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Teachers, Resistance is Futile

February 13, 2012
Politics and Economics, Science and Technology, Teaching and Learning
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Related to the last post, a friend passed along a link this afternoon to a story in the NY Times about a school district in North Carolina that is having notable success implementing technology in the classroom. Here’s a representative passage:

“Mooresville’s laptops perform the same tasks as those in hundreds of other districts: they correct worksheets, assemble progress data for teachers, allow for compelling multimedia lessons, and let students work at their own pace or in groups, rather than all listening to one teacher. The difference, teachers and administrators here said, is that they value computers not for the newest content they can deliver, but for how they tap into the oldest of student emotions — curiosity, boredom, embarrassment, angst — and help educators deliver what only people can.

Many classrooms have moved from lecture to lattice, where students collaborate in small groups with the teacher swooping in for consultation. Rather than tell her 11th-grade English students the definition of transcendentalism one recent day, Katheryn Higgins had them crowd-source their own — quite Thoreauly, it turned out — using Google Docs. Back in September, Ms. Higgins had the more outgoing students make presentations on the Declaration of Independence, while shy ones discussed it in an online chat room, which she monitored.”

Yes, you read that correctly. He did write “quite Thoreauly.” As unfortunate as that line may be, it’s not the most disturbing:

“Many students adapted to the overhaul more easily than their teachers, some of whom resented having beloved tools — scripted lectures, printed textbooks and a predictable flow through the curriculum — vanish. The layoffs in 2009 and 2010, of about 10 percent of the district’s teachers, helped weed out the most reluctant, Mr. Edwards said; others he was able to convince that the technology would actually allow for more personal and enjoyable interaction with students.”

Once more, the layoffs “helped weed out the most reluctant.”

I’m far from suggesting that there is never a time to let go of incompetent teachers, but it seems to me that this is a net that is just as likely to snare competent teachers as incompetent ones.

The message in this case seems clear: resistance is futile, I believe is the line. It rather reminds me of the motto of the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair which I stumbled upon recently — “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”.

So it would seem, at least as this writer presents the case.

Ideologies at a Crossroad … Literally

February 10, 2012
Culture, History, Politics and Economics, Science and Technology
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Here’s a moment in time from which one could build a book.

In 1938, a preview parade for the New York World’s Fair with its corporate modernist ethos wound its way through the city. The parade was ten miles long and it included cars from every state in the union.

At the intersection of Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue it was cut off by a 50,000-100,000 strong parade celebrating May Day.

One couldn’t script a better symbolic scene.

No disturbances or altercations were reported.

______________________________________________________________

Sources: Robert Rydell mentions the incident in World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions. He cites a 1938 NY TImes article, “Divided Leftists in Quiet May Day,” and “Red Light for May Day March” in World-Telegram.

Panics, Recessions, Depressions, and Fairs

January 24, 2012
History, Politics and Economics, Science and Technology
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In a recent post I alluded to the interesting relationship between World’s Fairs/Expositions and economic downturns in American history. In that earlier post I suggested that perhaps the most peculiar thing about our present ongoing period of economic turmoil may be the absence of a World’s Fair. I thought I might provide a little support for that suggestion.

Of course, there is nothing like a 1:1 correlation between the many downturns and the numerous fairs and expositions that have been held in the United States over the last 150 years or so. There is nonetheless a very intriguing correlation between many of the more significant downturns and notable fairs. Here’s a sampling:

The Panic of 1873 triggered what is sometimes called Long Depression which lasted until 1896, a period which also included the Panic of 1893. This same period witnessed the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia which was held three years into the period of depression and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago which was held in the same year as the second Panic that punctuated the Long Depression.

During the tail end of the recession of 1902-1904 the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 was held in New Orleans.

The decade of the Great Depression was also the decade when two major fairs were held, the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 in Chicago and the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Incidentally, during this famously severe period of economic hardship seven minor fairs were also held throughout the United States.

More recently the period of recession that marked the early years of the 1980s  gave us the Knoxville World’s Fair of 1982 and 1984 Louisiana World Exposition.

