Been Germane Franc Lend

Been Germane Franc Lend

We see here Franc Lend's theory of electricity as being composed of two colors - the red and the black - a theory reflected in the red and black wires used in electrical wiring today (along with a variable third color that Franc Lend didn't know about because the anti-Americans of Franc Lend's day kept the color a secret from him.)

We thus see how important Franc Lend's theory is even today, once again evidence of American technological and scientific superiority!

Comma, comma, down . . .

Ridicule this
so-called

'American' Revolutionary

Benjamin Franklin said:

"Poverty, poetry, and new titles of honor, make men ridiculous."

Ridiculous? RIDICULOUS?! I'LL SHOW YOU RIDICULOUS!!

That British comma after "honor" that separates the subject of the sentence from its verb, that's ridiculous.

Franklinish Irony

Money

"He's a Fool that cannot conceal his Wisdom."

Said the man who grew rich selling this very same sort of folksy wisdom compiled in Poor Richard's Almanack, which he published annually from 1732 to 1757, a quarter of a century, all told.

The Wisest American?

Benjamin Franklin

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise enough to ignore this bit of clever nonsense.

JooYoung Choi's Cosmic Womb . . .

 

Cosmic Womb

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this artist, JooYoung Choi. She's a bit like some of the outsider artists I've occasionally blogged on - her art is part of a larger creative goal, creating characters to populate an 'entire' cosmos! I put "entire" in scare quotes because in her wiki site about this place, she tells us that this cosmos - or, rather, this paracosm - spans 6,732 miles, which sounds small for a cosmos:

The Cosmic Womb Wiki documents the characters and history of a land called the "Cosmic Womb" created by JooYoung Choi. This paracosm spans approximately 6,732 miles, and is governed by Queen Kiok, humanoid creatures called Tuplets: Lady K, Aidee Three, Emo Flowers (No. 36), KunYook Six, Novem Nine, and Haneul-Sek aka Blue Girl, and one earthling from Concord, NH named C.S. Watson.

I'm reminded somehow of the great outsider artist Henry Darger, whom I have blogged about here. There's something of the novelist in both Darger and Choi in their compulsion to create characters and bring them together in a story.

But is Choi an outsider? Yes, to the extent that she feels herself one. She was an adoptee from Korea to Caucasian parents in the United States, and she lived in an almost entirely white area and always felt different, something of an outsider, which she of course was, but of this time, of that place, of some parentage, what does it matter? The future makes outsiders of us all . . .

Immersion in 'Superior' Chinese Education?

Congratulating a Student
Photo by Jane Peterson
New York Times

In "An American School Immerses Itself in All Things Chinese" (NYT, October 26, 2014), Jane A. Peterson publishes an informative article - though also something of a 'puff' piece - about a school in Minneapolis, Yinghua Academy, that immerses American students in Mandarin Chinese to teach all of its classes from from kindergarten to eighth grade, which is fine and dandy by my reckoning, but I have a few reservations about some of the praise:

Math results, which are particularly strong, are partly attributed to the Singapore Math curriculum and its eight-step approach to word problems, as well as the Chinese-educated teachers who move through material more quickly than their American peers.

Ms. Peterson is a journalist stationed in Singapore, so she should know something about its approach to math education, but she might also be wont to consider it more positively than if otherwise stationed. I note this only as a possibility - and one should always practice some skepticism about what one reads. Consider, for instance, these words of praise for Mandarin:

Mathematical terms in Mandarin are also clearer. The word for "triangle," for instance, "sanjiaoxing," means three-sided. And when counting to 100, the Chinese use only 10 numbers to build all others; 71, for instance, is written 7-10-1. "The number system is easier to work with," said Mary McDonald, a seventh-grader who takes an extra university math class once a week. "It's faster and more organized."

Hmmm . . . Let me just point out that "triangle" means "three-angled," which is no more difficult than "three-sided." Moreover, I can't see the Chinese number system as easier since the Western number system also uses only ten numbers - 0 through 9 - to compose all others. But who am I to argue with a seventh-grader?

And perhaps I've simply missed the point about how math is "clearer" and "easier" in Mandarin. Might somebody explain to me how?

