From where I'm sitting…

To complete the line of thought I started with yesterday’s post, there are now times that I encounter situations or books or ideas that make me think I might be becoming more conservative…or at the very least that I’m becoming a grumpy old man (an inevitability that I anticipate eagerly).

As I’ve mentioned  before, one of the the triggers for this feeling is the EU. It may be the darling of the British left, but all I see in it is a deeply undemocratic technocracy. Another is my concern about the demise of common standards. I’ve previously mentioned this with regards to aesthetics, though aside from architecture I think that’s a marginal issue. Neither do I feel particularly strongly that our modern world’s morals are all akimbo (though I’ll check back in on that subject after I’ve read A Secular Age).

I must admit, however, that I feel it keenly in the area of education. Two things triggered this realisation in recent days. The first was  a moment at work in which an allusion to ‘Paul of Tarsus’ in a conversation about conversions was met with blank stares. The second was reading a review of the newest book by Niall Ferguson (a man whose contributions to public dialogue have been primarily characterised by intellectual laziness and crypto-racism and who nevertheless has secured two professorships at Harvard).

Now, whether because of my leftie background or because I cannot stand Harold Bloom’s writing, I have long dismissed the idea of the western canon, even as I have personally consumed (and benefited from the consumption of) a large proportion of it. Perhaps dismissed is the wrong word: I have certainly thought little about it, and felt little inclination to think more about it. But (and here’s where I sit down to put on my grumpy old man trousers) I worry that I may be beginning to see its point.

Let me explain. As many of you will now, I’m terrified of strangers. Before I started my current job, I would avoid things like ordering pizza over the phone because I found them stressful. And I still avoid going to large group events where I don’t known many people. Small talk isn’t among my strengths, and in the absence of some mutually acknowledged common ground I struggle at conversation. A shared acquaintance or a similar intellectual or professional interest is often enough to get me over the hump, but even that requires some sort of boundaries: “technology” events cover far too broad a range of subjects for me to be confident that I’ll have much at all to say to a stranger I meet there, and casting around for topics is too too awkward.

It’s easy to say that part of the problem is that there’s simply too much to know these days–that the explosion of information and the specialisation of every industry and every intellectual discipline over the course of the 20th century means that a common set of learning or a shared heritage is no longer an achievable goal. As Ann Blair argues persuasively in her new book, though, it has been ever thus. Every generation has complained that there is too much to know. And while our present day has seen an exponential explosion of data, the growth of information based on that data has thankfully grown at a slower rate.

The other stumbling block, of course, is determining whether a common set of learning is even a worthy goal. And it’s here that I think I’m starting to change my mind. I’m a strong proponent of liberal eduction. I don’t believe that the primary purpose of universities should be to seek out and share truth and knowledge, and that such a purpose not only offers the greatest benefit to humanity as a whole, but also equips the society in which such universities operate with the best possible chances of economic and humanistic advancement. I don’t believe, for example, that universities should offer degrees in business or communications. It is certainly in the economic interests of society to train people in both of these areas, but they rightly deserve to be trade qualification rather than areas of stand-alone study in the tertiary education system. As the New York Times pointed out earlier this year, “undergraduate business majors study less than other students, and lag behind in assessments of critical thinking and writing skills — scoring lower than students in education and communications, and well behind liberal arts majors”.

I will admit a certain tendency toward elitism here, but I believe the primary purpose of the universities must be liberal education, and that the purpose of liberal eduction is to teach people not only how to structure thoughts & learn & assess the thoughts of others but also to understand the current state of human learning in at least one discipline and to appreciate how we came to where we are. Both sides of the equation are fraught with culture-specific norms, of course, and in many cases those can’t be disentangled without unravelling the whole. Formulating an argument, for example, is necessarily a social (and therefore culturally bounded) task, and teaching people how to structure thoughts into convincing arguments cannot be done as if in a sociocultural vacuum.

While difficult to deny the links between culture and epistemology, the arguments are abstract and therefore unlikely to attract a large audience. Discussions of the canon and whether it inherently favours dead white men, on the other hand, have a tangibility that earns them greater popular attention. I do believe there’s merit in the whole of the educated class having some shared set of learning, and I suspect that the very tangibility of the canon as a battlefield for a more expansive notion of the boundaries of “our” culture may mean it’s a less intractable problem.

I’m not entirely sure what the answer is, but I hope that there’s room for a global canon in the republic of letters. More than any time in human history, we live in a globalised world. If there is a canon, the very nature of our modern world demands that it include eastern philosophy and histories of a broader geography written from a more diverse set of perspectives. Just as much from western culture has been shed from the core set of learning, so the best of what already exists from other parts of the world should be grafted onto the existing set of knowledge. At least at first, there may be little merit in trying to reclaim things already shed by those cultures. As we go forward, taking a broader view of what matters, I think it will be easier to maintain a global canon.

The alternative, as I see it, is that our only shared knowledge is of the immediate popular culture around us. For better or worse, I have a rather tenuous connection to pop cultures, but I do know that there’s very little chat as boring to listen to as chat about reality television shows, X-Factor, and the like, and so I sincerely hope something can be done with the canon instead.