All the World’s a Fair

January 19, 2012
Culture, History, Politics and Economics, Science and Technology
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A few weeks ago I wrote a post or two which mentioned the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The ’39 Fair in particular caught my attention as a remarkable fusion of technology and modernism in the service of a utopian vision of the future. But the ’39 Fair is only one of many Fairs and Expositions held in the US and around the world since 1851, the year of London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition.

It’s quite likely that you’ll be hearing a bit more about these fairs, particularly the ’39 Fair in the coming weeks. They are fascinating historical snapshots capturing at once the past, present, and hoped for future. Many of the fairs included a retrospective look back at the culture’s achievement. For example, the 1876 Philadelphia Fair explicitly remembered the first 100 years of American history following the Declaration of Independence. The fairs also look forward to the future. This was most obviously the case in the ’39 Fair that took “The World of Tomorrow” as its theme, but it is an element of all the fairs. And, of course, in the way they remembered the past and the way they envisioned the future the fairs were perhaps above all else leading indicators of their own time.

Historian Robert W. Rydell has made a career out of telling the story of the World’s Fairs and Expositions, especially those held in America. In the Introduction to All the World’s a Fair, Rydell provides a useful frame by which we might approach the significance of the Fairs.

Following sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Rydell suggests that we understand the Fairs as “symbolic universes.” In their view, a symbolic universe placed “all collective events in a cohesive unity that includes past, present, and future. With regard to the future, it establishes a common frame of reference for the projection of individual actions.”

It is also interesting to consider the fairs as quasi-relgious experiences. Rydell notes Henry Adams suggestive claim that he “professed the religion of the World’s Fairs.” Interestingly, there is an etymological basis to the comparison: we “fair” derive from the Latin feria which means ”holy day” and the German Messe suggests both “mass” and “fair.” More importantly, as Rydell puts it,

“America’s world’s fairs resembled religious celebrations in their emphasis on symbols and ritualistic behavior. They provided visitors with a galaxy of symbols that cohered as ‘symbolic universes.’ These constellations, in turn, ritualistically affirmed fairgoer’s faith in American institutions and social organization, evoked a community of shared experience, and formulated responses to questions about the ultimate destiny of mankind in general and of Americans in particular.”

The fairs were also consciously arranged around the theme of progress. “Expositions are timekeepers of progress,” President William McKinley famously proclaimed. “They record the world’s advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise, and intellect of the people and quicken human genius.” (McKinley, incidentally, was killed at a World’s Fair, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.) In Rydell’s summary, the “mythopoeic grandeur” of the fairs lay in their translation of “an ideology of economic development, labeled ‘progress,’” into “a utopian statement about the future.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the fairs were held during times of severe economic and social strain. The ’39 Fair, coming years after the Great Depression had been in full swing, is only the most obvious example. In fact, the most striking feature of the present period of economic  difficulty considered in light of the past 150 years may be the absence of a World’s Fair. I suspect that we are now too knowing and ironically self-aware to take something like a World’s Fair seriously. The mythic aspect of the fairs has been significantly paired down into a theme park experience. Consider Disney’s Carousel of Progress the hinge. It debuted at the 1964 New York World’s Fair before making Disney Land its home. Subsequently, EPCOT has functioned as a kind of permanent World’s Fair.

Finally, one more item for all of those interested in a bit of cultural archeology. Below is a 50-minute film prepared by the Westinghouse Corporation for the 1939 Fair. The film is fascinating at a number of levels. I’ll leave it to you to watch the whole, but here’s a very brief synopsis. The Middletons are an average American family who have come to New York to visit the Fair. The daughter, who had been living in New York, is now involved with a socialist, anti-American art professor. At the fair, she runs into her old flame, a clean cut, All-American engineer working for Westinghouse at the Fair and determined to the defend the American way of life. Enjoy.

Knowing Without Understanding: Our Crisis of Meaning?

January 10, 2012
Culture, History, Politics and Economics, Religion and Theology, Science and Technology
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In the off chance that David Weinberger had stumbled upon my slightly snarky remarks on an interview he gave at Salon, he might very well have been justified in concluding that I missed his point. In my defense, that point didn’t exactly get across in the interview which, taken alone, is still decidedly underwhelming. But the excerpt from Weinberger’s book that I subsequently came across at The Atlantic did address the very point I took issue with in my initial post — the question of meaning.

