College Made Easy

“Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
         

          The quotation, which comes from Bob Herbert’s column (http://www.nytimes.com/), would make one suspect that those who fit this description either have great difficulty getting a degree or graduate with very low grade point averages.  However, his column reveals a different trend: students who are ill prepared and poorly motivated, and who advance little or not at all in the critical skills their education is meant to impart, not only get their degrees, but also leave college with averages between B and B-plus.  

That many colleges make it easy for many sub-par students to attend their schools and complete a degree is quite well known these days. That they set absurdly low standards, and offer vapid courses within intellectually vacant degree programs so students can navigate four years of learning without learning anything might make some parents upset.  Yet, if colleges were to uphold standards or impose rigor, they would be forced to turn away or flunk out too many students necessary to their revenue and existence.

The “attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors…at odds with academic commitment” that define college students have been planted and cultivated by the American public school system.  By the time kids reach college, this system has fully conditioned them to value leisure, fun, games, and just about anything else other than academic work.

When kids begin school as elementary students, they enter a system that pressures them with excessive homework and yearly tests.  Piling homework on elementary kids predates the Bush era’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which has driven the testing mania for the past decade.  Although “No Child Left Behind” was badly conceived and implemented, its goal of challenging students by testing what they had specifically learned in each subject in the elementary grades was laudable.  Unfortunately, too many states hastily developed exams and reduced too many classroom lessons to mind numbing drill work that ended up replacing intelligent educational practices.

After the stress of elementary grade testing, students reach middle school, and are prepared to face more academic rigor.  Ironically, it is at this point that school begins its slide toward academic and intellectual anemia. In middle schools, the philosophy, and thus primary objective, is to nurture the emotional growth of kids rather than propel their intellectual progress.  In line with this approach is a policy of social promotion.  Students quickly discover that they can never study, fail five or more subjects and still proceed to the next grade.  By the end of two years, the middle school experience has eroded the academic commitment and work ethic initiated in the earlier grades and necessary to foster further academic and intellectual growth.

In high school academic discipline loses even more ground.  Students enter an environment that is obsessed with sports, clubs, bake sales; they are forced to attend assemblies, countless meetings with guidance counselors, appointments with social workers or and psychologists.  These, and endless other distractions, dominate a school’s tone and reduce class work, homework and studying to secondary importance.

Herbert’s thesis that colleges permit (maybe even encourage, I would think) students to skate through fours years of school without exerting themselves, and then reward them with respectable B-plus or B GPA’s only exposes the tip of the problem.  For six years prior, schools provide a smooth and easy way to flow toward college with little effort or concern.  To expect colleges to buck this momentum of academic sloth and negligence, especially at great financial cost to themselves, is wildly naive. So, things will remain as they are, as the few who labor and learn continue to leave behind those too foolish and indolent to know what they will have lost.

The Church and Its Abuse

        “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but he whoso confesseth and forshaketh them shall have mercy.”  Proverbs 28:113


        “The sins of the common, untutored people are nothing in comparison with the sins that are committed by great and high persons that are in spiritual and temporal offices.”
                                           Luther, Table Talk




        Stories about members of the Catholic clergy abusing children continue to appear in the press.  A Sunday’s New York Time Magazine article (February 13, 2011) featured a report by Russell Shorto, “The Irish Affliction,” detailing the sexual abuse (I believe more accurate terms are “sexual assault” and “rape.”) of children perpetrated by priests throughout Ireland. 
       Besides the thousands of cases in Ireland, which makes that country only second to the US in the number of cases, Shorto cites reports of clergy sexual abuse in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Spain, France, Malta, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Kenya, the Philippines, and Australia.  Though this list might seem shockingly long, it does not report all the countries that have experienced abuse by Catholic clergy. 

        More tales of horror will, no doubt, surface in the future (See Washington Post, L.A. Cardinal’s legacy tainted by priest abuse.” Saturday, February 26, 2011).  But how many victims have remained silent over the years and how many victims from centuries past took the abuse they suffered silently to their graves?
        One particularly disturbing story that has made its way into the news is that of Marie Collins.  Collins told the curate of her parish about a priest who sexually abused her when she was thirteen.  The curate listened to her ordeal and then informed her that she “may have tempted” the priest into “digitally raping” her. 

