The Tragedy of Praxis

Governing revolutionary France, teaching… it’s all the same.

“The man who with such nobility held that it was infamous to lay down one’s arms while there remained, somewhere in the world, one master and one slave, is the same man who had to agree to suspend the Constitution of 1793 and to adopt arbitrary rule.” – Camus on Saint-Just

If you let students choose their own topics…

…you get research papers on:

-drug wars in Puerto Rico

-breast augmentation surgery

-history of iPods

-how to prevent youth violence

-breakdancing

-the Holocaust

-various media portrayals of the Rihanna/Chris story

-how sleep deprivation affects adolescents

-how smoking pot affects adolescents

-Nikola Tesla

-building and fixing computers

-LeBron James

-Lil Wayne

-how fast food affects adolescents

-how nuclear power has changed warfare

-the evils of capitalism

-history of basketball

-ancient Chinese history

-history of film technology

I really can’t wait to read these.

It’s student quote time again.

In my ninth grade humanities class, we’re studying the forced migration of the Cherokees and other peoples in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, during our break, I discovered one of my students perched on the edge of the large rolling trash can in the hallway, propelling herself down the corridor with a rather abstracted look on her face. I asked her why she was riding the garbage, and she said very earnestly, “I’m on the Trail of Tears!”

More Important Than The Differences Between Surrealist Revolution and Marxist Revolution

“Reading Test Dummies“

Surrealist Revolution vs. Marxist Revolution

“One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation. The advantage of revolution was not that it gives mankind happiness, ‘abominable material comfort.’ On the contrary, according to [Andre] Breton, it should purify and illuminate man’s tragic condition. World revolution and the terrible sacrifices it implies would only bring one advantage: ‘preventing the completely artificial precariousness of the social condition from screening the real precariousness of the human condition.’

[...]

“The surrealists were more different from Marx than were reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, for example. The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution–in other words, to preserve a historical situation. The Marxists made use of it to justify revolution–in other words, to create another historical situation. Both make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends. But Breton made use of revolution to consummate the tragedy.” – Camus, The Rebel

A Definition of Pessimism

“Pierre Naville, in trying to find the denominator common to revolutionary action and surrealist action, localized it, with considerable penetration, in pessimism, meaning in ‘the intention of accompanying man to his downfall and of overlooking nothing that could ensure that his perdition might be useful.’” – Camus, The Rebel

Talk about education, says George Will,

“is usually solemnity without seriousness–the issuance of imperious commands to an unimpressed future.”

I like.

[I wrote this in an email yesterday.]

So I lost it and started sobbing in class yesterday, in front of all my students, and today I’m getting very solicitous treatment, which is something about which I’m ambivalent. I know that when students are “bad” on purpose it’s a mistake to let them see that it gets to me, but my students almost never torture me intentionally; they’re usually just utterly clueless about how immature they’re being. When that’s the case, as long as I keep my composure, they remain ignorant of the effects of their behavior, even (or especially) if I try to explain to them in measured words what is happening. Sometimes a very graphic illustration of the harm they are doing–i.e., a usually-calm teacher breaking down in tears (not anger; that’s not productive, I know)–is necessary to shock them into awareness. But the idea of a woman using tears to get what she wants is loathsome to me, even if the tears are genuine, even if they are unstoppable. A (male) friend of mine last year, another then-student-teacher, observed to me that his (female) mentor teacher seemed to exaggerate her feminine fickleness and vulnerability in order to manipulate her students: cried once a month or so like clockwork, said “I’m in a bad mood today, so be nice to me” and such things all the time, and just generally performed her emotions more than necessary. My friend asked me what I thought of that as a woman, and it seemed abhorrent to me, but I also understood, and continue to understand, the temptation of it. It’s difficult to tell when to respond to things as a teacher and when to respond as a person, I suppose.

Still Life with Discarded Slogan and Hubcap

Please help.

The school I teach at is applying for International Baccalaureate (IB) certification, which means we need to develop a curriculum with set boundaries but plenty of choice within those boundaries. For example, for world literature classes, IB has published a (quite extensive) list of pre-approved texts from all over the world, and we can choose any authors and poets we want as long as they appear on that list.