In the interview, Weinberger commented on the inadequacy of a view of knowledge that conceived of the work of knowing as a series of successively reductive steps moving from data to information to understanding and finally to wisdom. As he described it, the progression was understood as a process of filtering the useful from superfluous, or finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Earlier in the interview he had referred to our current filter problem, i.e., our filters in the digital age do not filter anything out.

At the time this reminded me of Nicholas Carr’s comments some while ago on Clay Shirky’s approach to the problem of information overload. Shirky argued that our problem is not information overload but, rather, filter failure. We just haven’t developed adequate filters for the new digital information environment. Carr, rightly I believe, argued that our problem is not that our filters are inadequate, it’s that they are too good. We don’t have a needle in a haystack problem, we have a stack of needles.

This is analogous to the point Weinberger makes about filters: “Digital filters don’t remove anything; they only reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to something.”

All of this comes across more coherently and compellingly in the book excerpt. There Weinberger deals directly with the significance of the book’s title, Too Big to Know. Science now operates with data sets that do not yield to human understanding. Computers are able to process the data and produce workable models that make the data useful, but we don’t necessarily understand why. We have models, but not theories; hence the title of the excerpt in The Atlantic, “To Know, but Not Understand.”

Returning to my initial post, I criticized the manner in which Weinberger framed the movement from information to wisdom on the grounds that it took no account of meaning. In my estimation, moving from information to wisdom was not merely a matter of reducing a sea of information to a manageable set of knowledge that can be applied; it was also a matter of deriving meaning from the information and the construction of meaning cannot be abstract from individual human beings and their lived experience.

Now, let me provide Weinberger’s rejoinder for him: The question of creating meaning at the level of the individual is moot. When dealing with the amount of data under consideration, meaning is no longer an option. We are in the position of being able to act without understanding; we can do what we cannot understand.

The problem, if indeed we can agree that it is a problem, of doing without understanding is not a unique consequence of the digital age and the power of supercomputers to amass and crunch immense amounts of data. As I wrote in the first of a still unfinished triptych of posts, Hannah Arendt expressed similar concerns over half a century ago:

Writing near the midpoint of the last century, Hannah Arendt worried that we were losing the ability “to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.” The advances of science were such that representing what we knew about the world could be done only in the language of mathematics, and efforts to represent this knowledge in a publicly meaningful and accessible manner would become increasingly difficult, if not altogether impossible.  Under such circumstances speech and thought would part company and political life, premised as it is on the possibility of meaningful speech, would be undone.  Consequently, “it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

But the situation was not identical. In Arendt’s scenario, there were still a privileged few that could meaningfully understand the science. It was a problem posed by complexity and some few brilliant minds could still grasp what the vast majority of us could not. What Weinberger describes is a situation in which no human mind is able to meaningfully understand the phenomenon. It is a matter of complexity, yes, but it is irredeemably aggravated by the magnitude and scale of the data involved.

I’ve long thought that many of our discontents stem from analogous problems of scale. Joseph Stalin allegedly claimed that, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Whether Stalin in fact said this or not, the line captures a certain truth. There is a threshold of scale at which we pass from that which we can meaningfully comprehend to that which blurs into the undistinguishable. The gap, for example, between public debt of $1 trillion and $3 trillion dollars is immense, but I suspect that for most of us the difference at this scale is no longer meaningful. It might as well be $20 trillion, it is all the same, which is to say it is equally unfathomable. And this is to say nothing of the byzantine quality of the computerized global financial industry as a whole.

In a recent post about the opacity of the banking system, Steve Waldman concluded as follows:

“This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats . . . .

Nick Rowe memorably described finance as magic. The analogy I would choose is finance as placebo. Financial systems are sugar pills by which we collectively embolden ourselves to bear economic risk. As with any good placebo, we must never understand that it is just a bit of sugar. We must believe the concoction we are taking to be the product of brilliant science, the details of which we could never understand. The financial placebo peddlers make it so.”