Other depositions and news stories have revealed that the church would sometimes pay off victims and then convince them to sign nondisclosure agreements, prohibiting them from speaking about what they suffered.  In other cases, church authorities transferred abusive priests to different parishes when complaints against them became too clamorous to contain. 

Worst of all, the Vatican frequently asserted it had legal jurisdiction over priests accused of abusing children in order to shield them from criminal prosecution. These tactics were part of a ubiquitous pattern of concealing the crimes being perpetrated by their priests. 
        Through its history, the church had been more interested in protecting its reputation and wealth than the lives of the young.  But now that the church is buried in an avalanche of public evidence, one would expect at least a trickle of mea culpa to emanate from the Vatican.  Nevertheless, Rome rejects responsibility for these crimes and dismisses the fact that it covered them up.  One wonders, what makes this self-proclaimed guardian of morals blind to its own culpability?
        The mendacity of the Vatican has persuaded all but the most docile and dogmatic supporters (The Catholic League for one) to see the church for what it is: an accessory to numberless counts of sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape. Though it might attempt more subterfuge, it can no longer disguise its history of obstructing justice and helping perpetrators evade punishment.
        To anyone with the most rudimentary moral sense, it’s astounding that an institution guilty of covering up thousands of sex crimes continues to censure society’s “immoral” culture and behavior.  Yet, as its own crimes pour out for everyone to see, the Vatican still tries to deceive the world about the rot circulating through its clergy body.  Rome’s duplicity reflects a controlling hierarchy trapped in an archaic system of beliefs, beliefs of an insular male culture that sees issues involving women, marriage, celibacy, sexuality and the contemporary world through a warped lens of a medieval theology and philosophy.
        If the church is to purge itself of their foul crimes, it would first have to launch itself into the twenty-first century by modernizing all of its positions on the issues above.  But that is more than unlikely, since it would require jettisoning an all male hierarchy that will never surrender its control and power.

Psychic Hoax

Sunday February 5, 2011

Psychic Hoax

“The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

      Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks.  (New York) W. W. Norton. 97

    Throughout his life William Butler Yeats believed in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology.  His interest in these fueled his imagination with ideas and images that he employed in his poetry.  Even though W. H. Auden admired Yeats’s poetry, he found his idiosyncratic beliefs in Yeats’s poetry troubling.  He said that Yeats’s willingness to accept the occult as a means to know the future or a way to divine life’s mysteries was the “deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic.”  Of course, Auden is correct in this assessment.  Any grown man who believes the occult has fallen under some illusion of magic and mysticism. Nevertheless, Auden was spellbound by the beauty of Yeats’s poems.

   When writing poetry a poet steeps external reality in the world of the imagination and for Yeats that reality included the occult which he used to beguile the boundaries of the quotidian with mystical beliefs. The genius of his poetry and the need to satisfy his ravenous imagination make it forgivable that Yeats believed in the occult or worse, that he consulted astrologists to learn whether Maud Gonne would ever return his love.  In the twenty-first century, I would expect that all but the most credulous would dismiss such ignis fatuus for what it is.  Yet, even today many people read daily horoscopes and consult psychics with the hope that they might find answers to their problems and might communicate with dead relatives, friends.  In fact, many credit psychic readings with literally transporting from the grave the spirit of a parent, brother, sister, or friend into their presence during the course of a “reading.”

   Recently, a friend consulted a psychic and told me about the reading the psychic offered her.  At first, I thought her visit was for her amusement and the money she spent no more a loss than what one might slip into an Atlantic City slot machine.  To my shock, she credited the psychic with touching upon some personal matters in her life with an uncanny accuracy.  But more distressing was her willingness to believe this charlatan’s success at summoning deceased members of her family to join them at that reading.  Clearly, he manipulated her through her grief over the recent death of her brother.  Though I tried to wrest her from the grip of this sham artist’s illusions, she remained convinced that he had tapped into some special psychic energy that graced him with the power of clairvoyance.

   Anyone who believes a psychic’s ability to summon their dead relatives and foretell future events has failed to consult the most rudimentary research that exposes how these swindlers scam unfortunately willing victims.  Psychics gull victims by using a series of techniques which include cold reading, warm reading, hot reading, “shot-gunning,” the Forer effect, and the rainbow ruse to name a few.   One source that can quickly disabuse one of the psychic’s “power” is The Skeptic’s Dictionary (Skeptic.com) which provides reasonable and logical explanations of how these methods work.  If you are tempted to visit a psychic, read this website first.