Michael Kammen on Stephen Vincent Benét's "chauvinism"

Michael Kammen
Google Images

In Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), Michael Kammen offers a passage on collectors of Americana that might shed light on what led some critics to charge Stephen Vincent Benét with a "narrow nationalism":

If we ask why these people collected, the answers are even more diverse than what they sought to possess. Begin with the most obvious reason, sheer love of country: old-fashioned patriotism that often verged upon chest-thumping chauvinism. We find it, for example, in a fascinating "open letter" to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., written by the editor of The Americana Collector. It is an unabashed appeal for the creation of a Rockefeller Foundation of Bibliographical and Historical Research because "such an institution would become one of our richest assets for a patriotic people. Our heritage from the heroic past must be preserved as continued guidance and inspiration to ourselves and to all mankind." The same spirit animated one of Stephen Vincent Benét's most striking ballads, written in 1927, "American Names." It opens with the line "I have fallen in love with American names," and the fourth stanza contains both the geographical range desired and the nemesis being rejected:

I will fall in love with a Salem tree.
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea.
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

One can see why some of Benét's works were criticized for their "narrow nationalism," though today's critics would more likely be disturbed by the fourth line of the fourth stanza. But Benét probably spoke as a man of his era in his use of the N-word, and the context makes clear that he was was praising the blues singer (though this doesn't efface the offence), precisely as he was extolling the "Salem tree," the "rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz," and the "bottle of Boston sea."

This makes twice now in my research, by the way, that Benét has suggested the superiority of the American muse.

Idle Request . . .

Donald Duck
Wikipedia

Does anybody of a certain age recall this childhood ditty -- sung to the tune of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (or for you Brits, "God Save the Queen") -- popular among kids in the early sixties:

I hate my country,
I'll go to Germany
To see the king.

His name is Donald Duck,
He drives a garbage truck
To every city dump,

And how it stinks!

I recall singing this when I was about five, but I had -- and still have -- no plausible idea what it's about.

Anyone out there know its origin and meaning?

An American in America!

USA

Google Images

I have the most interesting 'discussions' over at the Marmot's Hole, as regular readers have recently seen -- and now this objection from a certain 'M1M0' to calling the US "America":

"America" is not an accepted term for the United States, it refers to both continents of the Americas. this is my main objection.

I've often heard such 'objections' -- and I ordinarily ignore them, but I felt like responding this time:

But "America" is an accepted term for the United States. It's short for the "United States of America" and accounts for the fact that this country's citizens are called "Americans." Everybody knows what country is being referred to when the term "America" is used, just as everybody knows who is being referred to when the term "American" is used.

His response:

fair enough, if you want to argue it that way.

To which I responded:

Thanks! What 'way' would you argue it?

No response yet, but he's far more reasonable than ENNSE was . . .

Douglas Murray Reviews Larry Siedentop on the Story of Western Individualism

Amazon Books

The British writer, journalist and commentator Douglas Murray, in his article "Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms" (The Spectator, February 22, 2014), reviews what sounds like an interesting book by the political philosopher Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism:

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity . . . . Larry Siedentop lays this problem out: "We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development" . . . . The problems this leads to are exacerbated by the fact that "we are in a competition of beliefs, whether we like it or not" . . . . Beginning with a panorama of the Greek and Roman world, Siedentop goes on to excavate in terrain which may have been taken for granted only a generation ago, but which has currently become controversial. He points out that a major source of the modern conception of liberalism comes from . . . . the melding of the traditions -- the Greek and Roman with the teachings of Christ and St Paul -- and then leads the reader through a tour of the succeeding millennia with a learning which is itself almost miraculous. Taking us through the changing sense of time, he then guides us through Tertullian on freedom . . . , Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Charlemagne and . . . . [a]long the way he gently demonstrates the manner in which charity -- a virtue which can hardly be divorced from the Christian tradition -- found its way from a theological idea into a common state of mind and expected action. Elsewhere the way in which Christianity helped shift the concept of the governed -- or even "owned" -- people into "souls" is filled with insight . . . . This kind of intellectual history is exceedingly hard to write . . . . But it seems to me that in this work, and in his highly practised hands, Siedentop has achieved something quite extraordinary. In this learned,subtle, enjoyable and digestible work he has offered back to us a proper version of ourselves . . . . In his closing pages he notes that the forgetfulness, ignorance and sometimes even hatred of our past with which the West is now afflicted is already having severe effects. In America he sees a growing evangelical tradition which is ignorant of the vital hand-in-hand tradition of western secular liberalism. Meanwhile, in Europe there exists a strain of thought which will give no credit whatsoever to the religious tradition from which we come. It is, he rightly says, "a strange and disturbing moment in western history" . . . . Siedentop asks, "If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?" Indeed. All that need be said is that there can be few better ways to understand that depth of tradition, or feel appropriate gratitude for it, than to read this magisterial, timeless yet timely work.

The competition among beliefs mentioned early in this passage is not specified, but I can imagine that Islam is on Siedentop's mind, as it surely is on Murray's. One paradox to books of this sort is that even though they often aim at motivating us to prevail in the competition among beliefs by telling us who we are through the story of where we've been, they manage only to convey knowledge without eliciting the belief essential for the will to win in that competition.

We just can't quite go back after a bite from the apple that turned us from belief to knowledge, from faith to reason, from medieval to modern, so the most we can perhaps do is get every other civilization to have a bite, too . . .