Our objective is a curriculum diverse in terms of the ethnicities, nationalities, languages, genders, classes, and concerns of the authors it represents. The problem is that most of us, myself included, are extremely well versed in Western European literature–and not much else.

I am one of two people responsible for finalizing and documenting the English curriculum, which means I have considerable power over what high school students at our school will read and study in the next several years. I don’t want to squander this opportunity to change things for the better, but I’m afraid that without your help I will.

If you can think of any author or text from any corner of the world that might appeal to high school students and deserves to be mandatory reading, please, please, let me know. I especially need poetry recommendations, but anything will be welcome. I am too ignorant to do this alone.

In Defense of Pathologizing the Loonies

[Every so often, I find myself in conversation with someone who reminds me of all the problems with pathologizing mental illness (with quotation marks around "illness"). I always want to agree with whoever it is, for his (this time it's a he)  is an attractive position--but all I can really say is that my life and sanity were saved when I ceased to be understood and began to be pathologized. I really don't know what I would have done if no one had ever come out and called me a nutcase (not quite in those words, I suppose), and I'm unspeakably grateful for the label and all it has given me. Anyway, below is what I wrote to my friend when the topic came up recently.]

 

All my life, I have had wonderful parents, understanding and loyal friends, excellent grades, a not loathsome appearance, enough money but not too much, and whatever other criteria of “the good life” one might name. In childhood I was shy but not pained; I read all the time and loved the world of books without neglecting the equally important one of friends and school and family and my violin. Academics were easy for me, but for the most part Iwasn’t bored, because I went to schools that recognized the excess of social capital bestowed on me by two overeducated parents (what some might call “intelligence”) and had the resources to challenge me and others like me.
 

All the same, I had glimpses of depression as early as sixth grade, and by the time I reached high school I could hardly see anything else. I kept my friends and I kept up my grades, but I lost my mind. I was not sad about anything in particular, and I did not wish my life were other than it was; I simply conceived of existence itself, in any form, as one big mistake. Obviously this led to suicidality, which scared my parents and me enough to send us, finally, to a doctor. I was offered counseling, but I concluded that I had nothing to say: no complaints, no problems, no stress–just undifferentiated nihilism. And so I was given pills.

 

I was afraid of the pills, of course, and I scorned them. I feared they would make me happy, and not in a good way (as an emo adolescent, I doubted that there was any good way to be happy); I had read Brave New World, and I wanted no part of its soma-induced complacency. But as much as I deified my own suffering, I prayed (to no one) for deliverance from it a thousand times a day, and so I took the pills. I wanted to.

 

The pills did not deaden my mind; they revived it. Within a week or two, I could function once more, and not as a robot but as a thinking, feeling being. They brought my emotions back into touch with life; they allowed me to feel sad when it made sense to feel sad and feel happy when it made sense to feel happy. They allowed me to think and theorize about my own mind and condition rather than sit in a continual crying stupor. They allowed me to find some things interesting and some boring, some beautiful and some abhorrent, rather than seeing beauty only in negation, which, after all, is nothing. Thus they gave me life.

 

My case is not everyone’s, of course. To overmedicate someone in need of other treatment is cruel and futile, just as it would have been cruel and futile to try to counsel me back to mental health by talking about my relationships with my parents, the stresses of high school, and so on. When psychiatric medications are used to deaden the mind, they are but slow-acting poisons. When they are used to pull the mind back from the brink of oblivion, however, they are lifesavers, and that is what they are for me.

I rarely LOL, but I did.

Apparently a contest to rename No Child Left Behind has elicited such entries as:

All American Children Are Above Average Act

Mental Asset Recovery Plan

Act to Help Children Read Gooder

No Child Left Untested

No Child’s Behind Left

No School Board Left Standing

Double Back Around to Pick Up the Children We Left Behind Act

Rearranging the Deck Chairs Act

Teach to the Test Act

Could We Start Again Please Act

[For the record (I hate that phrase), I harbor mixed feelings, not unmitigated anger, toward NCLB.]

