HITALTCAASHR, Part 2: What are English departments teaching? · 3:22am May 5th, 2017
Over the past 15 years, the proclaimed purpose of "English" classes at colleges and universities and in grades K-12 in America has shifted from teaching English or English literature to teaching "social justice". ("Social justice" in all cases turns out to mean "the ideology of Social Justice Warriors.")
Teaching for social justice with standards-based secondary English Language Arts curriculum
Alison George Dover, University of Massachusetts - AmherstAbstract
Teaching for social justice is the attempt by classroom teachers to use their position in the classroom to promote social and educational reform withinand despite current educational conditions and mandates [my emphasis]. However, while a growing number of K-12 teachers have published anecdotal reports of their attempts to teach for social justice in secondary classrooms (e.g., Bender-Slack, 2007; Christensen, 2000; Singer, 2005), ... I present the results of a constructivist grounded theory analysis examining how twenty-four English Language Arts teachers conceptualize teaching for social justice, as well as a content (lesson plan) analysis detailing how they operationalize the practice through the use of standards-based curriculum. ... Specifically, this study challenges critics’ attempts to portray social justice education as poorly aligned with academically rigorous content-area instruction (e.g., Will, 2006)...
Yeah, but that's just a few... well, 24... teachers, right?
From the home page of the English department at Lehigh University:
The Department of English has a focus on Literature and Social Justice, the outcome of a multi-year effort to revitalize the traditional period-based approach to literary studies and to develop an organic interest among many of our faculty members. Like the university as a whole, the department is committed to cultivating graduates who will be engaged citizens and community members, in addition to successful professionals and life-long learners. We also hope that our students in particular will learn to recognize how literature and other forms of cultural production uniquely intervene in questions of justice and shape our ways of being in the world.
Okay, so some second-tier college has joined. Still, it must be an isolated case…
Resolution on Social Justice in Literacy Education
2010 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Business Meeting in Orlando, Florida
...
Literacy education can be used to disrupt such inequitable hierarchies of power and privilege by adopting a stance on social justice and priming it for policy. Through the efficacy that social justice can have in schools, we commit to interrupting current practices that reproduce social, cultural, moral, economic, gendered, intellectual, and physical injustices. To prime social justice for policy in schools, it must be understood that it evades easy definition and is a grounded theory, a stance/position, a pedagogy, a process, a framework for research, and a promise (“Beliefs about Social Justice in English Education,” CEE Position Statement, December 2009).
Through a sustained commitment to social justice in all its forms, English education can contribute to disrupting these inequitable hierarchies of power and privilege. Be it therefore Resolved that the National Council of Teachers of English- support efforts by educators to teach about social injustice and discrimination in all its forms with regard to differences in race, ethnicity, culture, gender, gender expression, age, appearance, ability, national origin, language, spiritual belief, sexual orientation, socioeconomic circumstance, and environment;
- acknowledge the vital role that teacher education programs play in preparing teachers to enact and value a pedagogy that is socially just;
- advocate for equitable schooling practices that reinforce student dignity and success; and
- oppose policies that reinforce inequitable learning opportunities or outcomes for students.
The NCTE is a big fucking deal. They’re basically the US English teachers' union and academic hierarchy rolled into one. They publish all of the major journals on English education, and spearhead political action.
Sidebar: The changing face of College English
The NCTE's main journal for literary theory, College English, used to publish literary criticism of works of literature. Nowadays, they mostly publish articles about the profession, and about social justice. I went through all the abstracts for every issue published in 2014 and found just one article that studied texts: “Revising the Menu to Fit the Budget: Grocery Lists and Other Rhetorical Heirlooms.”
I didn’t read it; I trust the editor’s description:
As White-Farnham notes, hers is not the first scholarly foray into the rhetoric of food, consumption practices, or food-related artifacts, including some in this journal, but so far, none in this investigative group has focused on the grocery list per se.
I could not make this shit up.
From the referenced "Beliefs about Social Justice in English Education", NCTE Conference on English Education, December 2009:
We ground our work in the belief that English teaching and English teacher preparation are political activities that mediate relationships of power and privilege in social interactions, institutions, and meaning-making processes.
Extreme cases? No, the tip of the iceberg. Check out this article from the Purdue English department (also available here):
Reclaiming English Education: Rooting Social Justice in Dispositions
Janet Alsup and SJ MillerThis article addresses the importance of foregrounding social justice in teaching and assessing dispositions for preservice teachers in secondary English language arts....
