All posts by Gary C. Woodward

red bar graphic

Eroding Norms Require a Revival of Timeless Ideas

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It used to be harder to fake competence; now its easier.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ Frank Bruni recounted an article from a historian of education who mentioned a recent Columbia University graduate who shamelessly boasted about his ability to skate through his years mostly using A.I. The original conversation was recalled by James Walsh and mentioned in an article entitled, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” At the same time another higher education expert told Bruni that “in the minds of our students, [college] has become highly instrumental and transactional.”  When Walsh asked the student why he bothered with the Ivy League “only to offload all of the learning to a robot,” he answered that Columbia was an optimal place to meet the co-founder of a start-up and find a wife.

Obviously, as a representation of some students in higher education, this is disheartening. Are our best institutions producing graduates with a moral sensitivity that is as low as our President’s? Shouldn’t they know that the capability to copy and paste someone else’s thoughts is a long way from owning those ideas and being able to act on them?

Useful knowledge is precious. It can become part of the “equipment for living” that thinkers promise for any language of action. But lifting ideas from others is not the same as owning them. For example, I could take most A.I. descriptions of the key term “credibility” and sound like I know what I’m talking about. An A.I. definition at least superficially signals knowledge and awareness, but does not necessarily indicate real mental processes that give the idea life. Hence the definition that it “refers to the quality or characteristic of being trusted and believed”  is a harmless statement, but is not the same thing as the rigorous mental work of testing and detailed cross-referencing to understand a source’s credibility. In short, using A.I. descriptions is not the same as acting on its specific processes.

Imagine another case. I might make a guess that Canada is ripping off the U.S. in some sort of trade arrangement, but I can’t truly accept that claim if it has come from a source that has labored under the view that this is also true of every other nation. This is the unmoored thinking of Donald Trump.  As our defacto Minister of Slights, his faith in tariffs comes with a long held-bias that every nation is suspect and probably a worthy target of retribution. Those psychological motives are surely real, but beyond actual circumstances on the ground that could be assessed by a fair-minded expert. Thus, “credibility” is the result of considered judgment and knowledge, not something that just comes, a-priori, from a twisted set of norms.

black bar

Full and complete competence has to be earned, but seems to be more easily elluded if an A.I. substitute can be passed off as one’s own cognitive work. 

What is intriguing about all of this is that it represents the nature of high competence that classical thinkers sought to understand.  Their preferred words like “wisdom,” “aréte,” (excellence), or high “quality.” In Aristotelian and Platonic ideals, a person of evident “virtue” was worthy of belief. There should be no false front in the presentation of one’s own character. There should be no unearned pretensions. In plain language, an expert is worthy of attention when the “high ethos” of their character aligns with real knowledge and ethical intentions.

All of these indicators of “excellence” are what motivated Robert Pirsig in his well-known quest laid out in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). In the guise of a memoir of travel across the West he drifts into an interior monologue that keeps showing up. He compulsively revisits moments when his study of classical thought left him troubled by the lack of practical wisdom in the people he encountered. Consider his description of two uninvolved and distracted mechanics who were asked to diagnose a problem with his old motorcycle.

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast, and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, “Oh yeah. Tappets.”

Pirsig eventually paid a $140.00 repair bill for services that failed to remedy the engine problem. He later discovered that the noisy piston was caused by a damaged twenty-five cent pin accidentally sheared off by another careless mechanic. “Why,” he wondered, “did they butcher it so?” What evidence did they provide that indicated they were less than fully competent mechanics?

The radio was the clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way. . . .

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There is no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 PM or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

The book does not have much more to say about motorcycles, but it is full of the thoughts of a man on a quest to understand what “quality” and “aréte” can mean when applied to our own lives. I’m afraid he would be troubled by the intimations of excellence represented by the clueless student who thought he pulled off a perfect deception. The student may have deceived Columbia, but soon enough the rest of us must deal with more like him who have credentials but not competance.

red concave bar 1

When Spellbinders Had Sway

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , ,

peitho

Was I mistaken to believe that even amidst the maelstrom that is adolescence, another person could still be mesmerizing?

A few years ago I asked my students in a persuasion course to describe some people in their lives beyond family who were spellbinders: perhaps teachers, priests or others who were incredibly interesting and transforming. Since I am a rhetorician, my bias led me to believe  that these college students could rhapsodize about some outsized influencers in their own lives. But the room was silent. I tried again, being more specific. Describe a teacher or mentor who could really hold a group in their thrall: probably someone who was a good storyteller. Silence again from a class that was usually forthcoming.

I must have been mistaken to believe that, even in the maelstrom of adolescence, another person could be mesmerizing. Perhaps the question required a response that was too personal. Then, too, after the early grades, it is apparently not so cool to see a teacher or leader as transformational.

Active Listening in the Classroom Heather Syrett.

Perhap because I am older–OK, a lot older– I have a settled list of mentors who shaped my attitudes and partly influenced what I would do for the rest of my life. These folks include a Methodist minister who reigned over a large Denver church with a thundering rhetoric of religious certainty; a devoted speech and drama teacher at Evergreen High School in Colorado who mercifully supressed her judgment that I was no actor; a youth group leader who was full of ideas for living that scared our parents; and a professor who turned me on to studying political rhetoric when there was still some dignity left in national politics.

I was a sponge for their forms of dynamic mentoring. In the years that came after I wanted my teaching to be the embodiment of the same intense engagement. In every case this meant that I would need to rise to the level of trying to perform my enthusiasm for whatever I was offering to others. This means using an emphatic style in presentation that models the enthusiasm you want from your audience. Ideally, this kind of in-the-room discourse with a group might unfold like a three-act play. Or, more accurately, a given session would develop as a set of engaging variations on a set theme. (A good presentation often unfolds in a way that Bach might have recognized.)

I saw fluent and forceful rhetoric as an energized engine for self-knowledge, as well at the tool for creating social change. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the sources of that kind of change now lie in digital realm and less in the performative mastery of one person. Just by virtue of their age, students are more predisposed to models of discourse that are a long way from older hortatory styles Martin Luther King, John Kennedy or even Professor Harold Hill. Think of this kind of presentation as a form of heightened conversation: less like Bill Maher and more like Bernie Sanders or perhaps Ken Robertson, sampled below.

The grand rhetorical gesture is in decline, or at least reduced to the 18 minutes of a TED talk or a speech as a rally. Everyday communication elements like texting are more private and ad hoc: fast whispers, but little more.

In my last years before retiring my colleagues would sometimes give me a puzzled look if I said I liked lecturing, by which I meant a session driven by the energy of rapsodizing about new ideas. But the preferred mode of teaching is now more interactive and experiential, and necessarily less directed. Professors now understand that they have less time to profess. Even so, when not driven by an effective mentor, any single session can easily dissipate the energy intensity that seeds learning.

I worry that too many students have filled their lives with inconsequential messages that has shrunken what should be time for a rapidly expanding consciousness. The heightened drama of a rhetorical challenge from an outsider is now often relegated to events like sports or concerts. Few of us are saving space in our lives for the equivelants of the old Chautauquas our forbearers knew, when spending time in the presence of a literary or academic giant had so much appeal.