In a brief update, Waldman added,

“I have presented an overly flattering case for the status quo here. The (real!) benefits to opacity that I’ve described must be weighed against the profound, even apocalyptic social costs that obtain when the placebo fails, especially given the likelihood that placebo peddlars will continue their con long after good opportunities for investment at scale have been exhausted.”

Needless to say, this is a less than comforting set of circumstances. Yet, “apocalyptic social costs” are not my main concern at the moment. Rather it is what we might, perhaps hyperbolically, call the apocalyptic psychic costs incurred by living in a time during which substantial swaths of experience are rendered unintelligible.

I appreciate Waldman’s placebo analogy, it gets at an important dimension of the situation, but Rowe’s analogy to magic is worth retaining. If you’ve been reading here for awhile, you’ll remember a handful of posts along the way that draw an analogy between magic and technology. It is an observation registered by C. S. Lewis, Lewis Mumford, and Jacque Ellul among others, and it is considered at book length by Richard Stivers. The analogy is taken in various directions, but what strikes me is the manner in which it troubles our historical narratives.

We often think of the whole of the pre-modern era as an age dominated by magical, which is to say unscientific thinking. Beginning with the Renaissance and continuing through the complex historical developments we gloss as the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, we escape the realm of magic into the arena of science. And yet, it would seem that at the far end of that trajectory, taking it uncritically at face value, there is a reversion to magical thinking. It is, of course, true that there is a substantial difference — our magic “works.” But at the phenomenological level, the difference may be inconsequential. Our thinking may not be magical in the same way, but much of our doing proceeds as if by magic, without our understanding.

I suspect this is initially wondrous and enchanting, but over time it is finally unsettling and alienating.

We are all of us, even the brightest among us, embedded in systems we understand vaguely and partially at best. Certain few individuals understand certain few aspects of the whole, but no one understands the whole. And, it would seem, that the more we are able to know the less we are capable of understanding. Consider the much discussed essay by MIT physicist Alan Lightman in Harper’s. Take time to read the whole, but here is the conclusion:

“That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.

‘We had a lot more confidence in our intuition before the discovery of dark energy and the multiverse idea,’ says Guth. There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.’”

Faith? “All we can do is hope…”?

We have traveled from magic to magic and from faith to faith through an interval of understanding. Of course, it is possible to conclude that we’ve always failed to understand, it is just that now we know we don’t understand. Having banked heavily on a specific type of understanding and the mastery it could yield, we appear now to have come up at the far end against barriers to understanding and meaningful action. And in this sense we may be, from a certain perspective, worse off. The acknowledged limits of our knowing and understanding in premodern setting took their place within a context of intelligibility; the lack of understanding was itself rendered meaningful within the larger metaphysical picture of reality. The unfolding awareness of the limits of our knowing takes place within a context in which intelligibility was staked on knowing and understanding, in which there was no metaphysical space for mystery as it were. They acted meaningful in the context of what appears from our perspective as a deep ignorance; it now seems that we are consigned to act without meaning in the context of a surfeit of knowledge.

I’m tempted to conclude by suggesting that the last metaphysical shock to arise from the Promethean enterprise may then be the startled recognition of the Hephaestean chains. But that may be too glib and these are serious matters. Too serious, certainly, to tie up neatly at the end of an off the cuff morning blog post. This was all, as they say, shot from the hip. I welcome any thoughts you might have on any of this.

Weekend Reading, 1/7/12

January 7, 2012
Culture, History, Miscellaneous, Politics and Economics, Religion and Theology, Science and Technology
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Hope the new year finds all of you well. As you may have noticed, Weekend Reading posts have been on hiatus due to holiday busyness. Things will only be getting busier as the new semester ramps up, but I’ll try to keep these coming. For the sake of time, however, introductory/explanatory comments may be minimal as they are this week. Enjoy. All of these are quite interesting, the pieces by Havel and Lightman are particularly good.

“The Intellectual and Politics” by Vaclav Havel at Project Syndicate. By the late Czech poet, dissident, and president.

“Always the Optimist: Václav Havel’s transcendence of politics” by Stefany Anne Golberg at Smart Set.  On Havel.

“War No More?” by Timothy Snyder at Foreign Affairs. In conversation with Pinker’s recent book on the decline of violence.