An Islamist Surprise for Ian Buruma?

Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Wikipedia

Simon Shuster, writing for Time, has a surprise for Ian Buruma, who thinks that the Tsarnaev brothers' are an American phenomenon -- like a mentally deranged man with a gun -- and doubts that digging into their Caucasus connections will uncover anything of value: "Dagestani Relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev Is a Prominent Islamist" (May 8, 2013):

Last year, when Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in the Russian region of Dagestan, he had a guide with an unusually deep knowledge of the local Islamist community: a distant cousin named Magomed Kartashov. Six years older than Tsarnaev, Kartashov is a former police officer and freestyle wrestler -- and one of the region’s most prominent Islamists.

In 2011 Kartashov founded and became the leader of an organization called the Union of the Just, whose members campaign for sharia law and pan-Islamic unity in Dagestan, often speaking out against U.S. policies across the Muslim world. The group publicly renounces violence. But some of its members have close links to militants; others have served time in prison for weapons possession and abetting terrorism -- charges they say were based on fabricated evidence. For Tsarnaev, these men formed a community of pious young Muslims with whom he could discuss his ideas of jihad. Tsarnaev's mother, Zubeidat, confirmed that her son is Kartashov's third cousin. The two met for the first time in Dagestan, she said, and "became very close."

Buruma isn't entirely wrong, for some of the radicalization began in America, but Shuster provides evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's focus shifted during a visit to the Caucasus:

[A] picture . . . emerges . . . of a young man who already carried a deep interest in Islamic radicalism when he came to Russia from his home in Massachusetts. But that curiosity evolved during his visit. The members of Kartashov's circle say they tried to disabuse Tsarnaev of his sympathies for local militants. By the end of his time in Dagestan, Tsarnaev's interests seem to have shifted from the local insurgency to a more global notion of Islamic struggle -- closer to the one espoused by Kartashov's organization.

Tsarnaev's focus thus shifted away from the North Caucasus and onto the global jihad, zeroing in on America as the main 'oppressor' of Muslims and thereby making it the object of attack. Read Shuster's entire article . . .

James Kurth on American Conservatism

James Kurth
Professor of Political Science Emeritus
and
Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College
Member, Board of Editors - Orbis

I regularly receive emails from the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), with which my old 'paleoconservative' history professor at Berkeley, Walter A. McDougall, is associated, and a recent missive was penned by the man pictured above, James Kurth, one of the editors of the FPRI journal, Orbis, and a senior fellow at the FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West.

The missive referred to is titled "The Crisis of American Conservatism: Inherent Contradictions and the End of the Road," which sounds like it would be self-consciously a swan song, and indeed it is, for it looks directly at the stark facts confronting American conservatism . . . though Kurth holds out hope that some reinvention of conservatism can be achieved and prove successful.

His article's main focus, however, is on the incompatible ideologies grouped together in America under the label "conservatism":

In recent decades, political analysts have found it useful to interpret American political movements by distinguishing between different policy dimensions or arenas. Thus, conservatives have been divided into (1) those who are most concerned about economic or fiscal issues, i.e., pro-business or "free-enterprise" conservatives; (2) those most concerned with religious or social issues, i.e., pro-church or "traditional-values" conservatives; and (3) those most concerned with national-security or defense issues, i.e., pro-military or "patriotic" conservatives.

As Kurth acknowledges, there's nothing new about this, but he proceeds to make some interesting points, noting -- for example -- that the free-enterprise ideology of Milton Friedman, which has dominated the Republican Party's pro-business conservatives is, in one sense, not conservative:

Although Friedman and his followers were always talking about the virtues of the free market and of conservatism in economic affairs, their approach was not truly a free-market or traditional-conservative one at all. Instead, they advocated a controlled market in matters of money, credit and finance, while advocating a free market with respect to almost everything else. And the market in money, credit, and finance was to be controlled by an oligopoly of the major banks, implemented through the Federal Reserve System (whose name made it sound like some kind of government agency, but whose reality made it more a cartel of profit-making banks).

This monetarist policy worked well enough for about thirty years, but it planted the seeds of its failure by deregulating banks and supporting the risky investments that resulted in the crash of 2007, which caused the current Great Recession. Kurth goes on to show the problems of Neo-Conservatism (i.e., the dominant patriotic conservatives), basically a military doctrine advocating American intervention abroad in troubled places such as the Middle East and the Islamic world generally. He also shows the weakness of the traditional values conservatives, primarily, that this collection of groups has no "big money" backing it, and that it is undermined by the pro-business conservatives in their support for cheap immigrant labor, but readers will need to see the article for details on this and other 'contradictions.'

I thus won't summarize everything, but I encourage readers -- regardless of political position -- to peruse the article for a rational, intelligent, authoritative analysis of the current state of American conservatism and how it reached this state.

