Alan Jacobs recently wrote about a former colleague at Wheaton College who during a class decided to skip on a couple of the assigned readings. This colleague

devoted two weeks to studying a book and then, at the end of that time, said to his class, “I don’t think that went as well as it should have. Let’s do it again. We’ll have to leave out the next book or two on the syllabus.” Some students — I don’t know how many — went ballistic over this. That’s not what the syllabus says! I’ve already bought those other books and now we’re not even going to read them! Some faculty and administrators became concerned over this “lack of professionalism”; they wondered whether Wheaton could afford to have faculty “the students don’t really respect.” Me, I just wished I had the courage to go off-script that far;….

Now, the main point of Jacobs’s post was about racism at Wheaton. Jacobs’s colleague was black, and Jacobs suggested that his colleague likely got more push back from administrators because he was black than he would have if white. I’m not commenting on that aspect of the post.

What I want to comment on is why it’s usually wrong to skip assigned readings.

One, books cost money. Sometimes a lot of money, sometimes not a lot of money. Not all students–even, I imagine, at Wheaton–are independently wealthy.

Two, in some cases, a student may choose to take a class based on the assigned readings. I can’t say for sure that I ever did, bu when I registered for classes, sometimes I did look forward to certain of the assigned readings. I would have been upset if the readings hadn’t been assigned. The obvious retort is that I could have read the book anyway. But that neglects what one gets from reading a book in class. Sometimes classroom discussion or the guidance of the instructor helps one understand and appreciate a book. Maybe that’s not true for everyone, but it was sometimes true for me. One of my favorite books of all time–a collection of short stories, Dubliners–I read for an English lit class and I’m convinced I would not have understood or appreciated many of James Joyce’s allusions. I might not even have understood some of the stories.

Three, “going off script” and changing the syllabus means the instructor planned poorly. Maybe it’s sometimes necessary to go off script. In at least one class I taught when I was an adjunct, it would have behooved me to go off script because I had too poorly anticipated the classroom dynamics. And while doing so would have been admitting failure, it was more of a failure for me to keep on as I was doing. So I get that sometimes it needs to be done. But it’s still a mark of poor planning.*

There is such a thing as over-entitlement among undergraduate students (and especially among graduate students, but that’s a different story). And part of going to college is learning that life isn’t always fair and learning how to adapt to changing circumstances. I get it. But instructors need to realize that they have an obligation, too. Whether my admonition actually applies to the case Jacobs is talking about or not, I don’t know because I don’t know the specifics. But on the facts as Jacobs relates them, the students’ complaints weren’t baseless.

*Not exactly the same thing, but as an undergrad I was particularly frustrated with some professors’ practice of changing, at the last minute, an in-class exam to a take-home exam. Take-home exams are MORE WORK. Even if the professor says “I only want you to spend an hour on it,” they’re going to grade you as if you had more than an hour to work on it. If a student has to work, he or she likely has to plan a tight schedule to balance work and studies, and fitting in even an extra hour of schoolwork can be hard.

In 1984, the narrator mentions screens that enable the government to observe citizens in their own homes. Citizens were not permitted to turn these screens off. For quite a while I’ve seen a correlation between these surveillance screens and internet access, cell phones, and now i-phone technology, the main difference being that we choose to use them. We can turn them off, and we do, but we depend on them nevertheless.

These devices make us “observable” to others, not necessarily or only to the state, but in a way that potentially guides our actions and maybe even the way we think.

We buy things online. Most of those purchases are in principle more traceable than cash purchases and perhaps even more traceable than purchases by check. At any rate, Amazon seems to know what I might be interested when I log on. Our search terms are (or so I hear) somehow remembered by my Google and contribute to what comes up when we search. When I go to weather dot com, the site knows I live in or around Big City. I assume that it would be fairly easy to track down my real identity from the blogs I comment and write on, or at least narrow the identity to my apartment building. Even dumber technologies like my flip phone track my phone calls and messages and my time zone.

And this is mostly beneficial to me. All this connectivity is entertainment, shopping, and a way to express myself and talk with people online I would probably never get a chance to meet in real life. I’m part of online communities where in my own way I have a voice and an opportunity to speak my mind and learn from others. I have and use a Roku, which streams channels from the ‘net. I listen to music on YouTube.

This is all mostly voluntary. I choose to turn on my computer first thing when I get home. The computer remains on until I go to bed, even if I’m not using it.

Still, I can’t shake the thought that I’m patched into a world where I and my choices are observed or at least observable.

