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.

A Consideration of "Nigger Lover" for MLK Day

I am not afraid of words. I am afraid of meanings of words.

In the 1990's, my students at UNC Chapel Hill were encouraged not to refer to all persons bereft of a Y-chromosome as "girls." The result was that I got numerous sentences like the following, "The females would like for fraternities to go away, but this is because some females are unable to get dates and are jealous." The boys who wrote for me managed to use the word "female" (not woman/women, because the Anglo-Saxon plural confused them) and intend things at least as venomous and ignorant as any man ever had when he referred to his co-workers as "the girls." At the same time, the fact that these boys knew that they were not supposed to write "girls" meant that they were aware that there was something going on, that they were conscious to some degree, even if this consciousness only resulted in reactionary knuckle dragging and chin drooling self regard in the short term.

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." -- Abraham Lincoln, "The Lyceum Address" 1838

I recently ran into the word "nigger lover" for the first time in decades. As you might imagine, I don't spend any time in the "Comments" at FoxNews.com, where, I gather, the term is somewhat alive. I will be discreet with the context because the context isn't actually very important: a high-up individual in a college was accused of having used the term. Students were extremely upset. In what follows, I will not say "N-word," and I won't say "n***." I consider "nigger" to be profanity. Just as I would not capriciously type "shit," so I would not capriciously type this word, but, just as I would not laboriously invoke and avoid the word, so I will not here. This post is about the meaning of the word, and therefore about the word itself.

First, do I believe that the college official used the term? No, not particularly. It's a bizarre term. It's a term that depends upon a biographical rather than geographical context, and I am pretty sure that it doesn't fit.

Here's the thing, though: what is the insult involved? Let's think through this term.

This is a picture of EVERYTHING

 If you were called a "nigger lover," as I was in 1968, would you be insulted? Would you even understand the charge? The term is much, much worse than "nigger," because it is an inescapable indictment of the speaker. It does not mean "inter-racial lover." It means, to its speaker, "traitor to the white race" and "person giving advantages to the unworthy and hateful villains, Blacks." The person who uses the word affirms two things:

1. The speaker believes in skin color race. This person believes that persons descended from formerly enslaved persons, or simply persons derived from African stock by more than two generations, are naturally different from all other persons. This difference is a matter of innate competition as well as an entrenched and immutable superiority/inferiority. The person who uses the word believes that a child born with dark skin is already, before its first word, inferior, inimical, and alien to the speaker him or herself.
2. The speaker believes that everyone else agrees with her or him. The person who calls someone a "nigger-lover" is assuming an audience, a geography, a region wherein race is not merely understood, but where the assumptions of inequality and enmity are accepted. The person who uses the word believes that history and biography can only be understood as the enactment of a race war.

It's shocking. The idea that a person might get upset with another person and reach for an insulting epithet is understandable. It's not acceptable, but it is understandable. The stressed out and angry office worker might refer to another as a Pollack or Dago or Spic in a moment of rage. The rage is the problem more than the word, and this is largely because the audience and community that believes in and accepts such terms as truths is not merely gone, but historical. That's not true for "faggot" or "nigger": there are huge populations that still hold the hostility.

I said that I had been called one in 1968. I was a little kid living in Savannah, Georgia, and the subject was Martin Luther King. It was becoming acceptable for white people to like King. My mother did. My father didn't, but he was generally not political. On my street, though, the kids were pretty clear: if you supported King, you were a nigger lover. (They didn't know what they were repeating or what it meant.) I was only six years old, but I remember being deeply, deeply puzzled by the charge.

What the heck did they mean? Of course I was a "nigger lover." Aren't we supposed to love all people? Isn't that what Jesus said? Aren't we supposed to love our neighbors?

The next year, we moved to Atlanta, then on to New Jersey, where I was accused of being a slave holder, because I was from Georgia, and then we came back to Atlanta. I didn't hear the word actually used again until last week.

Mr. Nickles: "There must be

Thousands! Whats that got to do with it?

Thousands -- not with camels either:

Millions and Millions of mankind

Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,

Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking!

For walking round the world in the wrong

Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:

Sleeping the wrong night wrong city --

London, Dresden, Hiroshima.

There never could have been so many

Suffered more for less. But where do

I come in?" -- Archibald MacLeish, J.B. Prolog

 Today, we have MLK Day, and we also have more overt racism than I have seen since my childhood. While we, the good guys, were triumphant during the 1980's, the bad guys were simmering and bubbling beneath closed pot lids, and they were spreading. The craziest idea of the anti-civil rights era -- the idea of races coming from the book of Genesis and there being a Christian race -- spread among the unmonitored, unlettered, uncontrollable right wing fundamentalist church networks -- reactionary racism riding reactionary religion.

I have heard, with my own ears, children seriously informing me that white people came from Adam and Eve, but Black people came from monkeys. That kind of gibberish was, in my day, hard to find if you were looking for it. Today, it walks up to you with a blonde ponytail and an ad for a Father/Daughter dance, with coupons for Chik-Fil-A.

The person who said that the college official said "nigger lover" was probably employing rumor as one of the last tools of the powerless in a situation that feels arbitrary, but I wouldn't want to judge. I do know, though, that the cultural milieu, the set of assumptions necessary, for using the word don't exist for the official. They don't exist at the college.

What frightens me more than any foul term is that the culture surrounding me is such that people are using that term, thinking that term, and believing that term's world again.

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.

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.