Brief Conversation with a Friendly Korean on the Jungang Line

Cheongnyangni Station

Wikipedia

Yesterday on the Jungang Subway Line as my train was just leaving Cheongnyangni Station, a Korean man approached me where I was standing engrossed in my newspaper, greeted me warmly, took my hand and shook it, and asked me if I speak English. When I had affirmed that, he smiled broadly and asked if I were American.

"Yes," I acknowledged, a bit cautious.

His smile grew, and he quietly but with emphatic certitude confided, "Koreans love Americans!"

At first, I was unsure how to respond, wondering if he were crazy or thought I was, but I finally replied, "Some do."

His smile faded, and he looked concerned as he insisted, "All Koreans love Americans. The Americans helped in 1950. Many died. Perhaps some of your uncles?"

I nodded. "Some fought," I revealed, "but lived."

"Koreans and Americans have a blood relationship," he told me, "so Koreans love Americans." But he seemed to reconsider, for he added, "Some Koreans don't. A few. They are 'Advanced.'" He looked at me to see if I understood.

"Progressive," I corrected, knowing that the Leftists in Korea call themselves that.

"Yes," he agreed. "Progressive. But they are traitors."

I didn't follow up on the possibility of a political discussion, but asked him what he does and found out that he teaches English linguistics in a university. He said that he likes Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I wondered what he thought of Chomsky's politics, but our conversations soon ended anyway as the man bade me farewell and exited the train at Hoegi Station.

Taking Exception to American Exceptionalism?

Walter McDougall
Familiar Photo

FPRI Notes

My old, paleoconservative history professor from UC Berkeley has posted an informative e-note on the origin of the familiar but puzzling concept "American Exceptionalism":

What does it mean to say the United States is exceptional? If it just means unique, then the claim is unexceptional because no two countries are exactly alike. If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is "nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths." If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations -- that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America" -- then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall ("thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God") or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and "indispensable" status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.

One might get the impression that McDougall is skeptical of "American Exceptionalism." If so, one would be right!

For these reasons "exceptionalism" is more trouble and probably even more danger than it's worth: it either means nothing at all or altogether too much. But the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word. To be sure, most of them believed the United States to be an historic undertaking, even a "new order for the ages." But far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.

So . . . who coined this troubling, troublesome, risky expression? Not quite this guy:

Not until 1835 did a foreigner, Alexis de Tocqueville, catalogue the features of New World democracy and conclude: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Note, however, that he applied the term to Americans' position rather than to the people themselves, and argued that American institutions and values were the very opposite of universal. In any event, his adjectival usage had no echo and inspired no noun -- no "ism" -- among Americans themselves. Exceptionalism as some sort of birthright is an anachronism!

One might argue that this exceptional position places Americans themselves in an exceptional role -- and thus of course the opposite of universal -- but never mind. Yet if not Tocqueville, who then applied it to the American people? Not this guy either:

Flash forward to 1906 when another foreigner, German sociologist Werner Sombart, asked why the United States seemed unique among industrial, urban societies in that its working classes showed no interest in the ideology or politics of Socialism. He identified many reasons why American workers seemed content with capitalism, but nowhere did Sombart employ any word that could be fairly translated as exceptionalism. He referred instead to the "idiosyncrasies of the spiritual culture" (Eigenart der geistigen Kultur) or "American popular soul" (die Eigenarten der amerikanische Volksseele). But what was the source of this spirit? Must one hypothesize that it just dropped from the heavens "on the chosen people" (auf das ausserwählte Volk)? Not at all, he insisted, because the same entrepreneurial spirit could be found in London or Berlin. It was just purer and far more pervasive in the United States thanks to such factors as the Protestant ethic, democratic consensus, two-party system, high standard of living, social mobility, and safety-valve of an open frontier. For Sombart Americans occupied an extreme on the sociological spectrum, but were not exceptional, not "off the charts."

Idiosyncratic, extreme . . . but not exceptional. Where, then, did the expression come from?

The real origins of the notion of an exceptional United States lurk in the recondite disputations of the two greatest transnational movements in the early twentieth century: the Catholic Church and the Communist International. Both had reason to fear that Americans might be immune to their presumptively universal appeals.

Good Lord! Or not:

Ever since 1784, when Bishop John Carroll set up the first Catholic diocese in the United States, the Vatican displayed confusion about how to grow a doctrinal, hierarchical church in a mostly Protestant land that enjoyed religious freedom and material plenty. A century later European prelates grew alarmed by reports from American bishops about the erosion of doctrine and obedience among Catholic immigrants and their children. (European rabbis were equally alarmed about Jewish immigrants.) In 1899 Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, that condemned a heresy called Americanism, a name to which "there is no reason to take exception." The encyclical attributed this Americanism to the nation's revolutionary origins, individualism, Anglo-Saxon culture, liberalism, egalitarianism, and separation of Church and State, all of which tempted American Catholics to stray from the straight and narrow path.

