Falling from Small Heights

"Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider." -- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

As part of an "assessment instrument," I've been reading sample essays from Oh-ficially scored sources. See, our students read four very short arguments responding to a common prompt and then write their own argument about which is the best case. We free ourselves of subjectivity by using nationally certified sources. Our old essays are now too well known by the students, and we need new ones for the exit assessments anyway, so that means reading this year's samples. The old set responded to "As people rely more and more on technology, their capacity for problem solving and creativity will surely diminish." The responses were quite different from one another in approach, and the best was different from the middle one in thought as well as expression.

This year, all the prompts are business related. The best one, for our purposes, was, "For the leadership of the future, it is imperative that children be trained in the values of cooperation rather than competition." The responses, graded by the Official services from six to one, all agree with the prompt, and the differences between them are differences of compliance with written English. The "six" has complex sentences, and the "one" has sentence fragments.

They are all dumb. In fact, the "six" would have gotten only a B from me, because even it had the "Leaders will need to be encouraged in their school" object/subject number confusion (unless all "leaders" go to the same school). Not one of the responses was analytical. Not one questioned the dichotomy of the prompt. Heck, the "five" essay began with one of those, "The dictionary defines competition as..." gambits that is only supposed to be used if a person intends to redefine a term.

Consider this my answer, and my protest to the stupids that this Official voice wanted to offer people going to its test prep site.
 

"Skepticism (is) the virtuous mean between two vices: absolute knowledge and absolute ignorance." -- Odo Marquard, "Skeptics: A Speech of Thanks," in In Defense of the Accidental

"Competition" and "cooperation" are actions incomplete in their own. They both require objects, company, friends and enemies. One competes or cooperates with. These are neither values that can be taught in the abstract, nor are they transactions that can be consistently enforced without teaching a social setting that mandates the activity.

The submerged assumption in the writing prompt is that "MBA culture" has harmed America. Well, that's hard to argue, but it's also important to follow. "CEO America" looks at quarterly profits, does not know or care what the core business is, and is pleased to fire all of the labor force and eliminate all the goods being made by the company, because those are debts. The resulting "profit" will increase the stock price, which will increase the CEO compensation, and the trading of the stock will increase the company value, which will increase its price on being bought, which will ensure the board a good package on the merger. Thus, all of those making decisions will make enormous profits. The things being made will cease, but. . . that's not the business of the CEO. The CEO and board's duty is to shareholders, not to "consumers" or "labor."

Obviously, the effects of stock traded corporations are evil. Obviously, CEO's are bad for business and bad for the larger economy. Obviously, market funds are bad for the nation. Even their positive effect on stimulating start-ups is cancelled by their decapitation of those same businesses when they begin to produce, and especially when they manufacture. The specific evil is a system we have developed of captial pitted against commodities. When capital moves and "innovates" and "is made" without any relationship commodities, then there is a separate industry of "wealth workers" who set themselves in opposition to those who work in everything else, because their fundamental task is to shake capital free from any attachment to any person. (If you don't think we are post-capitalist in this manner, I'll see you in comments.)

By nature, humans are cooperative. By nature, humans are competitive. By nature, humans compete against themselves preferentially over other people, and we do not need studies to establish this.

Look around you at lunch. How many people are playing Candy Crush or played Tetris? How many people are playing video games solo? When they play in networks, do they play against one another, or do they play with each other in teams? In general, people play against fixed goals and against their own performances, seeking to be perfect at things. It is why they go to the gym and shoot hoops or lift weights.

At work, how often are you asked for help? How often do you ask for help? The point is that people are competitive, but not hostile, and they are cooperative, but not sycophantic. Indeed, we do need to battle the damage done by the naive assumption that "capitalism" is Darwinism and the even deeper lie that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" meant survival of the biggest, toughest, or strongest -- "fitness" means toward the environment, and strong, mean, nasty critters are not very adaptable. We have to fight the fascist theme that "America" is about individuals fighting it out without any help against one another for a triumph.

More, though, we need to understand that we are under assault by a post-capitalist economic theory that is disloyal, immoral, and corrosive of all values and value.

Why You Think the Internet Stinks Now

I have been active on the Internet since 1990. In those days, we had Usenet at the university and moderated private bulletin board systems (FidoNet) for amateur fun. This makes me four Internet generations ago, if we assume that an Internet generation is about five years, rather than twenty-five.

Indulge with me in nostalgia. Before the FCC decided to sell bandwidth to the .com top level domain, the Internet was a place of low or no graphics, where users were almost exclusively .edu accounts (with a few .sys, .mil, and .gov), and most accounts were a first initial and last name (mine being misspelled by the IT people at my U, so I had anonymity even then). HTML sites were usually navigated by Lynx or one of the other text-only Unix based clients. Since the entire endeavor was text on slow dial up connections or fast connections on computers with monochrome displays, it was an empire of words subordinated to either a group's activity (e.g. rec.bicycle) or a group's academic research. University and government workers created massive amounts of free information, and the early HTML systems were ways to link information infinitely. People spoke of beginning with an interesting note in the newspaper, clicking on an odd term, following to a strange fact, seeing a strange name, and spending hours “surfing” from site to site, but all of this was via reading.

When America Online and CompuServe opened their closed systems to the Internet, everything changed. There were floods of new users who reflected average America. While many snobs thought that “killed” the Internet, it was, instead, the underlying decision to commercialize the Internet, combined with hypertext, that turned the Internet into today's creature of clicks and “eyeballs.

By 1996, and certainly by 2001, most “Internet” users only knew the world wide web, not Usenet, not discussion. The world wide web itself “was” a series of commercially profitable sites, with the last of the .edu created purchased (e.g. Bartleby.com, created by Columbia University library to make all of its Columbia UP reference works available for free, was sold, then resold) or forgotten. University server sites providing information became gradually invisible to average users because they went unadvertised, and “the web” was no longer a place where persons “surfed” on an adventure of information. Certainly by the time the "tech bubble" burst, each website invested in keeping visitors on sites, in sites, and preventing outside linkages. Websites became more pictographic, with an increase in sensationalism, as the same pressures that turned superabundant newspapers in 1900 into the Yellow Press created increasingly narrow and vertical forms of discourse (“vertical” refers to information that is recursive and closed, in this case). What had been peer groups in conversation became interest groups engaged in a tailored retail experience. 