Modern notions of social justice have been in existence since the nineteenth century (Nussbaum, 2006; Rawls, 1971) but have only become a tenet of educational philosophy in English education as of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (see Adams et al., 2010; Apple, 2006; Ayers, 1998; Bender-Slack, 2010; Cochran-Smith, 1999 & 2004; Groenke, 2010; Miller, Beliveau, DeStigter, Kirkland, & Rice, 2008; Miller & Kirkland, 2010; Morrell, 2005; Nieto & Bode, 2011). On first consideration, it may seem obvious that social justice is an important concept in the field of English education due to issues of injustice that are presented and (re)presented time and again through various texts and related real-life issues. However, for those of us who teach methods courses at universities and are educating new secondary school ELA teachers, the stakes might be even higher. To be successful, preservice teachers must be prepared for the diversity of students they will encounter and be comfortable modeling and encouraging fairness, equity, and respect in their classrooms. To complicate the issue, our field has become increasingly vulnerable to losing social justice as a critical tenet to those who believe that the teaching of academic skills and knowledge alone, when aligned with standards, should ostensibly provide youth with the tools they need to bring about a more just society.
Notice they never consider the notion that the English department is not charged with bringing about a more just society so much as with teaching English or literature. This is not an isolated attitude; this is the water that English teachers and professors now swim in. They don't argue against the idea that English departments should teach English; the idea never occurs to them in the first place.
Sidebar: The irrelevance of literature
Vincent Leitch, editor of the Norton Anthology of [Literary] Theory & Criticism, described his personal journey which led him to literary theory in Chapter 1 of Literary Criticism in the 21st Century. He mentions reading Heidegger, existentialism, leaving the military academy, his Catholic upbringing, his anger at God over his brother's death, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the CIA, his mortgage, the corrosive influence of suddenly making a lot of money in the housing market, his daughter's student loans, the insufficiency of today's retirement system, the financial woes of his relatives, and concludes that "The mode of criticism that is best suited to these times, it has seemed obvious to me, is a renewed ideological and cultural critique with political economy, particularly finance, at center stage."
His only mention of literature as an influence on him, or as relating to his purpose in studying and teaching literature, in this chapter-long autobiography, is that a list of his activities in college includes "Beat literature."
But perhaps this isn't surprising, considering that he deliberately omitted the word "literary" from the title of his book on literary theory.
I continue to quote from "Reclaiming English Education: Rooting Social Justice in Dispositions" below, but here's the TL;DR for the next quote: The NCATE sets the standards used in most US states to judge teachers and decide whether to promote or fire them. These standards used to measure a teacher's level of social justice activism. In 2006, they decided that measuring their sensitivity to discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language was sufficient and that they did not need additional measurements of their devotion to social justice. This article demands the return of measurements of social justice activism as part of teacher performance standards across the US. "Politically comfortable" diversity and tolerance are not enough to bring about the revolution.
In 2006 NCATE, the National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education, removed social justice as an explicit performance indicator for assessing teacher dispositions. Twenty-five states have adopted or adapted NCATE (now CAEP) unit standards as the state standards, and according to the NCATE website, “NCATE’s professional program standards have influenced teacher preparation in 48 states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico” (http://www.ncate.org/). NCATE regularly partners with professional organizations (in our case, NCTE) to create standards for teacher preparation and assess programs on their success in doing so.... NCATE, on the other hand, claimed that it drew upon rhetoric from No Child Left Behind and argued that the words social justice themselves were unnecessary because they could be assumed under the revision of Unit Standard 4, which now reads, “The unit designs, implements, and evaluates curriculum and provides experiences for candidates to acquire and demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and professional dispositions necessary to help all students learn. Assessments indicate that candidates demonstrate and apply proficiencies related to diversity” (see Unit Standards in Effect 2008).... Candidates are helped to understand the potential impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning” (Kissel, 2009)....
As noted above, NCATE’s definition of diversity is arguably myopic in scope because it is instantiated by who is defining it, the time it is being defined, and who/what is included/excluded. When we see absences of the words social justice, replaced by more politically comfortable or less charged terms such as diversity or even tolerance [my emphasis], we, as English educators who recognize that our students cannot be reduced to essentialist or binary categories, might challenge how social justice is being defined and by whom, as social justice and diversity are not the same.... This lack of naming particular student identities in the definition of diversity, such as those whose race, gender identity or expression, national origin, or weight (size or height) are nonconforming, makes vulnerable preservice teachers, who by their nature are new to the profession, to marginalizing the potential cultural and social capital of the students they are teaching.