That's it? Seems rather too little to attribute the concept of "American Exceptionalism" to Catholicism. This Communist debate, however, seems much more likely as the source:

Finally, in the 1920s, the American Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone rendered a diagnosis of American society that echoed those of Sombart and the Vatican. His purpose was to explain why his comrades' agitation and propaganda had achieved so little by way of organizing the factory workers of Pittsburgh or Detroit. The reason was, argued Lovestone, that capitalism in the United States was exceptionally productive and stable, which made it hard to "raise their consciousness," which meant the proletarian revolution would take much longer than elsewhere to develop. The report engendered discreet discussion, mostly in Russian journals, until Soviet dictator Josef Stalin anathematized the theory as a form of deviationism. Then Wall Street crashed and the American Communist Party coined the term, in . . . April 1930, in the form of an obituary. "The storm of the economic crisis in the United States," it proclaimed, "blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism."

Hmmm . . . so there it is, a Communist coinage of the expression "American Exceptionalism." How ironic. I gather that in McDougall's view, "American Exceptionalism" was stillborn as a concept. But if so, how did this miscarriage of suchness come to be adopted by the mainstream?

Read the entire article to find out.

Sam Tanenhaus and Others on Death of a Salesman

Sam Tanenhaus

Photo from October 28, 2009

Charlie Rose

I can't say that I ever much cared for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, though I've seen it two or three times . . . inadvertently. But I was interested in something that Sam Tanenhaus -- writing in "A Nation of Willy Lomans" for Newsweek (March 19, 2012) -- said about it in response to Mike Nichols's current revival of the play:

What [many critics] . . . missed [but Nichols hasn't] was that Miller's play isn't ideological at all. There is not a whiff in it of anti-capitalist "critique." Its subject, at once deeper and less abstract, is the American myth of self-invention or reinvention, the dreams and delusions it fosters in us, which lead us away from our true selves.

I thought that Tanenhaus's remark about Miller's play not being anti-capitalist was rather neatly to the point. I never got that message from it. The damn thing was depressing, but to see it as anti-capitalist seemed to me more like eisegesis than exegesis. I was also interested in Tanenhaus's view that the play is really about the 'American' myth of self-invention or reinvention. I guess I can see that, sort of, but I don't think that I quite agree. Still, let's see where this point leads. Willy Loman tries, without success, to invent himself as a salesman. Tanenhaus cites a remark by Nichols as evidence:

"Willy has chosen to follow the craft that is not a craft, and he has a craft," Nichols says. "The sad thing about it is, as his sons know, there are things he's very good at -- carpentry, building, putting in a ceiling in his house. But he doesn't have any respect for that. What he thinks is important is to be able to sell, to convince, to charm, and it's one of the things that's wrong with us now. If you go into any office and ask people, 'What exactly is it that you do?' they either say, 'I record the numbers, and then I put them in another book,' or they say, 'I have ideas. I have ideas for commercials, promotion.' We basically are promoting our product."

This remark by Nichols, if viewed through the refractive power of the right interpretive lens, could have supported the point made by Tanenhaus, but it seems more to indicate our identification with what we do in our work than with who we are. Nichols draws a somewhat different point, however, that we're "promoting out product" (though his examples aren't typical products). Loman, however, wasn't interested in a product. He wanted to have the reputation of being a great salesman, and though selling involves promoting a product, the product itself doesn't interest Loman (as Tanenhaus notes later with respect to the fact that we never find out "what's inside the heavy sample cases Willy lugs into the house"). Granted, this may amount to the same thing -- Loman's product is himself (as Tanenhaus also later notes) -- so maybe the quote from Nichols could support Tanenhaus's point that Loman exemplifies "the American myth of self-invention or reinvention." I just wish Tanenhaus had drawn out the implications more clearly.

But I nevertheless wonder if Loman's wish to have the reputation of being a great salesman is a matter of 'invention' (whether 'self-' or 're-') or more the optimistic American belief that the future is open for you to be what you want to be. That might be an illusion, if life in America is more closed than usually believed, but is it about invention, whether self-invention or reinvention? It seems to me to have more to do with the belief that one has more than just a single talent to pursue. Loman's personal tragedy is that he couldn't bring himself to see that he had talents for things other than salesmanship. In short, that while he had tried all his life to 'invent' himself as a salesman, he couldn't see that he needed to 'reinvent' himself through following his true talents, though that was what he truly ought to have done.