“Friendster” and “MySpace” were non-profit simulacra of the older Internet. They succeeded, to the degree they did, by offering like-minded cultures and subcultures. (There have been other simulations since, including Reddit.) However, when their host/software companies offered stock, they were purchased by media corporations that, as early as 1998, had been imagining an Internet/cable vehicle whereby visitors would be captive, ordering television shows, movies, books, radio, and the rest on an a la carte basis by the Internet. '

Neither the websites nor the delivery technologies were in place for such visions to be realized. (This vision, and its failure, was paradoxically critical to the collapse of Enron. The Amazon Kindle/Fire is getting very close to its realization today, according to critics. If they can "own the pipeline" and the store and the production, then the consumer choice is finally completely eliminated -- or "business uncertainty is minimized," if you prefer.)

 I'm no Electronic Frontier Foundation warrior or GNU freak. I haven't the money to be the first or the skills to be the second. I did join Wikipedia in 2003, though. My frustrations with it were that it was not dedicated to a common project of construction as much as it was a "community." My criticisms of capital in technology are not propelled by idealism or ideology. They are directed solely at an analysis of the deterioration of academic freedom and investigation because of a capitalized web.

One thing I've noticed is that a genuine analysis of technology cannot be found under the title of "technology" writing. For about ten years, I noticed that the writing about computer technology, in particular, fell into one of two camps. Either a new device or program was the Swiss Army Knife of Heaven -- able to turn every student into a buddha and genius -- or the next device or program will free the Fenris wolf and extinguish the sun for once and all. "Tech" writers are either reviewers or advocates. Sometimes, even worse, they're salesmen.

Look, capitalized websites serve capital. I get it. That's just and right. But non-capitalized websites are now all but invisible, especially since Facebook learned from MyFace's failure and AOL's persistence and began to fold in a whole universe of outside websites into its "you're still on Facebook" experience. Regular people are beginning, just beginning, to realize one of the more cynical web "memes": If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.

All of the commercial Internet is riding on public infrastructure. Ask AT&T how it feels about cable companies getting access to "their" infrastructure. Well, how should we feel, then, about commercialized Internet services working against the public's interests or the nation's constitution? EU investigators found out that a person who creates a Facebook account and immediately deletes it generations twenty thousand pages of data that Facebook does not delete. That, after all, is their data.

Windows 8.1 is roping all its users into Xbox Live accounts and beaming geo-location to Microsoft. Apple does that with iTunes. This is without even talking about a smart phone. Any person who owns such a thing is foolish, in my opinion (as a phone, it's a phone, but as a computer, is it equal to a laptop? as an mp3 player is it equal to even a Walkman? doesn't it offer imitations of a dozen functions but at inferior performance, and all with the solitary advantage of fitting in a pocket?). I'm sure you have already read that the new iPhone made news for not including a backdoor into user encrypted data for NSA and FBI. 

Going onto Google is a losing proposition. It geolocates the browser. After a few searches, Google begins to tailor results to "customize the web experience." It predicts the sorts of results this user wants. It discounts, for example, "old" web pages -- so if you're looking for a news story from 2004, you won't find it, because Google simply doesn't want that to show up, because "normal people" don't search for old information. A few more searches, and the results are "customized more." 

Google's search is used by Bing, by the way. Facebook will tailor search results and "help" the user extensively as well. 

Doesn't that scare you? Don't you see why that's the end of the world?

The limitations are being made, in the case of Amazon, Facebook, and others, on the basis of likely purchases, not what one wishes. In the case of Google, it's made on the basis of what you have been interested in before. In other words, these merchants are making decisions about the sorts of questions you can ask, and answers you can get, on the basis of likely sales, likely happiness, not answers, not knowledge, not growth.

As an academic, I have to have open searches, because the Internet has consumed the library. Once that library has then become a public library with card catalogs assembled by advertisers, whole floors of the stacks go missing. The only answer to it is yet more capital outlays in the form of JSTOR and EBSCO subscription services. 

Meanwhile, the Facebooking of conversation has pushed conversation into interest groups, where like meet like, the agreed hear from the confirmed. That is guaranteed to be sterile or frenetic.

Let's change the rules

My only real rule, and it's about me and for me, so I don't have to justify it before any tribunal, is that I won't talk about myself on this blog. I'm fully aware that there is no other subject, if we trace the matter analytically through hoop after hoop, but you can take your hoop and put it in your nose. The simple fact is that I don't like me. I don't find me interesting. More, I loathe "bloggers" who write about the miracle of their daily lives. While these verminous scourges are less common these days, when I began here, they had not yet found their Facebook selfy Reddit Instagram Pintrest nirvana.

I recognize that I have an audience of perhaps two, thinking optimistically. I have made this so.

I want to change the rules a little. I want to talk about the vitreous that blocks me, even if it isn't universal. For example, anyone who reads all of this blog gets the impression that it is written by someone with clinical depression. That makes it nothing special. My last (look down) commented on the fact that this is just how things are, and talking about it might be profoundly useless. However, today I decided to make a play list for my funeral. I didn't do that because I'm planning on hastening the pale visitor's conquest, but because I've gotten a couple of cancers. That's no big deal, except that I'm paid so little that some months mean hunger (really), and our insurance just pushed the deductible from $3,000 to $5,000. I just, in essence, got a $5,000 pay cut.

The IRS has chased me around and taken this month's paycheck. The reason is that my mother borrowed against a life insurance policy of mine some fourteen years ago. The insurance company made sure that the premiums would never go to repay the loan, and therefore the policy would die. When it did, the company reported that I had gotten $5,000 in "income." I, of course, had gotten not a cent. My mother had. She's dead. I don't blame the taxmen. I blame the insurance industry that wants old life insurance policies to die, because they're too cheap. Nevertheless, I owed $1,000 on the "profit" I had made when the policy died. I barely get $1,000 a month, so I wasn't exactly able to pay them from my excess funds.

There's good news, though. If I owed $10,000 or more, there is a "Fresh Start Initiative" to take care of me to renegotiate! But owing $1000? Well, hell, boy, everyone can afford to pay that!

I've been working at a job for 10 years where I am making $5,000 less per year than the starting pay for my position.