I don’t think I’m paranoid. If I were, I wouldn’t use the computer at all. Or I’d use it less often. Or I’d take greater precautions than I do to protect my anonymity. I don’t think government bureaucrats are monitoring my to’ing’s and fro’ing’s on the internet. I am wary of identity theft, but not that wary.

As I see it, I’m taking two gambles. The first is that my life and views are so uninteresting and so non-influential and enough on the mainstream that no one (I hope) sees any special need to track me down. The second gamble is that there are a lot of fish in the pond for identity thieves, and I hope the chances of me getting my identity stolen is lessened by some sort of law of numbers, in addition to sensible precautions I can take myself.

Above, I compared this situation with Orwell’s 1984. It’s not entirely a good comparison. I’m not arguing that being “observable” is totalitarianism. I’m not even arguing that being observable is the same thing as being observed. In some ways, by being more exposed and more “visible” to the online world, I enjoy greater privacy than people did before such things existed. I probably enjoy more privacy on the web in 2015 than I would, say, in a stereotypical small town or closed neighborhood or enclave where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

But there’s also something not quite voluntary about it even though I choose it freely. It makes me uneasy.

Olivia Legaspi, a student at Haverford, writes about what working at McDonald’s has taught her about privilege [hat tip: Rod Dreher]. Legaspi, who suffers from PTSD but needs to work to fund her college education, notes that while at Haverford, she and her fellow students are encouraged to “to ask for help when we feel we need it, speak up when we feel uncomfortable, and prioritize our own well being over most other things,” at McDonald’s, she has to put others first and doesn’t have recourse to those strategies. On balance, she says, this was a good thing:

Before you encourage someone to practice “self care” in its current definition, think about in what situations this is actually useful or feasible advice….I’m grateful to have worked at McDonald’s: It taught me how better to handle my anxiety and how to put myself last in the name of efficiency and a common goal. McDonald’s strengthened my character, my work ethic, and expanded my capacity for resilience, valuable lessons which could not be learned in the “safe spaces” of Haverford’s campus. We must remember that putting oneself first is the essence of privilege, and that, in order to grow, we must leave this selfish mindset behind.

I’m temperamentally disposed to agree with her. Working customer service jobs can be a valuable part of anyone’s upbringing. If Legaspi had focused the unfairness of her situation, I would likely be writing a post about how she overlooked the positive aspects of working. So while I’m about to disagree with her, I do so in the spirit of supplementing, not negating, what she’s saying.

My disagreement: We should beware overlearning those lessons. While “putting oneself first”–or more accurately, being in the position to do so–“is the essence of privilege,” it’s sometimes necessary. My ability to go to the dentist and afford the visit is also part of my privilege. But I’m not going to abstain from those visits because others cannot enjoy the same treatment. (And to be clear, Legaspi is not saying I should. She is saying, in part, that recovery, survival, and self-care involve interacting with the real world, and that world is not going to out of its way to accommodate her needs.)

Service work doesn’t always expand one’s “capacity for resilience.” It can sometimes be degrading. Legaspi doesn’t deny that, but sometimes the solution to degrading circumstances isn’t always putting the customer (or whoever) first. Sometimes it involves engaging in the resistance necessary to keep one’s dignity in the workplace, or at least make the job more survivable. Legaspi doesn’t tell us whether or how she may have “resisted,” and I probably am too eager to see “resistance” where it isn’t, or to say it should be resorted to when it needn’t. (For some labor historians, an employee going on a bathroom break can count as “resistance to dominant structures of exploitation.”)

Still, Legaspi’s lessons need to be balanced against what a lifetime of such labor might entail. As Megan McArdle said in a different but relevant context,

I’m thinking it’s a lot harder to get out of bed on Monday in year 13 of your stint as a janitor than it was on day 300–and that it’s harder to get out of bed on Day 300 if you know there’s probably going to be a Year 13.

I’ll repeat that overall I agree with Legaspi. I am trying only to warn against the uses to which it’s possible to take her argument. I’ll close with the words of one person who commented to her column and with which I agree:

I’ve also worked unpleasant jobs: some of them early in my career when I didn’t have a choice, and had to stick them out; some of them much further along in my career, when I had the resources to wish my unpleasant boss well and quit. I wish those sorts of jobs didn’t need to exist. I wish nobody ever had to shut up and smile and take it, from an unreasonable boss or customer. But allowing the difficulties you encounter to shape and form you in virtue and discipline is a great thing. And having the wisdom to understand that this is what’s happening is even better. Well done.