Teaching for peace (or revolution, same thing)
From the English Leadership Quarterly, published by the National Council of Teachers of English. Vol. 33 No. 4, April 2011:
p. 1:
Peace, Love, and Understanding
Dr. Judson Laughter, English Education, University of Tennessee, guest editorImagine all the people living for today.
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
Imagine all the people sharing all the world.Just over 30 years ago, the voice that penned these words was gunned down by a lack of imagination. When it comes to violence, we as a society lack imagination. We choose violence as the appropriate response to violence because we cannot imagine a better way....
I believe that English language arts teachers are ideally placed to be effective agents of change in developing a world that can imagine a better way. After all, we traffic in the realm of imagination every day. We invite students to step into another’s shoes through reading a text.... Best of all . . . we teach poetry.... Poetry is where we imagine, a place where living for today, living life in peace, and sharing all the world are possible realities.
In this issue of English Leadership Quarterly, we are celebrating the poetry of a better way—our imagined possibilities for teaching peace, love,and understanding.
I love the blatant doublethink here. The entire issue of this NCTE journal was devoted to social justice, presented as "teaching for peace… the poetry of a better way." Their actual agenda in practice is to replace the teaching of poetry and literature with teaching political activism. The examples given in this issue speak about justice, empathy, and respect, but the actual politics and economics of most English departments today are explicitly Marxist, as evidenced by the frequent use of Marxist terminology, teaching of Marx's writings, and the common assumption in literary theory papers that the reader and writer are both Marxists. Regardless of whether it's good or bad, teaching Marxist activism is not "teaching peace."
p. 3, "Lessons from NETS: New English Teachers for Social Justice"
… Many teacher educators have begun to infuse a focus on equity throughout preparation programs and are challenging new teachers to assume personal responsibility for students in the “opportunity gap” (DeShano da Silva, Huguley, Kakli,& Rao, 2007). In fact, many teacher preparation programs market themselves to socially concerned students like Jamie as spaces in which they can learn how to teach for social justice, promote empathy and respect while teaching their subject matter, and play a part in reducing persistent inequities among American youth....
[The NETS teachers’] second-year narratives began to include some stories about ways in which they advocated for justice in student learning. ... The sense of inefficacy experienced by some of the new teachers had less to do with reaching their students and more to do with choosing their curriculum. The study revealed that these equity-oriented teachers also cared deeply about integrating modern, engaging, multicultural texts into their classes....
In one especially moving narrative from the very first NETS meeting... [Heather said] that though she was assigned to teach world literature and was excited to have been given an anthology that truly included literature from all around the world, she wasnot "supposed" to teach anything but British literature right now. . . . I feel like I’m stuck, where I can’t really go too far outside of the box since I’m brand new and I’d like to be there next year. That’s a big issue for me because I feel like the social justice that my kids need is exposure to things outside of their little town and outside of their middle, working class, white kid/white family society, so I’m working with that.
"The social justice that my kids need is exposure to things outside of their little town..." what does that mean? It sounds to me like it means not the justice they need, but the social justice indoctrination that they need.
Speaking as a white guy in a little working-class town, I am upset that these working class families are sending their kids to this teacher in the hopes they'll get a decent education and make something of themselves, and she is not there to help them. They are unaware that she doesn't plan to do the job they hired her to do (teach them English), and that she isn't there to help their kids, but to help somebody else's kids.
A teacher is not supposed to be an impartial judge dispensing social justice to the world. A teacher is supposed to look after his or her students. This is not to perpetuate the whitearchy; it's because each kid deserves to have someone looking after that kid. For many kids, the only adult in the world looking out for them is a teacher. For a teacher to go to a school in order to represent the interests of other kids she doesn't know, against the presumed oppressive tendencies of her own students, is obscene.
Continuing with the travails of our social-justice teachers:
I was told that I could do Fahrenheit 451 instead of The Giver. Do we have Fahrenheit 451? Absolutely not. And I could do 1984 instead of The Giver, but we don’t have 1984, either. I was told, “You can pick, and this is the list of suggested literature,” but we only have The Giver.
Funny thing: In the real world, books cost money. But what about The Giver? What is this white male conservative crap they force her to teach?