   It can be safely stated that many, like my friend, who consult psychics feel confident that they possess a strong faculty of reason.  Yet they accept answers to questions that categorically exceed human knowledge from someone who claims to have supernatural powers. Surely the imagination, as was true in Yeats’s case, conjures possibilities that don’t exist.  And surely the grief over someone’s death or the anxiety over what awaits us in the future can spawn in the imagination the idea that spirits exist in an afterlife from which they can visit us and to which we will travel once we die.  Perhaps these basic human feelings explain why so many fall for the obvious psychic hoax.  Or perhaps it is too painful and frightening to confront the simple fact that we know exactly where the dead are and the only other knowledge we have for certain is one day we will join them.  

Choices

January 27 2011
     A recent piece in The Economist ("You Choose": December 18, 2010) considers the question, "Does the modern world offer too much choice?"  It alludes to an episode of” The Simpsons," in which "Marge takes Apu shopping in a new supermarket, Monstromart, whose cheery advertising slogan is 'where shopping is a baffling ordeal.'"  The article's cites social science research evidence, and here are three that illustrate shortfalls of having too much choice:

          "Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.  It might even be said to tyrannise."

          "How is it, that in the developed world this increase in choice, through which we can supposedly customise our lives and make them perfect, leads not to more satisfaction but to greater anxiety, and greater feelings of inadequacy and guilt."

          "A 2010 study by researchers at the University of Bristol found that 47% of respondents thought life was more confusing than it was ten years ago, and 42% reported lying awake at night trying to resolve problems."

      The last quotation does not made explicit the connection between life being "more confusing" today and the multitude of choices consumers face when shopping, but it safe to assume that is the effect and cause the writer is suggesting.   It is true that too much choice, especially when buying expensive products - automobiles, homes, or complicated investment plans — 401k pension plans, makes it tough to decide what to purchase, but does variety really induce anxiety, inadequacy and guilt? Or is something else at work?   It seems to me the fault lies not in our economic variety but in ourselves that we are anxious and confused.
     The modern world can exhaust one with its deluge of products.  Which of the hundreds of soaps, shampoos, deodorants, breads, pastas, shoes, coats, trousers, computers, televisions, should we buy?  A more essential question, perhaps, is why are there multitudes of products that exceeds by far what people want or need?  Cheap manufacturing costs explain in part the mushrooming of those super-sized stores teeming with merchandise.  The frenetic production of goods, however, also reflects the calculated attempt of business to stimulate more consumer demand by creating an endless bounty of products consumers can select from the moment the novelty of what they have recently purchased wears off.  This has been a successful scheme of business for a very long time and with advertising’s help has enticed or induced almost all of us to buy things that were neither wanted nor needed.
          Considering the vast number of choices shoppers are given and the seductive power of advertising, one might think that people would be delighted rather than distressed (as reported in The Economist) by the cornucopia of products laid before them.  Perhaps many are delighted by all the choices available, considering less than half (47%) found “modern life more confusing than it was ten years ago.”  Still, there is something to be said about being sometimes unsettled by too many choices; however, it seems to me that there is something deeper in our psychology that unleashes the disquiet in mind The Economist is alluding to.  That disquiet in the mind is reflected in the way we live our lives: Each day we travel to work, and then back home to a hurried dinner before an hour or two of flipping channels or searching websites.  Then it's off to bed for too little sleep to gather a proper rest for the next day.  When the next day arrives, we rise to only repeat the day before.  Like the mass production of goods, we too seem to live in a flurry of activities each day. Such a life puts me in mind of George Herbert’s "The Pulley."  In the poem's mythology and metaphor Herbert envisions what we know too well:

           THE PULLEY.

WHEN God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
            Contract into a span.

            So strength first made a way ;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure :
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
            Rest in the bottome lay.

            For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
            So both should losers be.

            Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
            May tosse him to my breast.

          In the poem, Herbert ascribes human anxiety ("Repining restlesnesse") to the one treasure withheld from the human race – “Rest.”  Like his God, this world of ours provides us with every conceivable material product.  And we are told over and over through all manner of advertising that all these goods and products will fashion a fulfilling life for us. Like the process of choosing what to buy from the variety of what we are sold, we bustle to each activity of the day.  It is neither the number of choices nor the events of the days that “leads...to greater anxiety and greater feelings of inadequacy and guilt” but the control we permit these to have over us. We falsely believe we choose to buy the countless redundant products, and we then accept the illusion that these products will somehow make life “perfect.” Meanwhile, the days get lost in multiple little events that accentuate how we have no control over the transitory reality of life.