Fights are not arguments.

This is a great post on that sad necessity, calling out hypocrites on the political left.

I would add to the author’s points the observation that people in this country (that group includes me, by the way) can feel such outrage upon viewing a racist cartoon that nearly everyone agrees is disgusting while elsewhere not pens and presses but bullets and bombs are the expressive instruments of racism, sometimes (as in Darfur) with but futile condemnation from the rest of the world and in other cases (as of Palestine and Israel) without even wrinkling the brows of many onlookers.

Camus the Defense Attorney

Despite its over-reliance on the assumption that its audience is or wishes to be of the aristocracy (and is male, but that’s a given), this is the most eloquent defense of Nietzsche I have ever read. I hope I can write like this in the service of something or someone someday.

“In a certain sense, rebellion, with Nietzsche, ends again in the exaltation of evil. The difference is that evil is no longer a revenge. It is accepted as one of the possible aspects of good and, with rather more conviction, as part of destiny. Thus he considers it as something to be avoided and also as a sort of remedy. In Nietzsche’s mind, the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable. We know, however, his posterity and what kind of politics were to claim the authorization of the man who claimed to be the last apolitical German. He dreamed of tyrants who were artists. But tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men. ‘Rather Cesare Borgia than Parsifal,’ he exclaimed. He begat both Caesar and Borgia, but devoid of the distinction of feeling which he attributed to the great men of the Renaissance. As a result of his insistence that the individual should bow before the eternity of the species and should submerge himself in the great cycle of time, race has been turned into a special aspect of the species, and the individual has been made to bow before this sordid god. The life of which he spoke with fear and trembling has been degraded to a sort of biology for domestic use. Finally, a race of vulgar overlords, with a blundering desire for power, adopted, in his name, the ‘anti-Semitic deformity’ on which he never ceased to pour scorn.

“He believed in courage combined with intelligence, and that was what he called strength. Courage has been turned in his name against intelligence, and the virtues that were really his have thus been transformed into their opposite: blind violence. He confused freedom and solitude, as do all proud spirits. His ‘profound solitude at midday and at midnight’ was nevertheless lost in the mechanized hordes that finally inundated Europe. Advocate of classic taste, of irony, of frugal defiance, aristocrat who had the courage to say that aristocracy consisted in practicing virtue without asking for a reason and that a man who had to have reasons for being honest was not to be trusted, addict of integrity (’integrity that has become an instinct, a passion’), stubborn supporter of the ’supreme equity of the supreme intelligence that is the mortal enemy of fanaticism,’ he was set up, thirty-three years after his death, by his own countrymen as the master of lies and violence, and his ideas and virtues, made admirable by his sacrifice, have been rendered detestable. In the history of the intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has no equivalent; we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him. [I would put at least one religious leader up there with Marx, but never mind.] Of course history records other philosophies that have been misconstrued and betrayed. But up to the time of Nietzsche and National Socialism, it was quite without parallel that a process of thought–brilliantly illuminated by the nobility and by the sufferings of an exceptional mind–should have been demonstrated to the eyes of the world by a parade of lies and by the hideous accumulation of corpses in concentration camps. The doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of sub-men–a fact that doubtless should be denounced, but which also demands interpretation. If the final result of the great movement of rebellion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be this ruthless bondage, then surely rebellion should be rejected and Nietzsche’s desperate cry to his contemporaries taken up: ‘My conscience and yours are no longer the same conscience.’”

In answer to a friend’s question, I said:

I love writing and I want to do it somehow, but I also want to stay in education… the meeting of the two fields might be what attracts me about getting a Ph.D. in education someday. My reading assignments in ed school last year were often very badly written articles on very important topics, and it angered me that essays on Shakespeare’s use of flower symbolism in the sheep-shearing scene of The Winter’s Tale or whatever are often so much more elegant and interesting to read than papers on how huge numbers of students are being cheated of a good education and a good life. I want to be in education and I want to write about it skillfully so that more people will take respectful note of its issues. I have this rather overdramatic idea of having honed my writing skills in the bowels of apolitical academia, with the help of bubble-bound English lit professors, only to betray their interests and my former ones by using everything they taught me to benefit a field that is at best a neglected stepchild of hardcore academia. We’ll see.