The Giver is a young adult novel written by a white woman in 1993. In it, a boy lives in a society that appears, to the naive observer uneducated in its invisible, underlying reality, to be a perfect utopia with equality for all. But he learns that--to quote Wikipedia's summary of the Cliffs notes summary: "The Community lacks any color, memory, climate and terrain, all in effort to preserve structure, order, and a true sense of equality beyond personal individuality." So he must work with The Giver to overthrow this apparent utopia. The message is that equality and rationality are bad, color and diversity are good, and the only way to get color and diversity is to overthrow the government.
And, funny enough, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are also both books about oppressive evil governments. Heather shouldn't be complaining about... whatever it is she's complaining about, but about only being allowed to teach books about oppressive evil governments. I mean, why couldn't she take books off the Common Core curriculum?
Well, there is no Common Core curriculum, for one thing. But they do have a list of "illustrative texts":
6-8 grade:
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1869)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (1915)
The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)
Dragonwings by Laurence Yep (1975), a book about American racism against Chinese
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (1976), a book about racism in America during the Great Depression
“Letter on Thomas Jefferson” by John Adams (1776)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940” by Winston Churchill (1940)
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry (1955)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (1962)
9–10:
The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1592), a book about murderous white men
“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
“The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry (1906)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939), a book about the oppression of the poor
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953), a book about an oppressive government
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975), a book about war
“Speech to the Second Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry (1775)
“Farewell Address” by George Washington (1796)
“Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln (1863)
“State of the Union Address” by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1941)
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964)
“Hope, Despair and Memory” by Elie Wiesel (1997), a book about the Holocaust
11– CCR:
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1820)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1848)
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), a book about the futility of the American dream
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959), a book about racism against blacks
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003), a book about an Indian immigrant to America with ethnic identity problems
White men wrote 19 of these 31 works. Unfair!
But, look closer: White males wrote less than half of the curriculum by word count, and except for Tom Sawyer, the novels by white men are all about violence, oppression, or despair.
Getting back to our special issue on Peace, Love, and Understanding:
Comfortable with Controversy in the English Classroom
Scott E. Jenkinson, Tennessee High School, Bristol, Tennessee[This] is at the heart of what I do as an English teacher. I believe a central aim of public education should be to help high school students critically assess their world. To do so, teachers must help students learn how to discuss such topics as politics and contemporary social issues.
Okay, but can't they do that in their social studies classes? Which they also have.
At the heart of determining the need for discussion-based education is the teaching and ideology of one figure: Paulo Freire. In his literacy work with Brazilian peasants in the 1960s, Freire established the tenets of a curriculum whose primary intention was to question the politics that contributed to the society that had developed in his country. This, ultimately, gave his students a voice, which they learned to exercise for social change (Torres, 1993). Freire also establishes the notion of the "progressive" teacher who seeks to empower his/her students to think and develop critical thoughts of their own through a developed sense of classroom autonomy.
Paulo Freire was one of a very influential group of "third-world" theorists, like Franz Fanon of Martinique and Algeria, and Steve Biko in South Africa, whose writings are studied in the critical pedagogy (which until this moment I did not know had another name besides "literary theory").
These guys became famous because they were involved in horrific situations of lethal poverty or violent and deliberately racist oppressors. But is 21st century America really comparable to South Africa under apartheid, or Algeria under the French? Is it "critical" to go into a high school in a neighborhood that's 96% black, and have kids who don't know any white people read a Tony Morrison novel about white slaveholders raping black slaves, followed by the story of Steve Biko's torture and murder by white police in South Africa, and then ask them to critique American society?
Or is it just brainwashing?
NEXT: HITALTCAASHR, part 3.1: College English leftism: How did it begin?
A thought occurred to me reading this, and it's somewhat tangential. Someone (Morning Sun, perhaps?) mentioned the idea in a previous blog that a major reason for the social justice focus in English departments might be because of a vicious circle in how one becomes employed and promoted in such departments.
It's worth considering that there may be a purpose for the social justice focus at the college level beyond ideological reinforcement, too.
English degrees tend to not be very commercially valuable. It's hard to get a job using an ELA degree, except inasmuch as it serves as a generic college degree. That raises questions of: (1) why should college kids major in ELA, and (2) what are you supposed to do once you graduate with an ELA degree.
Social justice activism gives answers to both, and the Marxist bent is a really beautiful piece to it. A real "student of English" shouldn't even want to receive gainful employment for their expertise. That perpetuates systems of patriarchy and oppression, and goes against everything the degree represents. An ELA degree is about changing the world, man.