Still, money is not something I think about until I have to. I hate money. I hate the people who allow money to carry value. It is, after all, the most abstracted and irrational unit in the world. It is unconnected to morality in the extreme. It is unconnected to work nearly as far. The construction worker works much more than the stock trader, but the stock trader makes an obscenity of ejaculating money, while the construction worker makes a wage and destroys his body while listening to Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boors.

My college president thought it would be a good idea if all of us provided our Facebook profiles to him for a new intranet (that would be linked to the school's Facebook page. . . I'll let you figure that one out). We were also supposed to explain our conversion experiences. When did we realize that Jesus was Lord? What book or preacher was most important to us?

"Consider the lilies of the field. They spin not, nor do they weave...."

I do not do Facebook. I never will. I have Reasons. I put "A Poor Man's House" by Patty Griffin on my funeral play list. My first song is "On the Nickel," because it says, "If you chew tobacco, and never comb your hair," which sets out two of my conditionals.

I took a long time, but I finally came up with a response to the president's request. He wanted to know, so I decided I should tell him. I wrote two documents. I'll share them here, I guess. Maybe I won't. One is the actual story of how I lost my faith thanks to the evangelical movement and its emphasis on altar calls. I came back to it later and discovered a quiet, certain, faith. I never, in the document, point out the problems with the theology and polity that this college president and his new trustees embrace. I only tell the truth. Then I turned in a second document and explained why Facebook and all of the commercialized web is the destruction of academic inquiry.

This second one is boring as a sand pudding. I will post it here.

The point is that we once had a volunteer Internet, where discussion was organized by joint projects or activities. We exchanged that for interest groups and consumer subsets under Facebook or one of the others -- all designed as being conversation under the power of sale.

I will offer one of my blogs of Ideas next.

I remember the t-shirt from 1991: "The Internet's Full: Go Away!" That was a response to the "AOLamers." I thought the snobs were wrong then, and I was right, but I thought the Internet had been destroyed then, and I was right about that, too. In 1993-4, I thought the invasion of graphics into websites was the problem. I was feeling a symptom. The truth is that the decision to sell bandwidth to .com meant that, at best, the "real" Internet of Usenet days would exist only in an underpopulated, unadvertised, esoteric bubble, but "the web" would become a midway of freakshows, where the marks are the exhibits.

The Valley of the Uncan

This pun is available for adaptation, by the way ("The ICANNy Valley," e.g.).

The time is drawing near when I will be asked to consider technology and instruction again. I have never stopped thinking about it, of course, but once upon a time I was payed to be aware of the issues, even if no one actually wanted to hear what I had to say. (I blame myself. I probably didn't say it very clearly.) Now, though, I'm going to be caught between the cruising speed icebergs of capital and capitalized tech purchases and will need to explain why education, instruction, and the latest purchase aren't always aligned.

I got a new laptop, and for once, I'm current in software. I'm indistinguishable from consumer class, and it only took thirty years to get there. This means that there is a video camera built into the lid of the laptop, and both the NSA and Microsoft can turn it on at any time without my knowledge. Fortunately, there is a high tech defense against this. For a fee, I can relate the specs to you on the wireless network enabled BLACKTAAPE (TM) (Pat pending). By getting the properly designed, wholly chemical free and Y2K compliant BLACKTAAPE, you can place this device in front of the lens of the camera and be certain that no one is seeing anything you don't want to show.

Anyway, even if you don't keep up with college education, you know that the trend is for online classes. This trend is driven by consumer impulses and a flood of G.I. benefits, an exponential growth of for-profit colleges, and, most of all, colleges and universities seeking ways of gaining revenues by reducing labor costs and facilities expenditures. Sometimes, schools try to own the online classes teachers create, claiming that the professors surrendered their intellectual property and copyrights by using college/university computers. Even when that's not the case, the colleges frequently pay less for online classes and demand more.

In general, they are exceptionally unpopular among faculty. (Yes, commenter: you love them. That's great. I don't hate them. I'm talking about the general feeling.) Faculty generally figure out that exploitation is in the offing.

I

I want to talk about one small subsection of the phenomenon, though, and that's the technology of the online classroom.

Assume a class size of 15. Assume the class will involve laying out background information and process instruction. In fact, let's go ahead and stipulate a mid-point class, like "Survey of British Literature 2: 1750 - 1945." To teach a class like that, there will be

• Historical background, genre background, biographical background, thematic background for major authors; construction of either a thematic narrative or an historical narrative to unite the material selected into an arc that will allow the students to frame the things they read.
• Discussion with students of individual works to encourage close reading and strengthen student close reading skills; class investigations of longer works so that the students get to pioneer the exploration and discover when a reading has and lacks support.
• Explanation of "how to write on literature." A survey class is structured as a first step in a major, so one needs to teach students how to write about literature with an awareness of critical perspectives; students need to know how to read criticism without being adversarial or slavish.

Now, ignore for a moment what technology you must use. What technology would you choose to use for these tasks -- provided that "in seat class time" is not allowed?

No very good teacher is ever one-way about teaching. Giving background is close to one-way information flow, as the information in the background goes in one direction. However, the delivery, in person, is two-way. In a physical classroom, lecturers watch students, listen to whispers and groans, make personal asides to punctuate the depth of the information, slow down when students get behind, etc. However, this, and only this, can be replaced with a set of web pages or a video. Students can "watch a You Tube" of the professor and get an 80% experience, perhaps.

The third thing -- "how to write the paper" and "how to take the test" -- seems as if it is just as susceptible to one-way, static replication, but it is not. Even in highly selective schools, where students have relatively uniform backgrounds, a class of fifteen students will have ten different misapprehensions about how to approach writing about literature. This is inevitable, because the task is at the heart of the college major. In other words, students will be uniformly heterogeneous because they're not college majors. A single talk or web page on "how to write a literature paper" that addresses the misapprehensions of students will either be a work of inexplicable genius or unreproducible luck.

It's the second bullet point that's the hell.

Should I be on video, with fifteen small thumbnails of the students, to "meet" with my class? Is that better than a large chat window?

There is an irony here, because video contact is worse at reproducing the classroom than a flat text window. It is worse for my students, and much worse for me, to have video and video to recreate the in-person classroom than to have no pictorial representation at all in favor of text windows.