Snow Buddha

     The photo below was taken of a  Buddha sitting in my backyard. Right now I can turn and see him from where I sit. The snow from last Tuesday still covers most of him.

    

    








    






As a counter to the horrific shooting in Arizona and all the media frenzy that followed, we might do well to read four of The Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha: right view, right intention, right speech, right action.  Aside from this crime, let's consider also the odious attacks by conservatives and Republicans on Democrats over the past two years.  It is the kind of despicable behavior that should infuriate all who respect the rights of those with whom they disagree politically.  
     Even though the sick murderer in Arizona has been shown to have no ties to the political right, the Tea Party, or Sara Palin, Frank Rich demonstrates in his Op-Ed essay "Listened to Gabrielle Giffords," (New York Times, Sunday, January 16, 2011) that too few on the right have had the courage to rebuke their fellow pundits and politicians who continue to debase political discourse by portraying Democrats as anti-American and even enemies of the country.  Moreover, he cites examples of leading Republicans and conservatives who have downplayed the increasing "vitriol" ("Second amendment remedies"; "armed and dangerous") that has been spreading during the past two years (See Rich's essay noted above.)  Fortunately, there is John McCain who continues to reject the vile calumny circulated by some of his colleagues on the right. (See Washing Post Op-ed, Sunday, January 16 2011)
     What should anger us too are the insanely permissive gun laws in this country.  One would think that Americans could find a common ground on which to base sensible gun control laws.  Yet in spite of the astounding number of gun related deaths, pro-gun politicians and citizens remain unpersuaded that the sale of guns needs to be tightly regulated and restricted. So thick is the intransigence of pro-gun advocates and the N.R.A. that any law regulating guns is unacceptable to them.  One might think that the bloodshed in Arizona would open gun supporters' mind to reasonable gun control, but the response from gun advocates has been universally hardhearted.   What hope is there for civilized progress if it is opposed by such a remorseless mentality?
     Some have hoped that the crime in Arizona would be the inspiration for reasonable gun control.  But the brutality of how they died in Arizona will fade from the American psyche and the inspiration for gun control will dissipate as the ravenous media fill the coming days with "up to the minute" news, sports, and entertainment.

Winter Lament

1/10/11

        At work today, I walked by two colleagues who, like so many, were discussing the forecasted snowstorm.  Already sick of winter myself I expected them to complain about the cold and snow.  Instead, both men descried the timidity of those lamenting the onslaught of snow.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; when nasty winter weather seizes our attention, we can predict at least two reactions.  One is how intolerable the conditions are.  The second, mentioned above, features stoicism, real or posed, acknowledging and accepting the obdurate facts of winter. There is a third, infrequently observed possibility, that comes from those who love the snow and cold; for now, I’ll leave that inexplicable group for another time.
        As for myself, I find it harder each winter to muster the stoicism I thought innate to my character and difficult not to bemoan winter weather the way I do (loudly) summer mugginess and heat.  I venture outside each frigid morning and tighten my jaw and stomach as the freezing air stings my nose and cheeks.  No one could believe such an early blast could be bracing and energizing, but there are some who actually claim this. In the afternoons I like to walk for exercise; a brisk twenty-five minutes in the cold, fresh air arouses me from the torpor that fills the mind and eyes in those initial post-meridian hours.  Despite being refreshed, I am relieved always to get back inside the warm house. 
        When I was young, I loved to watch snow falling through the dark night blanketing the tree boughs in white shrouds.  Something mystical or sublime seem to gesture to me with each lilting flake; something mellifluous like the rhythm and rhyme of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Though a beauty still descends with each night snowfall, the numinous is absent.  To illustrate my point, here’s Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man”:


                                           
         

         One must have a mind of winter       
         To regard the frost and the boughs            
         Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
         

         And have been cold a long time
         To behold the junipers shagged with ice,           

        The spruces rough in the distant glitter
         

         Of the January sun; and not to think          
         Of any misery in the sound of the wind,       
         In the sound of a few leaves,
         