Other than that thought, my biggest reactions to this post are the following:
(1) I'm exceptionally glad that I developed a love of reading early in my life, and had the opportunity to form my own impressions about the world instead of getting subjected to literature through this nonsense paradigm. I was never a fan of the curriculum in middle school and high school anyway, and had a very low opinion of the analytical theory presented; but at least I had a chance to get into reading before that might have ruined it for me.
(2) If/when I have kids, I'm probably going to need to make sure they also get started early, and I'm probably going to want to monitor what's going on in their schools so I can prime them for dealing with any viciously illogical nonsense they may be subjected to.
"...- oppose policies that reinforce inequitable learning opportunities or outcomes for students."
Yeah, Equality of Outcomes. One of the cruelest things you can do to a successful student who works very hard and tries their best to succeed. But that wouldn't be equal, would it? =
4520506
I did find myself thinking about how phenomenally unwelcome "Harrison Bergeron" would be, while reading that.
I like the idea of studying the common grocery list, but the article proved too dense to get through. But I will never again take a grocery list for granted, which is good.
On the other hand, the phrase "grocery list" has temporarily lost all meaning for me.
4520514
See, this just reminds me that if I ever have kids, I need to make them watch the S5 premiere of MLP (and preferably the rest of the show too). It's so similar to Harrison Bergeron (but kid-friendly) that I'm sure the writers have read it before and were basing the episode directly on that (with a little bit of 1984 thrown in for flavor).
Maybe low-brow entertainment will be our counter to these ideologies. Most kids probably don't even pay attention in English class, but they'll glue themselves to the TV, and we can control that to a certain extent (a much greater extent nowadays with all the on-demand programming available). At this point, it would feel like a mercy to just let literary criticism die as a field and focus on writing entertaining stories. I honestly wouldn't be sad to see the English Literature departments of the world consumed by, say, whichever department does Creative Writing.
4520572
Ain't semantic satiation grand?
4520487
It's also because high school English class is the only place that social justice is not being fought. Large portions of the useful ideas ought to be picked up by History class, but every high school history class mysteriously ends after WW2 before getting into anything that might have a direct bearing on modern politics, lest someone's parents angrily storm into the building (because all it takes is one lunatic to make a teacher's whole year miserable, and administrators are increasingly spineless and unwilling to back them up [see the rise of zero-tolerance policies]). Even in the history that is covered, states across the South are busily muscling Civil War revisionism into the curricula.
There's also no such thing as a set 'Social Studies' class any more, in my experience. US Government and Economics were AP classes at my high school, and psychology an elective that maybe 4% of the student body could take per year. The only other thing under the 'Social Studies' umbrella that gets taught reliably is geography. Mind, I'm a little fuzzy on how the general population handled it, because I was in an IB program, which deliberately created a much more integrated curriculum across classes than was achievable in the piecemeal class choices available to the main student body.
So maybe this stuff isn't appropriate in an English class, but I'd suggest its appearance there can be traced in part to larger-scale failures in the school system.
A while ago I came across a interesting part of a old old interview, the guys name is Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB agent who defected. Seems kid of relevant/similar.
You know.
I am entirely happy to entertain the argument that English departments have seriously lost the plot. Indeed, I would be prepared to entertain arguments along the lines of them having it in the first place; English as a discipline has been a house on fire since... well, a long time. (I say that as someone with an actual degree in it.) I might not agree with some of the conclusions or priors but the case isn't risible.
What I'm less inclined to entertain is... this series of posts includes in its title a theme of no longer hating Republicans and will, presumably, attempt to make the case that the information they are presenting justifies that change of opinion.
That case both hasn't been yet, and frankly I find attempting to make that case at all not just laughable, but borderline offensive on this day, of all days, when a couple hundred of the most powerful Republicans in the country voted en masse to kill a few million people, including some of my friends, in the service of massive upper-class tax cuts.
They then lied about it repeatedly, and kicked back and had a few cold ones to celebrate a days hard work.
I'm going to keep hating those motherfuckers and the motherfuckers who voted for them, thank you.
4520618 Please don't commingle Genocide with changes to health plans. It is a slap in the face of hundreds of millions of corpses during the XX Century.
4520653 It would be if I'd done that. Thankfully, I did not.
"Changes to health plans." What a charmingly neutral way to describe "we could keep giving people health care. Or. Or. We could take it away from them... and use the money to cut taxes!"
I'm comfortable equating that with murder, at least in a moral sense.
I really have no idea where you're going with these posts anymore.