Think about what happens when you speak to a conference room. Think about what the people around the table are doing. The non-verbal communication is much greater than the verbal communication, and people will inaudibly negotiate a mood and behavior. This is why one class can be "mean" and another "sweet" -- with the same material presented by the same teacher, the students themselves will negotiate a mood among themselves without even knowing it, and this collective voice will hold until disturbed. This social harmonizing prevents the most egregious behaviors. (It also intimidates some students and prevents their asking for help.)

When fifteen students are fifteen picture-in-pictures, they are fifteen individuals -- fifteen television sets. They don't negotiate with one another, and each is engaged in the social behavior of "watching video."

You may think "video connection is allowing me to connect to my students," but each student has a history of viewing "video" on a laptop or desktop computer. There are conventions for YouTube and the others that overwrites the actual use made of the video link.  "Watching video" is a fundamentally solitary behavior that is subject to the egoism of consumerism. "Watching video" comes with a "like" or "dislike" button, has a comments field, and invites "snark" or forwarding to Facebook. These conventions are everywhere except the online class, so the students, at best, experience contradictory signals from the media. More likely, each of the fifteen students conceives of herself as a solo entity and the professor as disembodied, if not a commodity, and the commodity experience (i.e. monetized routine found in advertising and placed in journalism) of "watching video" acts as interference against the perception of the professor as a teacher.

The instructor for his or her part, will see fifteen separate, distracting behaviors across the screen. There will not be the corporate behavior one gets in person.

On the other hand, if students engage a large text box, the experience pre-dating the activity is "writing a text" or "reading." This is an individual experience as well, but it is what McLuhan called a "cool medium." The cool medium of reading/writing allows or forces analytical thinking. While the video presentation should replicate "conversation," the technology by which it is arriving has already etched out a set of expectation that instead dominate the intended effect.

Thus, it seems, just as it becomes more possible to have a video link with a class, it is less and less useful -- more and more counterproductive, in fact -- to do so, because the ubiquity of YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, and the rest automatically carry methods of interpretation in the very act of appearing by video.

The Dumbest Argument of All Time

Wayne LaPierre, executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, announced his current argument about gun ownership on the day after the Newtown, CT mass shootings. On December 12, 2012, LaPierre announced that what caused shootings by nice young people was mental illness and video games. The answer, he declared, was easy and obvious: "Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun."

The Republican Party, and much of the Democratic Party, has faithfully echoed LaPierre's remarks. The GOP has been relentless in saying that video games and R-rated movies are to blame. (Today is the day after a shooting in Santa Barbara, and something called The Daily Republican has an article pointing out that the shooter's father is a movie director and therefore tied to the "culture" of violence. I won't link to it.) Paul Ryan and a few others have even talked about the culture of "urban youth." Poor people outside of "urban" areas are deserving poor, but the people who are "urban" have a bad "culture."

LaPierre has been doing that "kids today and their scary movies and video joystick games" junk for a long time. In fact, it's such a stale act that, when he responded to Newtown in 2012, he did so by blaming "Natural Born Killers" and the video game "Mortal Kombat." A movie from 1994 and a game from 1992 were to blame, he claimed, for a severely mentally ill child killing his mother and then children at a primary school. It was such a lazy and slapdash evasion, blaming "media culture," that it didn't catch on. The people who have followed LaPierre have typically done so by just using "culture" as the grand conflating variable -- the monkey wrench with which they plan to deny any causality to a correlation between guns and crime (e.g. "Sure, when children have access to guns they're more likely to have gun violence, but how do you blame the gun instead of the insanely violent culture?").

What amazes me, though, is the staggering number of people -- mostly men -- who seem competent enough to hold down jobs who will say that "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." That is, quite literally, the dumbest argument of all time.

First, if you have been near a shooting, you know, as I do, that you didn't know it when it was happening. You are trying to sleep, and the noise you hear outside will be anything -- your brain will do its best to ignore it, as you're trying to sleep. If you can't ignore it, you'll imagine that it's a trash can lid falling, a piece of metal falling from a rooftop, anything. If you are going down a street, and someone is shooting ahead of you, you will be thinking, "Where do I need to go next? She's pretty. Do I have money to go there? Maybe I'll walk this way," and you simply won't process the sounds as gunshots. Even if you know what gunshots sound like, you won't think "gunfire" until your eyes tell you something is wrong or your ears give you other signals -- quiet, screams, sirens.

Second, if you process quickly, you have to be extremely accurate -- as accurate as you are fast, at least -- to know where the gunshots are coming from, take cover, get your own gun, remove the safety, chamber a round, and then shoot as few times as possible. Every time you miss, your bullet will continue travelling until it is stopped by something solid, like an innocent person's body. If you were in Santa Barbara and strapped, there is no way you would say, "Pistol shots," get your gun out, and aim carefully before the shooter had moved on.

Here, though, is why it's the stupidest argument in history: I'm writing this on Memorial Day.

During war, do all of the good guys come home uninjured and all of the bad guys die?

In war, we have good guys who are well trained, expecting to have to fire, armed with the best weapons, and facing off against "bad guys with guns," and yet -- amazingly -- it appears that bad guys with guns actually win some of the time and good guys with guns kill bystanders sometimes and good guys with guns are killed sometimes. In other words, in the best possible case of a "good guy with a gun" -- an armed soldier anticipating battle -- we do not get greater safety, just greater casualties and greater death.

That is what Wayne LaPierre is selling.

Galatea is "Her," and She Is Always Galatea

Confession: I live in the middle of radish fields, and the only movie theater plays nothing but "Smash and Boom III" and "Tyler Perry Presents Loud and Noisy." Consequently, I will sound like a moron if I talk about Spike Jonze's film, "Her." I will, therefore, instead, talk about reviews of the film and the premise of the film and hope that I don't miss any of the former that invalidate my commentary and that the latter is as it has been communicated.

Tentatively, therefore, I want to propose the following: "Her" plays upon the Classical myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and yet it does so in such an attenuated and developed way that reviewers either miss the model or do not bring it up. This mythic structure has a great deal to offer us, both in terms of a contemplation of art and the powers of humanity, chaos, love, creativity, and, indirectly, politics. The story occurs in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, in one of the Orphic songs. You can read a translation here.