Incidentally, although I've just referred to Loman as a tragic figure, the man can also be seen as a hero who sacrificed himself for his family by ensuring that his life insurance policy was up to date before he suffered his fatal automobile 'accident' -- the death of a salesman alluded to in the play's title. That word "death" tells us what we should be asking about when we talk about the play, namely, what kind of death is this, tragic or heroic?

The Jeremy Lin Show

Jeremy Lin Outplays Kobe Bryant

Yahoo Sports
Getty Images

I don't blog sports. I don't watch sports. I don't play sports . . . anymore. But I used to play basketball, and like a long-time player -- which I was, having played from the time I was a kid until I was about thirty, when I stopped because I couldn't outjump the other guys anymore -- I have good court vision, so I notice things going on in basketball even without my paying attention, and I therefore knew that Jeremy Lin was the real thing over a year ago when I read a long article on him. I didn't even need to watch him play because the facts and statistics told the story, but he wasn't getting much attention because if the stereotype about white guys is that they can't jump, the stereotype about Asian guys is that they can't even do that! And if you can't jump . . . well, you can't play ball. Or so they say. But Jeremy Lin has now got the jump on everybody and made even Kobe Bryant, who was dissing the kid before Friday, eat a bit of humble pie!

I don't waste my time watching videos, but I chose to use up ten minutes of my life watching the highlights of Lin's performance Friday night in leading the Knicks to their 92 to 85 victory over the Lakers, and if you want to see some smart ballplaying by a kid who's solid in every way that counts on the court, then give yourself ten minutes to enjoy the Lin show. He's not spectacular in any single skill, but he's sound in every one of them, and the total effect is awesome! And that's not a word that I use lightly. He has great ball control, complete control of his dribble. He has excellent court vision and can see an open man across court and get the ball to the guy on a cross-court pass that you're not even supposed to try because it's so risky, thereby demonstrating exceptional passing skills. He can move -- the fake, the roll, the quick step, whatever, he can do them. He's a little guy, only six feet, three inches, but he's not afraid to drive to the basket against the big men and put in a lay-up, thus proving that he can get off the ground if he needs to. He can get physical and even score while getting fouled. He can rebound. He can shoot with deadly aim, even three-pointers, which might be the one skill in which his ability approaches spectacular. In the past four games, he has scored 25, 28, 23, and 38 points! But where he truly is spectacular is in his mind for the game. You watch him play, and you see a very smart ballplayer. He knows what needs to be done, and he gets it done, either by himself or by setting it up with teammates.

And that's my judgment of him after seeing this single performance.

The question now is how well he can handle the intense pressure. He's an Asian-American star basketball player who's done the unexpected, caught everyone off guard, and performed in an unprecedented way by scoring more points in his first three starts than anyone in NBA history. Every opposing player has now heard of him, even Bryant -- who only 24 hours earler didn't seem to know who Lin was -- and they'll all now come gunning for him. Especially Bryant, who reportedly said about the Knicks' victory:

"Enjoy it. They'll receive judgment next season."

And he wasn't talking just about the team -- he meant Lin in particular. Revenge.

Menand Remembers Kennan

George F. Kennan

Pinnacle of Power
1952

Photo: AKG Pressebild-Ullstein Bild/Granger Collection

The New Yorker

Another fascinating article on George Kennan appeared recently, this one in The New Yorker, written by Louis Menand and titled "Getting Real: George F. Kennan's Cold War" (November 14, 2011), and it's even longer than Kissinger's article, or seems longer, and provides a fuller view of Kennan's life. Unlike Kissinger, Menand isn't concerned with defending his own legacy, for he never served in government making policy at the pinnacle of power. He's a Harvard professor of literature, not a political scientist. But he offers an interesting point about Kennan as the author of America's "Containment Policy" -- Kennan resented the attribution despite his seminal "Long Telegram" and his follow-up article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs:

Kennan's second major Cold War treatise [the first being the "Long Telegram"] was the 1947 article for Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The essay began as a paper written for Forrestal. In many respects, it was an eloquent re-statement of the Long Telegram, and it is famous for a single sentence: "It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

This gave a name to American Cold War policy, and, with a few tweaks and many exceptions, what Kennan had called "containment" remained American policy until the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wherever there was "Communist aggression," the United States pushed back. As long as the Communists remained in their box, the United States did not (except rhetorically) seek to intervene. And, as Gaddis says, even Reagan, despite talk of liberation and "rollback," stayed largely true to containment policy.

The article was signed with an "X" because Kennan did not want it to seem that, as a State Department employee, he was stating policy, but his identity was quickly revealed, and for the rest of his career he was known as the author of containment. He had reasons to resent this.

Menand explains the reasons underlying Kennan's resentment:

[A]s someone who proposed policy rather than administered it, Kennan was susceptible to the standard fate of policy intellectuals. Either he could get credit for providing a rationale for what was already the government's de-facto policy or his recommendations could be harnessed to purposes he did not endorse.