I’m well aware the story of my life is much more interesting to me than to others. So believe it or not, I’m reluctant to explain the parts of my personal background that inform my approach to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Still and even so, I am going to give a little bit of that background, mostly because I promised Michael Drew I would (so blame him), but also because it’s probably a good idea to lay my biases on the table. I intend this OP only as an autobiographical observation and not as an extension of my arguments. I don’t expect anyone reading this to change their minds about what I’ve written or might write in the future. In fact, I’m not even confident it will fully explain why I’m so ambivalent about Sagan. Some of you may have had very similar experiences to mine and come to very different conclusions.

This post has all the faults of any autobiographical account. I’m relying almost entirely on memory to make a representation that’s at least a little self-serving. I do promise, however, that I have no stories of Saganite hoodlums shaking me down for my lunch money in middle school so they can buy “star dust.”

Another fault of my post is that it’s long. One thing worse than reading a solipsistic post about someone else’s life is reading a very, very long solipsistic post about someone else’s life that runs more than 3,200 words. So I beg your indulgence.

(more…)

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to find an author whose books or essays or short stories captivate me, and I want to read almost everything by him or her that I can get my hands on. For me, here are some of them:*

• Ernest Hemingway
• C. S. Lewis
• George Orwell (nonfiction only, not too impressed with his fiction)

The problem is that I like them so much that there comes a point in reading them where I realize I’m hitting the limit and running out of their works. I read them, but realize the end is coming soon when finding things they’ve written becomes more and more difficult.

And now I’m adding Tony Judt, the late historian of 20th-century Europe. I’ve read Postwar, I’ve read a short set of biographies he wrote about Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron. I’m now plowing through some compilations of his essays. There are still a couple of monographs by him I can read and, I hope, a few more compilations of essays. But alas, I’m hitting the limit.

Question for you all: Do you have such authors in your life? It doesn’t have to be an author, either. I suppose it could also be an artist, or director, or musician, or other type of creator.

*It’s not lost on me these are all men. That may or may not be significant.

A couple months ago I watched the first episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, in which Sagan introduced the series.

Some of Sagan’s statements stand out to me. He says “because the cosmos is also within us we’re made of star stuff.” He also says the “same laws of physics apply everywhere throughout the cosmos.”  [My quotations from the show are paraphrases, but I’ve tried to relate them as accurately as possible]. Toward the end of the episode, he warns us:

We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us or we can squander our 15 billion year heritage in meaningless self-destruction.

Those statements represent to me a faith-like or religious-like approach to the universe. He employs a metaphor that is probably meant to inspire awe. We are made of matter–atoms and other things–but he renders “matter” as “star stuff.” The same laws apply everywhere. The corollary is that if they do not appear to apply everywhere, then we just haven’t discovered the right laws, or we haven’t discovered all the laws, or we have formulated the laws incorrectly. Life is assumed to be a good thing. It is a “heritage,” 15 billion years in the making, much richer than if it had been merely 10,000 years in the making. It’s possible for us to “squander” those good things and if we do, then the resulting self-destruction is “meaningless,” much worse, I guess, than a self-destruction that is meaningful.

Those statements represent certain values and starting assumptions that are not easily answered by Sagan’s approach to the Cosmos. He has to make certain leaps–not “leaps of faith” exactly but leaps nonetheless–to assume that “the same laws of physics” apply everywhere. He entertains certain values about what causes wonder and awe and expresses those values through the “star stuff” metaphors. And he also has certain values about good (“life” and “our” 15-billion year “heritage”) and about what is meaningful and meaningless, presuming that meaninglessness itself is a bad, or at least discomfiting (and therefore bad) thing.

I risk committing an error here. It’s one thing to point out that awe exists, that people speak in metaphors, that people have values, even values not easily reducible to a materialistic view of the universe or values not testable by a process we can call “scientific.” It’s another thing to take it too far, to say that because those statements are “faith-like” or “religious-like” in some ways, they are therefore expressions of something that can be answered only by or derived from faith or religion. The error is to say “gotcha” when all Sagan is guilty of is holding complicated views.

And yet there is a disjuncture in Cosmos among the scientific values, the materialist values, and the set of values that are not testable by science or not easily reducible to Sagan’s materialist assumptions. It’s worth pointing out that disjuncture if only to understand why some people are uneasy about Sagan’s project and to understand that this discomfort is not merely an expression of anti-scientific or anti-intellectual angst.