The song is very, very short, and the tale is very evocative. Pygmalion is a sculptor who is, in some versions, very ugly. In all versions he is very skilled. He makes a sculpture of a woman whom he could love -- the perfect girl. In Orpheus's version, she is chaste by virtue of her marble-whiteness. He loves the sculpture so much that he wants no real woman for a bride. At one point or another, Venus/Aphrodite turns the statue -- Galatea -- into a real woman.

The Victorians loved the story. W. S. Gilbert did a version, and G. B. Shaw (yes, yes, a Modern in . . . and yet not) did the famously class-based satire Pygmalion that became the rather denatured My Fair Lady. Of course Rousseau had written a Pygmalion as well, reflecting the later-Romantic fascination with the limitations of creativity, and this would show up in pictorial treatments by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. For the artists of the turn of the 19th - 20th century, the theme seemed to be the power of imagination, and the dangers of fascination. "The Lady of Shallot" is, in some ways, a mirror of Pygmalion: that which can be imagined can be beautiful, but having it brings danger. Their versions of Galatea, like other products of artistic imagination, inevitably transferred human stains or impossibility when they crossed into reality. Either the human malleability of the lover or the demands of perfection would, like Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde, show the impossibility of the perfect more than they would affirm the value of the real.

The new "Her" would not be the first use of the Pygmalion theme with technology. We have a long, long, long line of silly and crude efforts, from 1970's science fiction fear films about super computers. "Colossus: The Forbin Project" from 1970 set the tone for the "Oh my gosh, it has taken over the world, because we're not logical enough," but "Demon Seed" had the best creep factor, especially with the explicit (at the end) Pygmalion/Galatea dynamic, with poor Julie Christie being the unwilling model. For the silly, we get everything from "Weird Science" (super models from a Tandy TRS 80!) to "War Games" (yes, it's silly, and the Galatea is the non-geek girlfriend).

"Futurama" had a great time with the social scourge of "robosexuality." In one episode, it was a way of discussing the hysteria and vacuity of Proposition 8's anti-homosexuality. The show even had Hubert Farnsworth do a parody of the self-parodying "storm clouds" ad from the National Organization for Marriage ("nom nom nom"). In another episode, though, Fry downloads his own Lucy Liu-bot. To discourage him, Professor Farnsworth shows him a government propaganda film, I Dated a Robot! (If you haven't seen it, you should click on the link, as it's one of the finest bits of parody in the show's history.)

For a legitimate enactment of Pygmalion and Galatea, where there is potential culpability or unforeseen implications of reality, literary fiction had a flirtation with Galatea 2.0 by Richard Powers in 2004. It is a very well written novel with extremely fine style and control. The "Galatea" of the title is, ostensibly, an effort at natural learning for an AI. The neuroscience and AI in the novel is quite good, but the real Galatea of the novel is the novelist's own wife, who breaks away from him in the course of the book, having an affair as the marriage breaks down.

"Galatea," we may understand, is every romantic love. Men attempt to make their mates. (Neil LaBute plays assure us that women attempt to make their mates, too.) Consequently, we believe we find the image, but then we believe that we create the girl/boy inside the woman/man we love. After Venus gives the gift, though, comes the problem of change, life, and the fact that what was perfect only remains perfect if people are immobile or manage to move together.

The Shaw Pygmalion has to understand that his Galatea may not remain an experiment, that language does not remake the person, that class is or is not simply a disguise (it's not clear). (This ambiguity is gone in "My Fair Lady.")

The early Modernists had a strain of rejecting reality. W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" posits a reality of art that is parallel to the reality of daily experience. It might emanate from artworks, but it isn't coexisting. T. S. Eliot would argue for a Christian mystic experience that is, again, separate, superior, informing, but away from the quotidian, where all paths lead to the same place, and the place is not any one physical place.

The Victorians and early Modernists were living in a world where empire had shown Western aspirations and appetites in action on a global scale. Whether the Belgian Congo or the British Raj, the best practices had resulted in atrocities, repression, and oppression. Appetite had triumphed over planning. For the Modernists, the high minded belief in progress had smashed into World War I, when the most "civilized" nations on earth had used chemical weapons against each other.

Today? Are we stuck reiterating the tragedy of love alone, or can we look at Iraq, Afghanistan -- not to mention Honduras, Nicaragua and other places where American best practices have been at work -- and feel a similar skepticism about projecting human will into practice itself? Surely it is the fate of love, just as love itself, to be lashed to humans who do not live in sync, but is it in the realm of any human creation to breathe without carrying with it the stain of its creators?

If we re-tell Pygmalion/Galatea simply to explore the degree to which the beautiful can only exist fleetingly, and outside of the grasp of the mind, then we do not add much. It's true that the American public is cynical, that one doubts that even the architects of the neo-liberal invasion of Iraq and the supposed vision of a spreading garden of democracy achieved by the overthrow of Saddam believed what they said, but just crossing our fingers behind our back -- swearing that we didn't really mean it when we said that we thought we were making the world a better place -- does not absolve us from having done our best and having created. We, with our names and bumper stickers attached, sent troops to destroy and enforce governments. We, with our right wing radio telling us that Jesus was involved, did what we said we believed what was right and good.

We, with very sincere dreaming in print, made the Internet, opened it to the .com's, sold domains, and preached freedom. We created the world that spies on us in order to sell us pregnancy supplies before our daughters have missed their second periods. We created the super-intelligent super intelligence in our action movies, and now the 4th amendment is unknown.

An OS coming alive and loving its user sounds more like the Demon Seed than a lesson in love to me.

How Bill O'Reilly Can Be Accidentally Correct

Well, Bill O'Reilly is going to have a heck of a time being correct on purpose. He made an argument, a very smug one, on the absolute proof of the existence of God. In case you missed it, it happened a while ago that O'Reilly said,

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

His statement was stupid, and it still is. In fact, it is a bottomless stupidity, because it requires Mr. O'Reilly to not merely not know something that most of us know, but to actually forget things that he almost surely learned.

What causes the tides? The moon. The moon is large enough to attract rocks, to attract water, to pull on everything, even making the Earth bulge just a wee bit. Effectively, as we go from day to night, as the moon goes from over the water to opposite the water, a huge wave develops from the center of the ocean rising, then falling. Voila! The tides come in and go out. 