4520711
To be perfectly fair to both sides in terms of really dramatic and unhelpful interpretations of minor policy shifts, in that case our only choices are enslaving people to avoid murder, or murdering people to avoid being enslaved.
I can't imagine why the US is so polarized.
4520730 I confess that your comment confuses me, bookplayer. That... may or may not be my own fault; I'm often confused by things that, in hindsight, should not confuse me.
The only way it at all makes sense to me is if you're part of the "taxes are theft and/or slavery" crowd, but that position is one I usually don't like to ascribe to people without being sure about it. I likewise confess to being largely unfamiliar with your posting history and so am not aware if you are such a person.
4520755
I was simply pointing out the equivalence of the ideas that not providing people with health insurance is murder and that taxation is theft/slavery. They both can be argued if you want to be morally absolutist about it, but that argument basically just convinces the other side you are absolutely bonkers.
4520761 Ah, I see.
All I can say is that if people have health care, and you take it away from them for no better reason than you don't think people should have health care if they can't afford it, and then they suffer and die because they don't have health care, I don't see how that isn't a massive crime that makes the people doing it absolute monsters.
Whether or not someone accepts or rejects an argument isn't actually materiel to whether or not it is, you know, correct.
4520723
I find this comment particularly amusing, because I'm sitting here nodding along, going "sky is blue, water is wet. Where's the meat, Bad Horse?!"
4520769
No, but in public policy debates it is very material to whether it's worth voicing or may even damage your position.
People elected people who enacted policy you think is morally wrong. Defending the correctness of hating those people because they're murderers Is probably having the effect of making people who agree with you nod self-righteously and making the people you hate dismiss not only this but everything else you say.
Granted, Bad Horse's blog isn't like you're saying this in the New York Times, but we have ample evidence that there are people on both sides of the line here, and if you care to actually change the situation so that people won't vote for these people and others like them in the future, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
And the larger problem is that people are saying things of this general tone in the New York Times (and Fox News, and everywhere else,) and shooting the entire country in the foot.
4520777
Well, I guess I am uninterested both in people who only agree with me because it makes them feel good about themselves, and people who disagree with me because they don't like my tone rather than my facts or my basic moral positions.
Yes, and some of those people are right, and some of those people are wrong, and determining which is which is actually important.
No, the larger problem is that people are saying things that are either incorrect, incoherent, useless, monstrous, or lies.
This also seems a curious line to take in a series of posts that have accused teachers of conspiracies to overthrow western civilization, neglect and abuse of their charges, and brainwashing. Those are fairly maximal positions on the part of our host that are certainly going to be alienating!
But whether they're out of line is entirely down to how accurate and correct, or inaccurate or incorrect, Bad Horse is in making those charges, not him making them in the first place. If they're right, he should be saying them regardless of how alienating and polarizing they are, and if they're wrong, he should not.
4520769
Your argument is not valid. On its own terms it simply isn't.
This is not to say I am against universal healthcare. On the contrary. I think it is morally imperative and eminently sensible[1]. On a personal note, I enjoy one such system in my poor, poor country and am quite glad that I can enjoy medical expenses that are one to three orders of magnitude lower than those of Americans.
However.
Your position is that if a person requires a resource or service of some sort that might extend their life then everyone else is morally obliged to provide it to them and, crucially, if they don't they are murderers. This line of reasoning leads us to the interesting notion that all governments (and presumably all people?) of the United States were murderers up to 2010 then had a brief seven-year respite from being murderers, and are now murderers again.
Further, extended just slightly, since there are still people all over the world without healthcare, food, water, and shelter all over the world—in the US and outside—and since the US isn't doing anything about it and doesn't plan to, it turns out that even in the halcyon days of 2010-2017 it was full of murderers.
It's not a particularly tenable position is what I'm trying to put across. I mean I'm a lefty, me, I do think that we should provide an acceptable level of living to all human beings, no questions asked. But to think that anyone who disagrees with me is a murderer is... well it's not helpful. For a start, in this sea of murderers, what shall I call someone who shoots me?
[1] In places that aren't the United States, sadly, as there's so much money bound up in the insurance racket that introducing the sort of healthcare reform that might actually work (ACA ain't it) would crash it permanently leading to one hell of a recession.
4520783
Ooooh! That makes more sense. Here I was thinking that people prioritize different values in different ways, and we might understand each other and try to at least consider solutions to social issues that balance those values as much as possible.
I guess I was wrong.