Libertarianism doesn’t have a lot to say about the good life. It doesn’t tell me whether I should give to charity, whether I should save a drowning child, whether I should be a loving husband, or whether I should devote myself to uplifting intellectual pursuits instead of squandering my life watching TV and eating bonbons. Is an unexamined life still worth living? Libertarianism doesn’t say.

At least not much. I’m referring to libertarianism as one thing, but there are a lot of libertarianisms. I’ve never read Ayn Rand but those who claim to, and are critical of her, say that she advocates a life of selfishness or self-centeredness. Maybe that means, for her, the good life is looking our for number one? (Maybe this more charitable and better-informed account serves her better. I don’t know, but I trust its author.)

Rand’s not the only libertarian. As with Rand, I’ve never read Rawls, either. But my understanding is that his libertarianism rests on a notion of fairness: what would we have the world look like if we didn’t know beforehand what privileges we’d be born into? Others (Murali, if you’re reading, I’m thinking of you) can clarify how I misunderstand Rawls, but it seems to me he advocates something like a golden rule. In that sense, the good life is doing–or advocating for, or building society along the lines of–how you would be done by.

A better example, because I’ve actually read some of his stuff, is Jason Kuznicki. He has urged us, for instance, “to refuse to be ruled–and refuse to rule.” By that standard, maybe the good life is a studied and reflective humility. Even if I’m misrepresenting him, I think it’s a good lesson at any rate. A thousand flowers can bloom, as the cliché says. Or to paraphrase James Hanley (I forget the cite), a strongly libertarians society has more room for traditionalist Hutterites than a strongly Hutterite society would have for just about anyone else.

Still, libertarianism does its best work as a naysayer. It has a lot to say against the excessive uses of state power and about the costs of even the best intended programs. Liberals and conservatives and anyone else who wishes to use the state for any purpose had better heed libertarians’ critique against coercion and for expanding choices. Some fringe elements notwithstanding, most members of team liberal or team conservative value individual autonomy.

Even as a naysayer, libertarianism offers a clue to the good life. Its advocates seem to have a faith in human resilience if only the fetters of coercion be removed. Along the lines of what James Willard Hurst argued 50 years ago in a different context, many people await the “release of energy” that can move them to ever expanding choices, opportunities, and prosperity. There’s a good here, and the good is in removing impediments to finding the good.

But nagging questions remain. Prosperity and abundance count for a lot, but can there be too much? We’ll all die eventually anyway. The fear of death disturbs me even now.

And while still alive, how to deal with all the complexity life offers? Local communities and autonomous agents have a way of forming their own complex and sometimes restricting rules and obligations. While these can be chalked to the outcomes of market exchanges or daily micro-compromises and while a strongly libertarian society widens the opportunities for exit, they still impose ought’s and should’s on those who don’t choose exit or for whom exit is still too costly or who choose exit and find only other obligations or (maybe worse) themselves.

Liberty, by itself and however you define it, doesn’t have the answer.

Jason Kuznicki has written a post critical of what he calls the “new presentism” from the academic left. He notes that questions such as “was Shakespeare sexist?” don’t point to any worthy of consideration. The answer is “yes, he was probably sexist” but uninteresting because it tells us too little and relies on a present-day category [read the whole thing, etc., etc.]:

The problem with presentism is that presentist questions do little analytical work for us. At first they may appear bold, but they are entirely too easy to answer. Rather than digging deep, a presentist reviews only his or her own pre-existing feelings; presentist questions answer themselves almost mechanically. The past becomes an empty canvas, on which we paint all of our least courageous judgments.

He also warns libertarians. The lede for his essay advises libertarians to “engage with the past on its own terms. That means seeing beyond boringly obvious historical manifestations of sexism and racism.” In the essay itself, he urges his readers to remember that presentism is a tactic:

We should not infer from certain ugly, anti-intellectual tactics used in fighting social wrongs that racism, sexism, or the like are true or good. This is a path down which I see way too many young non-lefties going. As they do, they lose all interest in liberty: except, of course, for those of precisely their own kind.

A few of my own thoughts on Jason’s essay:

One: Historians need to realize that just pointing out that something is ahistorical or “presentist” means that it’s bad history. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. That’s of course what Jason is saying. But I just wanted to drive that home because historians (including yours truly) make that error a lot.

Two: The question “was Shakespeare sexist” is presentist. But the questions “what were Shakespeare’s attitudes toward women as expressed in his work?” or “in what way does Shakespeare ‘construct’ gender in his work?” are less presentist. They may reflect present-day concerns in a way that would’ve been unrecognizable in Shakespeare’s day. They also contain certain value-laden assumptions about the “constructedness” and socially contingent nature of gender. But they’re also open questions for which the answers can be interesting and not overdetermined.