However, O'Reilly thought that the tides were mysterious, proof, in their reliability, of God. Nothing so vast could be so precise and so regular, it seemed to him, without the omnipotent being attentive to it. Interestingly, another argument of ignorance for God is that something is too unreliable or small to be anything but evidence of God. Thereby people will argue that a cancer in remission or a car accident must establish a divine intervention (randomness mandating a controlling intelligence) and that the modern tide tables' precision proves that God is being a global harbormaster.

I know that there is a God, but I would not offer the sort of argument that either Bill O'Reilly did -- where the vastness of anything proves it or the bewilderment of chance demands it -- and the idea of holding up such an argument as if it were self-proven is sadly funny. However, Bill O'Reilly, as I said, got accidentally correct. The first place was by showing, rather than knowing or telling, the process of his need.

It's not my place to judge anyone except students who pay me, and then I only judge their writing. I do not know the depth or complexity of Bill O'Reilly's faith, and I hope that it is deeper than he showed in that anecdote. What he showed, though, was a faith born out of incomprehension rather than mysticism and an assumption that Authority is always in control of all large actions. A person touched by that need will carry with him an assumption that "the government" is in control, that a bad meal at a restaurant was the result of "the staff" persecuting him, etc.

O'Reilly's attitude toward tides is not fundamentalist Christian. We can glance back a couple of centuries and see how actual puritains viewed the inexplicably large. See Daniel Defoe's The Storm as one grand example. At that time, no one knew how the winds worked, really, although they were getting close, and you can see that Defoe ascribes divine power to a place beyond the physical but saw in individual providence of survival or perishing as tinged with God's power. Defoe, unlike some today, had the brains to realize that bad events did not equal a scourge. (See also his A Journal of the Plague Year.)

O'Reilly's "proof," that tides are too big to exist without some Authority in charge, is a true statement about a mind set, a psychology. For some people, all things incomprehensible are also under authority. The atomic bombs are well regulated, the NSA spying is too big to understand and thus a self-aware and self-controlled entity. 

The other way O'Reilly was accidentally accurate is that, in the most technical sense, we really don't know what causes the tides.

1. The moon's mass is sufficient to attract the oceans, which are 70% of the earth's surface (0.02% of the mass of the planet).
2. Time lapses with cameras on a Foucault's pendulum show that stones on a mountain side rise and fall with the moon.
3. #2 is probably wrong on the how they compensate with the cameras.
4. In physics, gravity is the weak force that all particles of matter have attracting to other particles of matter.

So, each bit of matter wants to be near all other matter.

Very well. How?

The truth is that the simplest, most logical explanation for the tides is the gravitational effect of the moon. All persons of sense would accept that answer. Certainly, that's my answer. However, Isaac Newton, when he was working with gravity, couldn't explain how it reached out. He had to resort to spirits, in effect, and "fluxions" to get things attracted. No one can see a "gravitron" or any strings pulling pieces of matter together. We universally recognize the force as present, but it isn't even like a magnet with iron filings.

Bill O'Reilly's explanation is no explanation for the existence of God, although it does give us insight into a paranoid personality complex. Further, if he were to be correct, on the basis that no one can adequately explain gravity, he would exchange one type of indeterminacy (perfect regularity, but no visible cause) for another (perfect agency, but no visible means).

Fly Larvae!

"He showed concernment for his soul. Some things
In his experience were hopeful. He
Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree
And praise this countryside our Lord has made.
. . . though a thirst
For loving shook him like a snake, he durst
Not entertain much hope of his estate
In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late
Behind his attic window by a light
That guttered on his Bible; through that night
He meditated terror, and he seemed
Beyond advice or reason. . .
. . . In the latter part of May
He cut his throat. And though the coroner
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir
Palsied our village. At Jehovah's nod
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us." -- Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising Conversions" 1946

Robert Lowell is one of those poets with very few friends and very many enemies, and that's at least partly due to the fact that there are several editions of Robert Lowell. There is Robert Lowell the agrarian (above) of New England, Robert Lowell the diffident yankee, Robert Lowell the insane person, Robert Lowell the confessional, and Robert Lowell the noisome political actor. That's a lot for one poor madman to bear. It's even more for one bundle of poetic skill to have to voice. Me? I pick and choose. I kind of like his snarky poems about other poets, despite the poet, and I somewhat like the pretending stridency of the early stuff.

What I really like, though, is the madness that has an unchanging essence. It is a very American form that did not quite mature with our century.

I quoted a long stretch above because of it is a subtle butterfly net. It purports to be a poem written by one of Jonathan Edwards's deacons reporting after a visit from the great man. This deacon reports the score board: the saved soul of the dissipate or indifferent. However, it then goes on, like a physician discussing a disease of the soul, and notes how the patient was lost to hereditary and environmental conditions. It ends by noting that the entire village begins to have a rash of suicides, and the bass gorges itself on the spawn of the stream.

First, this is A-OK with me, because the evangelical movement continues along the path described here. A successful meeting results in X souls saved. I have seen a weekly service at a school populated by Christian students have an alter call as a regular feature. Further, the ministers exclaim at each meeting that the top priority for the students is to save their classmates by introducing them to the Gospel. Later, the speakers are ranked on how many were saved.

(I used to be upset that these folks assumed that anyone in the U.S. had not heard the Gospel. However, my students, who attend church every week, do not recognize Gospel quotations -- even ones I consider most famous, like "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last," or "Judge not, lest ye be judged," or "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Now, my complaint is that the ones who are supposed to "introduce" the others to the Gospel are unlikely to have read one of them still.)

However, the poem is only consciously about the underlying problems of evangelical preaching. By speaking of this figure powerless to stop his village from killing itself, completely unequipped to deal with his crisis, Lowell gets at despair itself and the call to repentance. When we convince people that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God, it gets pretty hard to convince them that forgiveness is available. Some people will never believe in their own guilt, but more will never believe in their forgiveness.

Each pleasure or admiration will call to mind some way of falling short. It took the exceptionally radical (and I think toxic) view of perseverance of the saints to get evangelical preaching past this point. Today's evangelicals preach a once-saved-evermore-saved to get people past even being bothered by their sinning, but this introduces its own poisons.