“Their Noonday Demons, and Ours” by John Plotz in the NY Times. On distraction, past and present.

“The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith” by Alan Lightman in Harper’s. This article has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of weeks. Very interesting.

“Christianity and the Future of the Book” by Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis. Explores relationship between Christianity and the book form in light of the emergence of electronic forms of reading.

Play, Politics, and Worship

January 3, 2012
Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics and Economics
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Here is a thought for the day:

“I assert that in all the cities, everyone is unaware that the character of the games played is decisive for the establishment of the laws, since it determines whether or not the established laws will persist.”

This assertion was made by Plato in The Laws (book VII) and it suggests that the political culture of a society is bound up with the nature of its games. More specifically, Plato goes on to observe that the persistence of a society’s laws is bound up with the persistence of its games:

“Where this is arranged, and provided that the same persons always play at the same things, with the same things, and in the same way, and have their spirits gladdened by the same toys, there the serious customs are also allowed to remain undisturbed; but where the games change, and are always infested with innovation and other sorts of transformations … there is no greater ruin than this that can come to a city.”

We typically remember that Plato treated music with a great deal of seriousness in The Republic, we less often hear of the seriousness with which he treated sports and games, but there it is (courtesy of James Schall from whose essay, “The Seriousness of Sports,” these quotations are drawn).

There’s a good deal to think about here.

It is not insignificant that with regards to the two great civilizations of the classical period, Greece and Rome, we readily think of games which seem to characterize their societies: the Olympics and the gladiatorial games respectively. In Constantinople, that enduring but infrequently remembered enclave of classical civilization, the Blues and the Greens which functioned as part gangs and part political associations not infrequently contributing to riots and coups began and were sustained as fans of popular charioteering teams. More recently, in Egypt, one not insignificant block of participants in the current political turmoil are bound together primarily by their love of soccer.

On a related note, perhaps at the root of soccer’s inability to take in American culture there is more than a hint about the national character (insofar as we may legitimately speak of one).

Moreover, what might it mean that for a time baseball could legitimately be called America’s sport? And what, in turn, might it mean that while baseball remains popular, it’s place in American culture has been challenged if not replaced by basketball and football? Both of these, of course, have been around for some time and it could be argued that they too are distinctly American. So perhaps we may create a political taxonomy of sorts based on the three dominate sports of American society: baseball, football, and basketball. I wonder, has anyone studied whether a preference for one of these sports is a reliable predictor of political inclinations?

Two titles come to mind in connection with the theme of play and culture. The earlier one is historian John Huzinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture, the first Dutch edition of which appeared in 1938. Huzinga aimed at demonstrating the elements of play that variously manifest themselves in culture. The other is a more recent work,  Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, which similarly stresses the links between play and worship.

The link between religion and sports is frequently noted and perhaps there is more to it than we usually imagine, more than the surface similarities between the worship of the religious and the devotion of the fan.

In The Laws, Plato puts the following claim in the mouth of the Athenian:

“I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete, blessed seriousness, but that what is human … has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the noblest possible games, and thinking about them …”

This is all well and good, but it seems to describe less and less the reality of sports in America. Perhaps because sport has become an end to something other than itself. Schall also cites the following from Aristotle:

“Men have been known to make amusement an end in itself … for there is indeed a resemblance; the end is not pursued for the sake of anything that may accrue thereafter but always for its own sake.”

Sports at their best, Schall notes, approach a form of contemplation:

“Here, in a way, we near what is best in ourselves, for we are spectators not for any selfish reason, not for anything we might get out of the game, money or exercise or glory, but just because the game is there and we lose ourselves in its playing, either as players or spectators. This not only should remind us that what is higher than we are, what is ultimately serious, is itself fascinating and joyful.”

It is these realizations that explain our collective fury and anger when sports is tainted with betting scandals or steroid controversies and even haggling over the distribution of dollars in the billions. In each case, the happy myth of sport played and watched for its own sake as a kind of end in itself channeling even higher realities is shattered. It is not that men and women have disappointed us –although this also is true — it is rather that the vessel of a certain secular grace has been broken and we are all the poorer for it.

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