A Liberal Artist Wanders Into The Realm Of Science, With Vexing Results

I took a class on systems theory in college that concentrated on the dynamic, unpredictable, chaotic aspects of systems. The worldviews of the philosophers and novelists whose work we read were endlessly exhilarating, if somewhat terrifying.

Articles I read in grad school last year (by David Cohen and by Stigler and Hiebert) present a very different theory of systems: Far from providing butterflies on power trips with quick and easy ways of causing natural disasters across the globe, huge sprawling systems (ecosystems, languages, education, bureaucracies) exert all their massive might to crush any potential disturbance almost before it appears. Systems are conservative to the extreme. This perspective, too, I find terrifying.

If systems overreact to and amplify change, caution is in order when attempting any kind of reform. Of course that does not seem to be the case, at least in the area I am thinking of, which is school reform. On the contrary, no reform seems big enough, no revolution absolute enough, in the world of progressive education. The education system, at least, appears to be conservative.

But does that assumption argue for more revolutionary reforms or more cautious ones? On one hand, it is going to take a lot to change a system so resistant to change, and we’d might as well start changing as much as we can as quickly as we can. On the other hand, because, as a professor once told me, progressive education is like a pork chop—better nonexistent than half-cooked—even the smallest changes could be very damaging in that they will clash with everything around them and possibly negate or at least fail to help other efforts, progressive or not, at good teaching and administration. By this logic, extreme caution would have to be prescribed.

So I feel paralyzed. We mustn’t be overzealous for fear of being counterproductive, but we must be overzealous if anything at all is to be accomplished. I suppose ideally we would all sit and think for a very long time until we had considered all possible contingencies and felt confident that our proposed reforms would have a radical but not negative effect—and then implement them. But history and society (not to mention human lifespans) do not allow for that. What options are left? Must we either reform the entire system at once or leave it be? Trial and error seems so unacceptable in a system in which (again, as a professor once said) each child is in fourth grade but once.

“Nation’s Blacks Creeped Out By All The People Smiling At Them”

I knew there’d be an Onion article on this phenomenon sooner or later.

Camus Overload

“The essence of [Nietzsche's] discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence of law is still less so. If nothing is true, if the world is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action there must, in fact, be a standard of values and an aim. But, at the same time, nothing is authorized; there must also be values and aims in order to choose another course of action . . . [otherwise] there is nothing but the appalling freedom of the blind. . . . A profounder logic replaces the ‘if nothing is true, everything is permitted’ of Karamazov with ‘if nothing is true, nothing is permitted.’” – The Rebel

Oh. Duh.

Which definition is it?

“Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.” – Camus, The Rebel

Are ideas eternal? Should they be?

Camus says Stirner says no. I assume he’s talking about the existence, not the validity, of ideas, but I’ve never read Stirner.

Of Stirner, Camus also says that “even revolution, revolution in particular, is repugnant to this rebel. To be a revolutionary, one must continue to believe in something, even where there is nothing in which to believe.” Stirner is too nihilistic to be a revolutionary, but he can be a rebel.

(Aside: I recently taught my ninth graders that rebellions differ from revolutions only in that they are unsuccessful. Perhaps Stirner, or Camus’s version of him, would say that the “failure” of rebelli0ns is not a matter of historical contingency but rather essential to their nature: that rebellion is a negative argument without a positive one–perhaps without a desire for a positive one, in the case of nihilism–the positive argument, the new order of things, is inherent in revolution from the beginning.)

Anyway, Camus continues thus his discussion of Stirner’s belief in nothing abstract:

“In this desert everything begins to flower again. ‘The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures.’ This night is drawing to a close, and a dawn will break which is the dawn not of revolution but of insurrection. Insurrection is, in itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation.”