4520618
No. You presume too much. It's just that I can't hate everybody. They do their evil, and the left does its evil, and I am running out of hate and left with nothing but lowered expectations of humans.
4520800
Post-Modernist relativism is both morally and intellectually bankrupt.
What values we choose to believe in and prioritize can, in fact, make us right or wrong. A neo-nazi or klansman who prioritizes the "sanctity and sanctity of the white race" above and beyond all other considerations is simply and flatly wrong, not to mention socially destructive. This is not a "social issue" that needs to be "balanced", it's a morally indefensible position that should be rejected an opposed.
Likewise, the belief that "poor people are solely responsible for their poverty and deserve no consideration", and which values wealth and the wealthy above all considerations is similarly wrong and destructive, and should similarly be rejected, not "balanced".
These people are flatly wrong -- morally, socially, and practically. These are not complex issues that need a good deal of effort to "understand", and they certainly don't need to be "balanced".
4520795
"Murderers" would be too strong a word. "Immoral" and "inhumane" would be more accurate.
4520795
It is not. This is mis-statement of my position.
My position is that if a person has a resource or service of some sort that is required for them to live, and people act to take that away for bad reasons, those people are, in fact, murderers.
This isn't some abstract philosophical point for me. I have friends and family members with medical conditions that they could live to a ripe old age with if they're treated continually and promptly, and will almost certainly kill them within a couple years if they're not. If someone comes along and deliberately makes it impossible for those conditions to be treated, and they lack a good reason for doing so, why should I not regard those people as committing a heinous moral crime? And if so, what label aside from murder would you ascribe to it?
Now, the broader moral question of "what obligation to we have to look after people" and "what sort of culpability accrues to us if we refuse to do so" is of course one worth asking. But I didn't actually state a position there. The difference between "actively taking something they need to live away from someone" versus "not providing it in the first place" might be bigger or smaller than I'm currently conceiving it.
Even if I accepted your initial framing of my argument, I'm not sure it would lead here.
It depends on specific context sometimes. For example, there's a strong argument that many parts of the insurance industry were (and are) engaged in behavior I would regard as murderous, abetted in some ways by the government and constrained by them in others.
Yes?
The US government, and indeed most governments, routinely acts in ways that are murderous and contain within them people who, in both a moral and legal sense, are murderers. Is... is there some doubt about that?
Of course, they also act in ways that save countless lives and uplift countless more. It seems to me I'm capable of condemning people and institutions who aid and abet the former while praising those who carry forward the latter.
As do I. But I'm not sure this is inconsistent with regarding people who, if they were to see that acceptable level of living being provided, with proactively taking it away as morally hideous.
I agree with this statement!
I'm actually not sure this is true as a matter of white-paper policy. That is, in a purely technical sense, it would be possible to establish a robust and effective form of universal healthcare that didn't lead to a financial crisis of some sort. It might not even be all that hard.
The problem isn't technical, but political; assembling a coalition that supports this goal and can also overcome all four veto points in American policymaking is... difficult.
4520615 Google says:
KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov’s Warning to America
29 YEARS AGO, Soviet defector and KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov, specializing in the fields of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and ideological subversion; warned us about the silent war being waged against America as part of a long term plan to take over and destroy the American system and way of life.
A much longer interview is transcribed at Useless Dissident.
4520812
Come to the my-kind-of-left side, Bad Horse! We have cookies. Well. When I say we... I really mean, um, me. I have cookies and it is lonely out here.
4520815
Wrong.
Not you, they. They are wrong. That's it. They may be inhumane or they may not be. It depends for their motives.
Wrong is plenty bad. There's really no reason to pile on invective aside from the dopamine hit of righteous indignation.
4520813
The politicians who voted for this, the wrong ones, got voted in while loudly declaiming their desire to kill the ACA stone cold dead. They, upon being elected, did exactly this thing. So, really, the impetus for the act comes from their voters of which there are approximately half in the United States.
Do you believe that half of the United States electorate holds that "poor people are solely responsible for their poverty and deserve no consideration?"
Because if you don't, you are left with he notion that these people prioritize some other set of values or have a different opinion and, so, can be compromised with, especially if approached with suitable rhetoric which is what I think you'll find 4520800 was talking about.
4520813
We're using values in different ways.
In my mind, "sanctity and sanctity of the white race" isn't a value, it's a means of enacting a value. Values are things like "freedom" "security" "faith in god" "personal happiness," "sympathy for others."