         Which is the sound of the land         
         Full of the same wind          
         That is blowing in the same bare place
         

         For the listener, who listens in the snow,         

         And, nothing himself, beholds          
         Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

          The “misery” evoked by the sound of wind chaffs any who expect to find the comfort or certainty of an Emersonian sublime in the poem.  Stevens offers is a state of “mind” that might ignore (“not to think”) the “misery” that sweeps with the wind across the landscape.  But however stoically one withstands winter, nothing can negate the ubiquitous cruelty of this season.  That would require some transcendent power the twenty-first century imagination can no longer conjure.  The best we can do is collect whatever peace can be found in the dark and cold.

Nihilism: Not in America

           At the end of the nineteenth century, there were intellectuals who, in concert with Nietzsche, wanted religion to dissipate as modern concepts from science spread; meanwhile, theologians and the religious railed against the scientific and secular ideas that threatened Christianity’s dominance over life and society.

          A hundred years later, those who believe in God can observe much that has changed.  Today, there are public atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins who work tirelessly through their books and lectures to depict the world’s religions as persistent myths that have perpetrated far too many crimes against humanity to permit them to go unchallenged publicly.  Hitchens, in particular, has crisscrossed the United States debating ministers and people of faith as he strives to advance the legitimacy of atheism and dispel the “fantasy” of religion.

          There are a few undeniable points that can be made about Americans and their religious beliefs: first, religious belief in God thrives as much as ever in America.  A two-thousand and eight Pew Poll revealed that ninety-two percent of Americans believe in God or some universal spirit and seventy percent of Americans believe that religions other than their own can lead to God and salvation.  Second, atheism, though increasing, poses little threat to religion or belief in God.  In light of these facts, it is exasperating to read Harvard Philosophy Professor Sean Kelly’s blog purporting that a state of nihilism permeates American society, and, at the same time, a silent dogmatism infects Americans’ religious beliefs.  (“Navigating Past Nihilism,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/)

          According to Kelly, nihilism has come about because religious tolerance has had the effect of nullifying meaning for people. Now, one might think that religious tolerance would foster religious diversity and enable different faiths to grow stronger.  Instead, Kelly argues that tolerance has denied God “his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live,” and created a “state” where the “culture...no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.”  Thus, Kelly concludes, “God is dead,” (again; Nietzsche’s pronouncement didn’t take.) and nihilism has spread beyond the subject of university seminars in philosophy.

          If tolerance can really engender nihilism in the way Kelly indicates, then how can he account for the rejection of atheism denoted by the remarkably high percentage of Americans who believe in God?  After all, atheism is the necessary precursor for nihilism.  But never mind the burden of overcoming facts.  A little later in his blog, Kelly suggests that for a person to experience faith as valid, he has to believe his faith is “universal and absolute.”  It is necessary, in other words, for a person to believe that only his specific faith can lead him and the rest of humanity to God.

         As Prof. Kelly’s argument unfolds, his reasoning becomes more distorted by his unsupported conjectures.  He offers no evidence (to counter the overwhelming data indicating otherwise) to show that Americans do indeed suffer in a state of nihilism because they are tolerant of different religions or that they are in fact dogmatic regarding their religious beliefs.  He does postulate that Americans deceive themselves into thinking that their religious beliefs are held universally by one and all (Where does this leave nihilism?), but again provides no evidence to support his perception of this mass self-deception.  On this point, his strategy is simply to season his perception with the philosopher's bromide: the philosopher (he) can see their self-deception, but they, of course, cannot.  Convenient and clever though this point may be, it is not at all convincing.

         Prof. Kelly’s final section claims to have discovered in Melville’s Moby Dick a text that can inspire the spirituality he sees missing in America.  He imagines an America in which “there are nevertheless many different lives of worth, and there is no single principle or source or meaning in virtue of which one properly admires them all.”   The problem with Kelly’s point is it describes American attitudes as they already exist (See the Pew Poll cited above).

        In part, Kelly’s essay could be read as another attempt to engraft onto American society and culture the pronouncements of a nineteenth-century's philosophical giant (Nietzsche) whose status outside the academy continues its slide into irrelevance.  At best, his analysis of religion and nihilism offers merely conjecture about rather than a realistic assessment of religious belief in American today.  But then the conclusions of philosophy have always been much more imaginary than real.