of butter even more and leave out the pasta altogether (the corn and bacon all hid at the bottom of the pot) to have it as a side dish.
Oh, and also, if anything important has happened in the world in the last few days and you didn’t e-mail me about it, I probably don’t know it happened. Hillary — still in the race, right?
[1] Advantages to Whole Foods being the only supermarket within walking distance: quality of produce and meat, selection of delicious gourmet food. Disadvantages to same: temptation to blow entire grocery budget on cheese.
[2] This is still an entire stick of butter, which I think is quite sufficient. On the other hand, the reason my Thea Helen’s baklava is so much better than mine is that she uses twice as much butter. The parallel is left as an exercise for the reader.
Helen asks:
We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old’s experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?
I disagree. I think the question is: Why should it be permissible to invent a law that doesn’t exist for the purpose of shaming an individual whose behavior you feel to be immoral? It’s pretty clear to me that that’s what the clerk was doing — at very least, she was under a misapprehension and didn’t reconsider it in the face of contrary evidence — and in fairness, Helen hasn’t tried to argue otherwise. However, she seems to treat it as of a piece with anything else the clerk could have done: lecturing the girls, handing them a Bible, telling them her register was closed, etc.
I think it is probably true that the transgressing legal norms carries much more shame than transgressing social ones in contemporary America, so it’s likely that nothing the clerk could have done would have been as likely to be effective as what she did. But it seems to me that the right answer in the long term isn’t to appropriate the force of the law — especially when it doesn’t actually exist for this purpose — but rather to reinforce social norms so that they have comparable force.
This is especially true in this situation, when the would-be customer had an advocate with her who actually knew the rule, and therefore “defeated” the clerk by proving her wrong. Had the clerk kept her reaction within the realm of the social, the defender would have looked much more silly and petulant in writing her post — “How dare they judge us at all?” — and Helen’s response would be entirely justified. As it was, the post reads as much of triumph as of righteous anger: “They tried to lie to my friend; luckily, I was with her, and I knew the facts!” It’s extremely difficult to shame someone once she feels you’ve conceded the moral high ground to her.
Helen continues her advance on the heights of literary society by getting paid to blog ’bout ha’ obsessions. Shame culture, as ever, is on the agenda, as today Ms Rittelmeyer applauds the cashier who told a teenager trying to buy a pregnancy test that “you shouldn’t be having sex in the first place”. Helen has long championed “shame culture” over “guilt culture”, a distinction known to popular parlance ever since ER Dodds identified Homeric society as a “shame society” (even if JT Hooker’s analysis of Iliad threatened to prove him wrong). According to Helen, in a moral society, there should be no “freedom from shame”. The problem is that the example she has picked to illustrate it, on further examination, actually illustrates shame failing to police the teenage sexual activity that Helen so deplores.
According to Helen’s argument, teenagers should cease a behavioural practice simply because other people will express disapproval (which is why Benedict, in her groundbreaking study of shame culture in Japan, defined it as fundamentally collectivist social trait). Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”.
The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all.
This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better.
We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act. You can’t rely on pregnancy itself being shameful. Sexual acts only take place in the presence of people who approve of them. So the only way in which a disapproving spectator can be philosophically introduced is through belief in God. It is possible to teach people to feel shame in the sight of God.
And isn’t that what we Christian cultures just call guilt?
Like Yglesias and Schwenkler, I find the fact that a supporter of torture would make a shirt joking about waterboarding to be viscerally horrifying. But I really don’t see the sale of a T-shirt on one of dozens of sites selling conservative memorabilia as tantamount to identifying support for torture with conservatism. Furthermore, I think that divorced from that context — as it would be when worn — the product itself is a perfect vehicle for the “coming to grips with the horror” that Yglesias discusses.
First of all, remember that almost 70% of Americans believe waterboarding is torture. The reason that this sentiment doesn’t metastasize into an opposition to American operatives using the technique is twofold: some of those who believe it to be torture also believe its use is justified on suspected terrorists; and public discourse centers on the concept and related legislation rather than the actual, current practice (which is deliberately quiet and remote, especially for Americans who don’t consume media compulsively enough to be intimately familiar of what happens in Guantanamo or secret prisons). I suspect that the latter is the more pervasive force: it’s easy to forget going about daily life that torture is something my government does. Being confronted with that fact unexpectedly is like taking a punch to the stomach.
And that’s what I suspect this T-shirt would actually end up doing. It addresses waterboarding directly, as a practice, not introducing the mitigating factors of terrorism or national security. A “You can’t understand a terrorist until you’ve taken him waterboarding” shirt would be a different thing entirely; that would in fact aid in the othering of “enemy combatants” and inculcate an embattled-but-triumphant mindset (two preconditions, in my opinion, for taking pride in the desecration of the human body to begin with). But a shirt that merely declares “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” is likely to meet with vague curiosity as passersby try to figure out where they’ve heard that term before, followed swiftly by recognition and attendant revulsion. It turns the flippant euphemism of the word back on itself.