So it is, also, that the modern -- triumphant over disease, glorified by radio, triumphant over the atom and the atmosphere -- had a horror betraying each marvel. Every chemist could be a murderer, and every physicist a world killer. The Janus mask of the 20th century never came off, and being responsible was too much for anyone but the most glib, oblivious, or maniacal.

Finally, though, Lowell's own guilt is captured. The depressive will fall back to William Cowper's malady of feeling damned and need distraction or encouragement, but all of the latter will fail, as it does not penetrate the internal certainty -- the "Satan let loose." Lowell, who had his insanity possibly as an incubus, had his guilt, too.

The flies that fall to the water's edge are food to the trout.

A Vile Antithesis: Amphibious Things

  Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk, [305]
Sporus , that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; [310]
Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray, [315]
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad,
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad, [320]
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis. [325]
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
Eve 's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, [330]
A Cherub's face, a Reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.  --Alexander Pope, Epistle to Arbuthont found best by every-hero-since-the-crack-of-time Jack Lynch here.

You think that's long? It isn't: it's great. Lord Hervey was effeminate, and perhaps more. Pope refers to him as Sporus, who was the pretty boy whom the Emperor Nero had 1) castrated, 2) freed, and then whom he 3) married. It looks at first glance to be the usual attack on homosexuality (assumed), except that it isn't. Pope implied that Hervey is homosexual, but also that he is an impotent homosexual. He never enjoys women nor men. Nor does Pope give Sporus a Nero -- there is no masculine to Hervey's feminine, no 'top' for him to play 'bottom' to. No, what Pope points at with disgust is that Hervey is a mix. He is a discordia discors. 

In the portrait of Sporus, Pope lambasts Hervey's wit as being "between that and this,/ Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss." By the theory of mind most operative in Pope's day, wit would come from the ability to show unexpected similarities in disparate things and unexpected distinctions in presumed like things. However, each bit of wit, to be true wit, had to be tempered by a knowledge of place (the infamous "decorum") and, most of all, serve a purpose. Pope did not merely believe in Horace's maxim of "utile et dulce," he saw it as a guide star. Hervey's wit had to be in the service of Nature.

When Pope ridiculed Ambrose Phillips, it was along the lines of truth and nature, and when he criticized other moderns, it was because they derived their practice from their rules or observations rather than from nature or what must be true. This Catonian streak can make Pope difficult at times, at least partly because he is not consistent. Three Hours After Marriage is for simple entertainment and a la mode, after all.

Hervey's crime, in Arbuthnot, is being an amphibian -- one who slips from male to female and back again. He is very much like Pope's view of woman when he says that "Most women have no character at all." Women can change their whole selves, and so the Theophrastan idea of character does not fit them. Similarly, a woman's freedom and art with clothing and cosmetics mean that she can blend into any environment she desires. This is the disability of women, in Pope's mind (in Epistle to a Lady):

 Nothing so true as what you once let fall,/ 'Most Women have no Characters at all.'/ Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,/ And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair."

It amazes me that people can think there is misogyny present. The "character" intended is obviously not the sweat-stained inner soul and integrity of the locker room motto. It is the germ within that cannot be crushed and which grow into a predestined form.

The amphiotic, including amphimixis, is disturbing. Medievals, who lived and thought the Great Chain of Being, saw mixed things as blasphemous or miscreant. The best one could hope for, if one looked mixed, is to be ruled a lussus naturae (freak of nature) and thus not personally in league with Satan. The reason for the revulsion is simple enough. If each creature fits into a niche of intellect and soul, and the niches run from God at an infinite height to nothingness at an infinite small, then something that is two places/positions is defying the order God set upon the cosmos. A person who willingly mixes is willingly creating discord.

Once more, though, idiots will be idiots. Folks given a metaphysical concept will almost instantly apply it to the flesh. Their deductive reasoning will run from, "God put each thing in its place, and you seem to be manly and female" and conclude with a beating. It may only take red hair, or a stubby thumb, or a club foot. Pope, you will notice, is not doing this.

Pope studiously avoids physical descriptions. When he provides them (Edmund Curll in Dunciad), it's notable, but his usual tactic is to talk about a person's character through a behavior. Lord Hervey is offering up the continuous wit without a purpose that devalues language, and he is girlish and a man; he is both empty and poisonous.

The disgust with the mixed would continue. Gay men today write about the "straight-acting" code and how gay men who are "straight acting" do not get the ill treatment that presumably gay acting men do. This discussion is at least slightly off the beam, as the vicious and illegal behavior gay men fall victim to is usually men reacting to an effeminate man, and effeminate men are routinely harassed even if heterosexual. (Gender codes are policed by the same sex, and so men force men to be 'manly' as women force women to be 'feminine.') Women who are masculine (as opposed to assertive) also get hostile reactions, whether they are lesbian or not.

You going to eat that pencil?

In the 1890's, Gerard Manley Hopkins addressed the issue of the God of Placements:

"Pied Beauty"

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

Be sure, he tells his readers, that God does not need our version of consistency. Further, the very concept that God has to be homogenous is unnecessary. Plato may have needed a god that was internally consistent, like a giant ball of Silly Putty surrounded by an egg of Demiurge, but Plato's god is not alive. The Platonic god is affectless. 

All of the Middle Eastern religions have a God who is involved by emotion or impulse. A living God who loves can create out of love without having any lack. What's more, differences and mixes are all actualities and eventualities confined to time and space; for the eternal, there is only the glory, the exultation, the amazement, and the praise and love.

Lord Hervey was despicable, probably. However, what Pope lashes him for is being an artificial creature -- a man who is self-made without reference to nature (which does not mean hetersexuality, but productivity). Pope could not see that he, too, was amphibious, also antithetical. A man 4' tall who had to wear a corset simply to stand erect is an embodied paradox. A poet with a sensitive mind lived in physical pain for all of his adult life and wrote with placid ease. I wonder what the Confessional poets would have done if they could have claimed a quarter of Mr. Pope's pains. A man who never got consideration from women because of his condition, and yet he wrote lovingly of women. He was a Roman Catholic and despised for his religion, discriminated against, and yet he supported the conservative party.