Kennan's fate was to have his idea of containment conflated with the Truman Doctrine's promise in March 1947 of military aid "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This might sound like containment if the outside pressure were Soviet Russia, but Truman made a general call to arms, and that was apparently not Kennan's intention:

Kennan was appalled when he read the draft of Truman's speech, and for the rest of his life he protested that he had meant containment to be a policy of selective confrontation, and its means to be diplomatic and economic, not military. But he was construed otherwise.

One wonders if Kennan doth protest too much. Knowing Russian history as well as he did and having had personal experience of the Soviets from his time in the diplomatic service in Moscow, did he really believe that diplomatic and economic confrontation alone would contain the Soviet Union? Absent the back-up threat of military confrontation? Diplomacy without strength offers merely a comforting blanket woven of words in a Hobbesian world of naked power, and economic sanctions alone would make a Bolshevik laugh. Kennan must have known these things. Perhaps he would not have pressed military confrontation in places like Vietnam, but one wonders if his resentment had less to do with foreign policy disagreement and more to do with the doors that closed him off from the corridors of power.

Kennan's life was no tragedy, but he did suffer the melancholy consequences of having been at the pinnacle of power and influence relatively early in his career, only to see his personal influence decline as he drifted further and further from the center of power in a long life of protest, like the anonymous voice in T.S. Eliot's poem Prufrock: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

Kennan lived to be 101 and died in 2005.

Kissinger Remembers Kennan . . .

George F. Kennan

1952

Bettmann/Corbis Photo

The New York Times

As part of her English lesson yesterday evening, my soon-to-be-fifteen-year-old daughter and I read a fascinating article by Henry Kissinger in which he analyzes the man George F. Kennan as a foreign policy thinker. Titled "The Age of Kennan" and written for The New York Times (November 10, 2011), it displays Kissinger's own brilliance as much as Kennan's. For instance, at one point in our lesson, Sa-Rah read the following paragraph to me:

[N]o other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America's world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary -- if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one's ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.

When she had finished reading this aloud, I stopped her and pointed out that Kissenger was speaking about himself and his own views as much as he was talking about Kennan and Kennan's views. I added, "When one great man analyzes the work of a great predecessor, you should be alert to signs that he's also defending his own legacy, as is especially the case in this passage." I urged her to keep this in mind, to read with an ear attuned to different levels. Kissinger, I explained, worked with one eye to the distant evolutionary goal and the other eye to the imperfect step to be taken now. He is defending his own method against charges of cynicism and opportunism, I told her.

After we'd finished, I asked her what she'd learned about Kennan, and she replied that he'd formulated the concept of containment in response to what he considered Soviet Communism's intrinsic aggressiveness, a concept that was elaborated in practical U.S. foreign policy as America's strategy during the Cold War.

Not that she used those exact words . . .

Decline of American Universities?

Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Allemania (ca. 1355)

Laurentius de Voltolina (1300s)

Wikipedia

The above image of a 14th-century university classroom has been used in a previous post or two here at Gypsy Scholar, and I still don't know anything about Laurentius de Voltolina. So much for my education!

In other areas, I'm also ignorant, as I learned from an article by Anthony Grafton for The New York Review of Books, "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (November 24, 2011). Grafton reviews eight books on the state of American universities, and it's rather depressing -- astronomical tuition, disengaged faculty, overheavy administration, neglected students. This is the world's best system of higher education? Hard to believe, but perhaps not for long. Grafton doesn't despair, and he's not writing a jeremiad, but there seems no easy way out of this mess. Read the article if you want to know more, for it's too complex for me to summarize this morning, given my lack of time.

Instead, let me just quote three paragraphs that I can respond to, Grafton's remarks on a book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses:

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying -- down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields -- humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics -- outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Concerning this CLA "exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond," I can readily imagine that I'd have difficulty doing well on such an exam. Such an exercise demands not just skills in analysis, synthesis, and composition but also some sense of what works in the practical world of business and politics, and that sense comes mostly from life experience in those worlds. As an impractical scholar, I'd likely perform worse than some of my students. Well . . . maybe not here in Korea, where undergraduates have far less practical experience than American ones. If I were teaching in the States, I suspect that my students performing best on this CLA would be the young men and women who'd served a few years in the military on tours in Iraq or Afghanistan and had learned to deal with complex situations requiring quick analysis and practical solutions. But there aren't many such students with that sort of experience.

I suppose I ought to feel gratified that students majoring in liberal arts and studying on their own tend to do best on the CLA, for that describes the sort of student I was . . . but if I'm one of those who'd outperform students in other majors, especially if they engaged in group study, then the CLA scores must be dire indeed.