Three: It’s very, very hard–and maybe impossible–not to be presentist in some ways. We’d all do well to heed that point and at least recognize the presentism in our own arguments. Libertarians no less or more so than others. The terms they use to critique government power–“liberty” and “freedom”–sometimes shade into shibboleths that libertarians use as if those terms are eternal truths whose meaning transcends time and place. And anyone who objects to the way that shibboleth is used is “against freedom” or “against liberty.”

One person’s freedom or liberty can be something that to another person helps justify the denial of liberty. “Freedom from want” can sometimes mean “compelling third parties to subsidize others’ lives” and “denying choices to some people in the name of helping them be free from hunger.”* “Economic freedom” can mean “freedom to starve” or “freedom to be taken advantage of by fraudsters.” Not that there’s no common ground here–libertarians usually recognize the need to help the less-well off and to protect against fraud, and at least some liberals recognize that expanding choice in the marketplace is a good thing–but the two freedoms have an inherent tension that becomes clearer when we examine who and in what historical context embraced those freedoms

My point is not to say that libertarians are wrong. We all commit and probably can’t avoid committing presentism. But libertarians would do better to recognize that error, too.

*I forget the page number, but somewhere in The Road to Serfdom (I think in a footnote), Hayek notes that Britain’s post World War II Labour government, probably concerned about fuel shortages, seriously considered a plan to force people to work in the mines because too few people were willing to do the work.

This New York Times essay  [hat tip, Saul DeGraw] relates an experience that’s probably not in itself very common but that represents some of the challenges first generation college students face. The author discusses her first week of class. She and her parents didn’t realize that it was okay and even expected for the parents just to drop their child off and let them begin college. The parents, instead, stayed for several days during the orientation and first few days of class, having to use up their vacation days to do so.

The anecdote fits too neatly into the point the author makes about it. I wonder if there’s more to the story than what the author is admitting. Still, it is a pretty good reminder of how college can be an alien experience for first generation students.

In my last post, I argued that it didn’t “seem right” that a police officer would make up an “offense report” because she was refused service at a fast food place. I was also uncomfortable with the fact that she seems to have somehow gotten personal information from someone who was disinclined to provide it. I finally suggested that businesses should have the legal right to refuse business to police officers just because they’re police officers and still expect the same level of protection that any business or person ought to expect from the police.

I guess a fair question to ask of my OP is, what would have been a right way for this all to have turned out? That question can be broken into two others.

1. What is the most the officer could have done to pursue her complaint and yet meet my standards for appropriate conduct?
2. What would have to be true of our legal system for me to be okay with what the officer did do in this case, which was to write up an “offense report”

To answer the first question, my preference would be that the officer complain to the fast food company, using whatever avenues that already exist for a customer to issue a complaint in a related case. By “related case” I mean a case where a person is denied service for a reason not prohibited by law and where the proffered reason appears to be the real reason. In other words, I’d say it’s a different matter altogether if, say, the police officer is black and the employee says they don’t like to serve police officers but the real reason the employee is saying that is arguably that the officer is black.

My answer to the second question depends on what access any private citizen would have in a similar case. Let’s say someone refuses business to me because I am a public employee, and let’s say I have my name tag/badge that shows who I work for. Let’s also say it’s obvious from the situation that they’re not discriminating against me because of my gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. If I can call the police and the police can write up an “offense report,” then I concede that a police officer ought to be able to do the same if it happens to her/him.

I still don’t concede that I or the cop have any right to obtain contact information from an employee who declines to furnish it, especially because no crime or anything civilly actionable is being alleged. Is a crime, or at least an something civilly actionable, being alleged? Maybe. In the comments section of my last post, I referred approvingly to the idea of an “‘implied contract’ associated with being open for business” mentioned in this BHL post. Not being a lawyer, I wouldn’t know. But if it is something that I could allege and use to invoke the writing of an “offense report” and to obtain personal information from someone who doesn’t want to give it, then I suppose that an officer, as a citizen, ought to have the same prerogative.

That said, even if a cop then has the legal right to pursue the matter, I’m less certain as to whether he or she ought to pursue it. The privileges cops enjoy come with the responsibility to be judicious, and that sometimes means taking certain slights in stride. But that’s a different issue.

Now is probably the time to say that I do think it’s wrong to refuse service to someone without a “good” reason. What counts as “good” is probably in the eye of the beholder, but unless the cop in this case is leaving something out of her account, I don’t see a “good” reason to refuse her service.