Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Can We Salvage the Humanities?

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For most of us who have gained richness in our lives through direct access to music, live performance, and academic study, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total and devastating.

Though there can be no single measure of the negative effects of the pandemic on our social and intellectual intelligence, the mind reels at what the final tally will be. We are mostly missing what was once the vast array of classroom opportunities, plays, concerts, and travel that survive only in the form of video facsimiles. Of course, the first task through this pandemic is to save lives and keep individuals healthy. Even against the myopia of many slow thinkers in government, that remains true. But for those Americans whose lives were on track to be given greater meaning through live performance, academic study, and direct mentoring, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total.

The humanities—fields of inquiry ranging from history to languages to literature and the arts—thrive when open and eager minds can share the same space. It’s our birthright to be with others. For students this means being in the presence of a wonderful instructor in any field that creates insight about what is possible and what’s at stake within human communities. The humanities remind us where we have been and where aspirations made visible can still take us.

For an educator, the pinnacle of this form is perhaps the seminar: a small room shared by 10 or 12 students and an instructor, all beginning the voyage of a shared conversation about the work of a groundbreaking creator of ideas.  We may never be more connected to thoughts that matter than as a participant discussing a writer or creative force bursting with revelatory insights. There may be ways to electronically approximate a meeting of minds. But most are often more performative than enlightening. Communication works better when folks share the same space and time.

It is especially heartbreaking to imagine all of the events, meetings, lectures and performances that have not happened in the last year.  In the United States alone this list would surely be in the millions. Scale down to one organization like a modest-sized college, and it would be in the thousands.

The effects of this cultural shutdown are beginning to be evident and especially costly for the humanities. Enrollments in the nation’s community colleges has dropped at the very moment when non-college adults are at risk for chronic unemployment. More disturbingly, stretched parents are having second thoughts about spending money on any undergraduate curriculum that offers a palette of experiences larger than is required to do a single job. Their concerns are abetted by nearsighted reporting in our media, with headlines like “College Majors With The Lowest Unemployment” or “College Majors With The Worst Return On Investment.”

The pandemic-hastened conversion of a student’s education into vocational training for an employment category is now fully underway, as schools and universities close programs in writing, philosophy, performance studies, history, foreign languages, music, dance, theater, journalism and rhetoric. Never mind that they have missed the more subtle point that a degree in history or philosophy may cultivate wonderful skills needed for innovative work. Writer Julie Schumacher reminds us what her English students can accomplish: “Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express.”

I doubt if any of us who have spent time discussing Aristotle’s pragmatism or Suzanne Langer’s insights on presentational art thought that we were wasting our student’s time. Indeed, for reasons I have mentioned before, reading Langer—a philosopher writing in the 1950s—would make any contemporary television journalist a little bit smarter. And Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s suspicions about public opinion still gives us a clear rationale for striving to protect democratic norms.  In these times, with electoral losers brooding over dark ways to return to power, this should be a primary concern.  Indeed, we can’t afford to not have the humanities, which collectively help us imagine what a great society can ethically achieve.

 

 

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French Unity and American Multiculturalism: Contested Grounds of Identity

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In defiance of what the founders of the nation feared, factionalism has become an American norm.   But official France still gravitates toward the idea of a defined culture that immigrants must embrace. 

French government leaders and cultural affairs officials frequently express intense interest in preserving their culture, usually noting with alarm the rise of tribal identifications now common in American life. Both sides of the Atlantic now have activists working under the banner of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and new revelations exposing historic figures who condoned slaveholding and colonialism.

Although there are clear exceptions, French advocates asking for more social justice can face stiff winds of resistance from high profile protectors of the nation’s identity. Many, such as President  Emmanuel Macron, are vocal in affirming the core principles of the Republic over the particular claims of identity groups. For example, it was not long ago that the actress Catherine Deneuve and other influential French women signed a letter claiming that #MeToo was a “puritanical overreaction.”

According to reliable news reports, behind some of this wide-ranging discussion of what it means to be French is a fear of American cultural hegemony.  There is a broad concern that the young in “immigrant communities” have taken a page from American politics and are insufficiently grateful for their French citizenship.

Political currents especially on the American left now run in the opposite direction, favoring recognition for the separateness of various identity groups. But official France still aspires to be a single great society. Nationalists often see threats against “unity” in dire terms, feeding off memories of domestic terrorist attacks in and around Paris over the last decade.

In France, official secularism is a national virtue.

Even the broad political center in the Fifth Republic gravitates toward the ideal of a single great culture that all must embrace. For example, the National Assembly just completed debate on legislation that would oblige all organizations, including religious groups, to adhere to key secular values, specifically, the “principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and respect of human dignity.” Though not stated, the primary goal of the legislation is to combat Muslim “separatism,” especially where religious practices veer into the public sector. For example, hijabs (head coverings) for Muslim women are banned in French schools. By contrast, North Americans are more likely to see the denial of the right to wear a head covering as an infringement on a person’s religious freedom.

Defining and embracing national identity is a tricky game of perceptions. Many in the United States now think that the once simple invocation of the “national interest” is now bridge too far, as the hardening of political differences in the last election so clearly demonstrated. In defiance of what the founders feared, factionalism is becoming an American norm. And with it, interest in identity has shifted to communities that want to define their own practices and preferences, including having a say about what others may appropriate as their own. It is now more routine for Americans to ponder whether a straight actor should portray a gay character in a play or film, or whether a special condition such as autism can be suitably represented by non-autistic actors. These samples are representative of groups asserting authority over the use of what they see as their unique community property, whether it is particular experiences, cultural products, names or sensibilities. Who should wear tribal clothing or jewelry?  Can a sports team use an anglicized version of a name for an indigenous group?  In short, who gets to tell a specific community’s story?  These are now frequent American questions, where the pronoun “our” is tribal as much as it is nationalistic. That’s a different emphasis than is common in French thinking, where the pronoun is more or less meant to cover the entire culture: a nation of 67 million souls set apart from the rest of the world.

It is an irony that one of the guiding forces shaping the American experience was France’s commitment to its ideals of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” But to many in Europe, America’s twin embrace of right-wing politics as well as progressive multiculturalism looks like a descent into destructive separatism.  When exported, these impulses seem like unwelcome intrusions imported as newer forms of American cultural imperialism.