Some books apparently demand review over and over and over again. I suspect it’s no coincidence that many such books cover seemingly sensational topics and end up being rather dull. I’ve noticed this with ‘ground-breaking’ technology books, like Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, Eli Parsier’s The Filter Bubble, or Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams’s Wikinomics. The irony has never been lost on me that Carr, who wrote The Shallows, is one of the premier authors in a genre whose books consistently lack the depth of a tea saucer.

Their structure is simple: an introductory chapter that reads like (and as often as not started as) an article in Wired is followed by 3-5 chapters featuring vignettes offering anecdotal “proof” of the trend outlined in the introduction.These books are one of the reasons I so enjoy my membership of the London Library. As a vociferous producer of marginal notes, there are many types of book I’d rather own than borrow from a library. Tech pulp non-fiction, though, is perfect for library usage since they’re easy to scalp: skim the introduction and the first page or two of each chapter, make a note of any real research cited, and move on. On the other hand, these types of books do offer the chattering classes an opportunity to spill shocking amounts of ink.

An admission: I’ve thought of writing a book on the history of different communications technologies and what they can teach us about the Internet…but these types of books have put me off it. I don’t want to do it unless I can do an intellectually robust job of it, and work takes up far too much time at present for that to be feasible. I might try to take a sabbatical in early 2013 to do so, though.

Anyway, putting aside my rant: reviews of Christopher Turner’s Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex seem to be ubiquitous these days. So far, I’ve read reviews in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the Guardian. The book itself seems to be robust enough, though none of the reviews has yet inspired me to order a copy. What I’ve found most interesting is differing approaches each reviewer took to putting the book in context. The New Yorker discusses the book book in the broader historical sweep of sexual liberation; the LRB, typically, focused more on the intellectual milieu in which Reich lived and worked; the Guardian, for its part, produced a workable synopsis of the book itself.

I don’t mind what I call “reading around” a book, though it does sometimes feel like the literary equivalent of Facebook stalking. Perhaps my bigger problem is that if a reviewed book captures my interest, I’m likely to avoid future reviews until I can read the book itself (by which time I will have lost track of the other reviews), so I end up reading more about books towards which I’m indifferent than about those that fascinate me. I don’t think that can be a good thing, but at least now I’m aware of it.

I apologise in advance for what will no doubt be rather jumbled thoughts. Andrew & I have been watching the second season of Downton Abbey, which takes place during the First World War. At the same time, I’ve been reading a lot about the current moves to dismantle or diminish various public services in the UK, and the shifting landscape of the American electorate. In the background, of course, is the ongoing failure of the European Union to face up to the havoc that member states’ fiscal failures are wreaking on the Euro, and the resultant political brouhaha in Westminster.

All this has got me thinking. I should begin by acknowledging that I’m a hearty Eurosceptic. I believe the initial goals of institutions like the Council of Europe and the European Economic Community were laudable, and that the common market is a fundamentally good thing. The European bureaucracy, along with being fundamentally anti-democratic, is dysfunctional at the best of times. There is something deeply worrying about the fact that in good times the European institutions work to tie their members closer together in closer union, and that in bad times (even in bad times made worse by the resultant union), their response is to tie things together more quickly.

All that said, my reading and watching habits have of late led me to wonder about the effects armed conflict on society. Don’t get me wrong: war is, by and large, a bad thing. It does, however, have some positive side-effects. There has long been discussion of whether war drives economic growth. Looking at 20th century Anglo-American history, there also seems to be a link between war and  social progress. I don’t count revolutions: any number of them have rallied behind cries for social justice; more often than not, though, new forms of tyranny take hold alongside whatever social progress manages to eek through.

The participation of women in WWI, both on the home front and in the Red Cross, made calls for women’s suffrage harder to resist in both the US & the UK. WWII led to further breakdown of social barriers. In the UK, the post-war settlement led to the foundation of the NHS and other elements of the welfare state that have been under attack from both sides of the political divide since the 1980s. In the US, the second world war was followed by the desegregation of the military in 1948 and, eventually the civil rights movement (which hit its stride during the Vietnam War). In both countries, access to higher education expanded significantly in the aftermath of WWII (as did the general standard of living).

My question, then, is whether the last 65 years of peace in Western Europe, fostered and encouraged by a variety of international institutions, have the pernicious side effect of undermining social democracy.

It may well be that the socio-economic circumstances that tied war to social progress were unique to the early 20th century. In nineteenth-century Britain, Catholic emancipation and the reform acts were not a price the ruling classes had to pay for war. It’s possible that social advancement is contingent on total war, and an acknowledgement that parts of the social contract are open to revision after such a conflict. It’s also possible that the decline in noblesse oblige–or whatever sense of duty used to encourage the ruling classes to participate fully in the armed services–has changed the expectations at all levels of society. Today, the poor are expected to bear the human cost of war almost entirely, while the economic benefits seem to flow primarily to a small subset of the rich.

Finally, was anyone else thoroughly freaked out by Angela Merkel’s warning this week that “nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe”?