Maybe the shirt is, in fact, an illustration that you can no longer call yourself a true conservative without supporting torture — though, again, I don’t necessarily see why that would be true. I’ll take derision of those who find torture unpalatable over an attempt to make torture palatable any day. And if those who see someone walking down the street wearing this shirt are reminded of the fact that their government does things of which they don’t approve as a result, I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.
Admittedly, this is coming from someone who talked for a while about putting up recruiting posters for Club Waterboarding and seeing if anyone got the joke.
For all the hullabaloo about how 2008 is the new 1968 (a narrative that’s turned, conversationally at least, from “The Democrats will eat each other alive!” to “Generally Transformative Cultural Change and the Rise of Youth Movements”), it’s becoming impossible to notice that pop culture’s new mine for nostalgia is the period that 1968 destroyed: that of 1962-66, more or less.
Exhibit A: Mad Men. How do you produce a second season of a show so dominated by the aesthetics of the period that keeps the content fresh without sacrificing the self-absorption (not to mention those exquisitely lit costumes)? Move the action ahead from 1960 to 1962, of course! Incidentally, it’s my suspicion that the forward shift will mitigate what I perceive to be the actors’ biggest weakness, but I’ll explain that theory further once it’s had the chance to be proved or disproved by the new season.
Exhibit B: Schlitz Original 1960s Formula. Tragically, the ads I’m seeing in bus kiosks in Minneapolis don’t seem to be posted anywhere online (the official site for the beer only has ads up to the 1980s, which is probably better marketing). They’re nostalgia-soaked triptychs — “The Cars Were Cooler/The Girls Were Hotter/The Beer Was Better”, with accompanying illustrations — whose central image is a a perfectly vintage sex kitten, complete with flipped hair and heavily lined eyes. (The alternate version is a little more aggressively reactionary: “The Music Didn’t Suck/The Athletes Didn’t Cheat/The Beer Was Better”, also not available online.)
Exhibit C: The music video for Beck’s new single, which Adrian has been kind enough to embed in this post. It’s 1966, maybe: only the tiniest bit psychedelic and utterly mod-tastic. The palette! The Factory-esque cinematography! The dress-on-wall geometric action!
I only wish I could tell you why the period’s become so popular, or which of our own attributes we recognize in it. Is it the glorious artificiality and cult-of-celebrity that a worship of new media promotes? (Edie Sedgwick might have been the first celebutante.) The allure of a counterculture that was hedonistic but not nihilistic? The recognition that the traditional 20-year nostalgia cycle would bring us around to the late 1980s, which (as I understand it) was a very ugly time? Further evidence of alliance between the Boomers and Gen-Y against Gen-X?
Post theories, examples and counterexamples here.
I refuse to use the term “Millennials” on this blog. It may be chronologically true but the associated traits bear little to no resemblance to the reality of my generation.
Poulos has a bathtubful of good advice on tap regarding imported beers (I can publicly agree with his recommendation of Delirium Tremens because I drank it in Quebec and therefore legally), while Noah finds common cause with George Will over the beverage’s fundamentally therapeutic nature.
Personally, I bristle a bit at this paragraph of Will’s piece. Admittedly, I think he broaches the issue as delicately and critically as possible, but this is the sort of semi-scientific assertion that so usually gets presented as proven fact in the MSM that I’m not confident his readers will mirror his skepticism:
Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.
Or maybe it has to do with the circumstances under which alcohol was introduced to those populations. If, as Will suggests — heck, asserts — earlier in the column, beer production was tied in Eurasia to the settlement of cities, it seems logical that the concurrent rise of new forms of nutrition and new social circumstances in which to consume them might have caused the two to become interwoven. Even the development of social conventions around alcohol, let alone the concept of an inherently public “drinking space” (pub culture, etc.), would have presented significant external constraints on immoderate consumption individually, and enabled the “teaching” of proper consumption intergenerationally.
When alcohol was introduced to peoples who hadn’t been exposed to it generations earlier, by contrast, it was presented as just another foodstuff or commodity and stripped of the social context that had made its consumption manageable. Without the publicity and contextualization of Eurasian alcohol consumption, of course native individuals were more likely to be harmfully immoderate in their use of the stuff. (This actually happened in the other direction as well — think about the difference between use of the peace pipe and Europe’s early-17th-century tobacco mania.)
I’m sure that in reality it’s some mix of both; I just wish the scientists would stop being so reductionistic about things, especially when such reductionism shades toward social Darwinism. It’s also an interesting cautionary tale about the introduction of alcohol to populations unfamiliar with it and who lack the proper public context to consume it moderately: such as what happens to college freshmen every year, for example.
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