What's more, and worse, is the amphibian life. Death does not hurt, I assume, but dying does. We spend a good portion of our lives neither born nor adult -- struggling between two characters, fighting between child and self. Even as our beauty forms and fades, we are in the crisis of sloughing off our births. Then we spend more time neither adult nor dead, but merely dying very slowly. We have our powers, and the supports and succors we long for have passed, but we have not death -- just an unresolving blur.

I can feel it these days, the tug of war. The white flag in the middle of the rope may jerk back to my side a foot or two, but more people keep joining the other side, and there was never any doubt about the outcome.

The Crime of Cant

"Of all the cant that's canted in this canting world, the cant of hypocrites may be most common, but the cant of lawyers is the worst." -- Tristram Shandy

I probably misquoted that a bit. (My commonplace book is in my other cell phone.)

Linguistic scolds always assume a general posture of pursed lips, wagging finger, and wide eyes when "u rit yr txt," and they refuse to "be proactive" when they "do lunch." However, the same will write, in their own professional journals, "Moll's Newgate conversation with Jemy reveals a formidable challenge to this critical shibboleth" (Melissa Mowry, found here). Or an article might be titled, "The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production" (March 2011 issue of Language). And we all know that Laurence Sterne, of Tristram Shandy had not experienced the misery of business speak or education jargon. I recommend this dictionary of Business jargon, although it misses the genuine horror of the phenomenon. As for education-speak, it is as impenetrable as it is unnecessary, and it admits neither light nor any effort at finding its bottom. This is a serious list, meant to help. Its sincerity testifies to the humorlessness and Mobius strip nature of this language. This one is designed to help people pass for MEd.

Why do we do this?

I do not mean, "Why do we use jargon?" I mean, "Why do we castigate it," we scolds? If I can explain this, this axiomatic principle, perhaps I can lay out as a handy tool why this is a lifelong, consistent and positive philosophy and not a "conservative" position, not "luddite," not "retrograde."

Let me take a small piece of text with jargon in it.
This is the abstract of an article by Amy Topper submitted to Developmental Education: Time to Completion. It has not been peer reviewed and is not yet published. I found it via the ERIC database. This should lead you to the entry in question. If there is any loss in the links, I apologize. I quote:

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, this issue of "Data Notes" investigates the number of attempts it takes students to complete all developmental education courses to which they are referred. Subsequent gateway course completion and overall persistence are also examined. Three-year outcomes were analyzed and disaggregated by developmental education subject (English and math) and the level of developmental education assignment. Students referred to developmental math were more likely to attempt the class than were students referred to developmental English. The data show that the number of developmental education course attempts and the student's referral level are both inversely related to successful gateway course completion, regardless of subject. Three-year persistence rates were positively associated with developmental coursework completion, but not with the number of developmental coursework attempts.

This is admirably clean writing. In fact, I feel certain that you can understand it, and I quite agree with its observations. However, there are some few things in there that will make my point. "Gateway course?" "Persistence" and "outcomes?" "Level of developmental educational assignment?" "Successful gateway course completion" is on top of that. If we look at the first two of these jargon terms, we will see all that we need to. I picked this sample because I can translate between the worlds ("discourse communities") of college English teaching and blog reading, I think.

Once upon a time, someone argued that we should not call a course that taught basic syntax or mathematics "remedial." If a student perceived that she or he was being written off or called a failure, then that student would conform to such expectations and fail. If the school told the student that he was bad at English, then he would fear English. Therefore, the argument went, it was better to say that these classes were simply gateways, just neutral value classes that could allow a student access to the college's curriculum. I think this is a fine argument, and I agree with it. However, when I use the term "gateway class," just as when the author did, I am passing on that argument in a tight little word bomb. I am giving my assent and assuming it, allowing no discussion or examination. When I use jargon, I buy the argument, agree to it, and perpetuate it, and I silence any examination of its assumptions.

So, measuring student "persistence?" Does this mean that the students would sometimes disintegrate? Or has the author not solved peek-a-boo yet? Actually, the word's meaning is basic enough, but here the word is jargon because it appears not as itself, but as an antithesis, as a replacement. "Persistence" is the word we read, but, when we do, we almost silently supply the words it replaced: "not drop-out." Measuring student persistence means measuring the students who do not drop out of the class.
So what's wrong with dropping out? Well, when you or I say "drop out," we are implying several nasty things. We came up with the term in Education circles in the first place, and so it was that some other Educator pointed out that "drop out" suggests that the person ceases to exist. Well, Jamal was here, but he dropped out of the system, fell away, ceased to be our concern, went off the grid, became an unperson. Additionally, a person "drops out" as an active verb. In the 1960's, Leary's disciples tuned in and dropped out on purpose. The quality of quitting is not constrained in the drop out, where struggling students who stop attending are often forced to stop or driven to stop and feel passive in the process.

Therefore, the argument went, we have to stop talking about drop outs. Instead, we need to study the positive quality of "student persistence." Students who have the quality of trying, the quality of wishing, of working, and how we can foster that. I agree, generally.

This, though, is the heart of the hart. "Student persistence" is the same blunderbuss mistake that "drop-out" was. It discounts the dropping out student as much as the other term ignored discouragement. It blames the instructor as much as the other blamed the student. However, because this argument is passed on in language rather than in propositions, we do not get to debate, or even think about what is being said. We must consent to the point of view to even read the danged paper.

In the paper on Moll Flanders I quoted way up there, the author talks about a "formidable challenge to this critical shibboleth." Well, that term, "shibboleth," is inherited from a particular literary critic, and using it marks both a familiarity and agreement with that school of thought. Further, it suggests that there is an us vs. them war going on in the matter of interpreting a novel from the 1720's, as if one's value as a progressive depended upon fighting dead critics. This warfare, and these arguments, are all present in the word choice, and the assumptions, which are tremulous, not merely shaky, are nowhere to be debated. (I think the critic herself is quite bright, and if we strip this posturing, she has an insight in the article.)

Therefore, and I apologize for taking so long to get to the point, the reason to oppose jargon is not that it's new. We should welcome words from slang or foreign languages that offer meanings not present in English. (I like "homeboy" as a way for English to get pisano, but it's already a dead word.) We should pour acid, though, on all language that passes jargon, and especially that does so unknowingly. Jargon is a way of pushing unexamined arguments and unthought assumptions further and further from the light of logic and human life.