What's the solution? I don't know. I'll just keep slogging away at teaching as best I know how. Encouraging students to think for themselves. Providing critical feedback to students on essays and research papers. Generally showing students the virtues of moderate irascibility. One ought to be a bit put out with the world . . .

Distorted Learning Through Test-Taking Culture

Typical Test-Centric Student?

Free Dictionary

I read two articles this morning that note the distorted understanding of education encouraged by the rise of standardized testing as a measure of learning. The first article, "The China Conundrum: American colleges find the Chinese-student boom a tricky fit" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2011), written by Tom Bartlett and Karin Fischer, describes the bewilderment of many Chinese students who head to America for higher education. The Chinese have long had a test-taking culture that emphasizes rote memorization, a practice deeply rooted in Confucian educational tradition, but they have adapted this tradition to fit the educational paradigm of standardized testing:

Students in China's test-centric culture spend most of their high-school years studying for the gao kao, the college entrance exam that is the sole determining factor in whether students win a coveted spot at one of China's oversubscribed universities. So it's not unusual for those who want to study in the United States to spend months cramming for the SAT and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, which most campuses require for admission.

Patricia J. Parker, assistant director of admissions at Iowa State, which enrolls more than 1,200 Chinese undergraduates, says students have proudly told her about memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, studying scripted responses to verbal questions, and learning shortcuts that help them guess correct answers.

She has seen conditionally admitted students increase their Toefl scores by 30 or 40 points, out of a possible 120, after a summer break, despite no significant improvement in their ability to speak English. Her students, she says, don't see this intense test-prepping as problematic: "They think the goal is to pass the test. They're studying for the test, not studying English."

The American academic culture is not yet entirely dominated by 'test-centrism' because the professors teaching today were educated in an academic environment that had not yet become dominated by standardized testing. They therefore still try to teach students to think for themselves:

During this past September's orientation on the University of Delaware's Newark campus, Scott Stevens, director of the English Language Institute, stood on the stage in front of a mostly filled theater. Behind him, on a large screen, was a stock photo of two white college students seated at desks. The male student was leaning over to look at the female student's paper. "We are original, so that means we never cheat!" Mr. Stevens told the audience of primarily Chinese students, mixing compliments and warnings. "You are all very intelligent. Use that intelligence to write your own papers."

But these days, even American students are apparently less well equipped for education that does not focus on teaching toward an exam, a fact documented by Kaustuv Basu in "Socratic Backfire?" (Inside Higher Ed, October 31, 2011). Kaustuv writes about the experience of Professor Steven Maranville, who was recently denied tenure at Utah Valley University, partly due to student complaints about his teaching:

Some students didn't take well to Steven Maranville's teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor's "capstone" business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn't raise their hands. They also didn't like it when he made them work in teams.

Maranville was doing nothing improper, so far as I can see. I'm particularly baffled by the complaint that he asked them questions when they hadn't raised their hands. Asking questions to get students to think is a proper part of teaching. Maranville is now in court over the university's decision to deny tenure, and he's having to defend his teaching style:

Maranville followed the Socratic teaching style and described his way of teaching as "engaged learning," according to court documents. Those records describe teaching approaches designed to go beyond lectures. He would ask questions to stimulate discussion. He divided his students into teams and gave them assignments outside class.

The Socratic style of teaching that Maranville used is hardly novel. But experts say that while it remains popular in law schools, there are reasons many faculty members have never used it extensively with the current generation of students.

"When done well, you simply do not impose the teacher's idea, and try to come up with a solution through dialogue," said Michael Apple, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "In general, it is a guided dialogue." Supporters of the method see it as "a process by which you try to make the best logical argument and you focus on process as much as content," Apple said. But he added that not that many faculty members use it these days. "The reason for its unpopularity sometimes is because we are in a test-based education system. Students can be increasingly impatient where the answer is not clear and when the professor is not giving it to them immediately."

A lot also depends, Apple said, on who the students are. "It is controversial to some people, for example, students who are deeply concerned that they have to learn a certain amount of content and then take a test at the end," he said. Students may also think that they are being treated as if they were not very smart.

What a baffling attitude students have! Socratic questioning presupposes student intelligence, the ability to think for oneself! Apparently, students these days look on learning as little more than the memorizing of class notes written down as the professor lectures, the aim being to pass a test, and any process that departs from the rapid conveyance of information is an inefficient waste of time. They don't see that genuine education means learning how to think, which entails slowing down to ask questions and look at an issue from various points of view as they learn to integrate facts and ideas on their own under the guidance of a good teacher.

I don't know, of course, that Professor Maranville is actually a good teacher. Students may have a reason to complain. But the remarks by Professor Michael Apple are very revealing about the assumptions held by the current generation of students about learning due to the prevalence of a test-based educational system.

Little wonder that my teaching style doesn't quite perfectly fit either East or West these days . . .