I'd have to talk more to neo-nazis to understand their values, but if you can find another means and convince them that it will better serve the actual values they're fighting for, you're addressing their issues without all the racism and genocide.
I've found very few positions that aren't fighting for something I understand perfectly well underneath (not always what I think is most important, but something I can understand as a good reason.) They might be supporting means that I think are outright evil, but those are the cases where it's most important to understand why and direct your responses towards that underlying issue.
4520819
Your position is terrible, and I've sympathy for it. Presumably if my tin-pot country can pay for its people not to die, America can too. If the treatments are one-off affairs you can look into healthcare tourism where people travel to, well, tin-pot countries like mine and pay for private medical service which is still infinitely cheaper.
However.
The people involved didn't _take away_ anything. They stopped providing it. I suggest there is a difference there.
Also, purely talking of pragmatics, calling people murderers when you want to convince them to vote the other way is counterproductive. As you may imagine.
4520487 That was me in Bad Horse's second-to-last blog. To quote it :
The tl;dr version was 'Getting jobs in degree-fields that don't have an objective way to evaluate talent like Math or Physics means some other kind of metric is necessary to filter candidates, and in English circles that appears to have become Social Justice Purity'.
The same problem actually does exist in Science - but there it manifests by the lack of people doing corroborating research, as 'Our research corroborates a previous experiment's results' or 'Our research failed to validate the previous experiment's results' is not sexy and doesn't get published as much. So a lot of Noise gets published because it finds a New result, and because in certain fields we accept a 95% probability of it being a valid conclusion as acceptable, we see a lot of Type 1 Errors that occur since everyone is trying to prove new things rather than validate old things.
4520800
I don't see how this statement, which I agree with at least in principle, in any way conflicts with my own positions.
4520812
Ah, I see. This is a fair enough response and I accept it uncrticially.
... I realized while typing that it kinda makes me sound like a douchebag but I'm drawing a blank on how to more artfully phrase "this response addresses the point-slash-concern I made in a way that is both entirely fair and that I will not dispute." And even that sounds kinda like a dick move.
4520506 One of the interesting things I find is that a lot of us think talent & hard work is all that matters.
Luck matters too, though. I have my current career due to luck - I got my foot in the door because a family friend needed someone, fast, and I was in her extended mental circle of 'Maybe this person would work' so I got flat out invited to apply. The gig itself wasn't great, but I had a straight line to phone interview, and that gig led to more until I ended up with an actual good job with significant prospects for advancement.
That's Luck Type #1 - You get opportunities not through merit, but through accident of acquaintance.
There's also Luck Type #2, which I got hit with in a bad way recently. I was in a meeting and didn't realize I was speaking out of turn and this has caused me to end up with pie on my face, right now. Nothing I won't recover from - but it wasn't due to any skill/fault of my own, it was due to I was suddenly in a different corporate culture-style than I am used to in that meeting, and so what was 'Good' in my standard area was actually bad here.
But that won't happen again - because of Luck #3, which is that my manager is an awesome dude, so within 24 hours I knew what I did wrong, we're going to focus on developing that new skillset I didn't even realize I needed, and I will be far better prepared next time.
If I had a less-skilled or less-caring manager, though? I'd be up a creek, and may not even realize that I'd fucked up and be prone to doing so again. Hence, Luck #3 - Your success or failure can hinge on who you end up working with, and what they can teach you. And when that teaching is an Unknown Unkown - Something you don't know, and don't realize you didn't know? Without a Type 3 there to turn it into a Known unknown, you're screwed.
(For those confused : A Known Unknown is something you know you don't know. I know I do not know how to speak French. An unknown unknown is something you don't know you don't know - an easy example is a foreigner traveling to a different country, and a perfectly acceptable behavior in their home country is unacceptable there. Random made up example, in their home country it's okay to pull your hair back in a ponytail, but in new country that's a huge faux pas, and so they end up getting seen as rude without even realizing they're being rude).
4520602
You say I've drawn " a lot of rather unsupported conclusions". What unsupported conclusions? I haven't even started drawing conclusions.
Agreed. I don't think I said they were. Please, everybody has to stop this form of argument by B:
A never said that all scorpions kill their owners. B is using the fact that some did not to reject A's claims that scorpions are dangerous. People make this kind of counter-argument all the time. It isn't valid. Think statistically.
There is a strong preponderance of leftism, particularly at the level of teachers' associations, unions, and people who actually do stuff politically rather than just teach. U Missouri apparently is monolithic. That is what I said, and it is true.
You also seem to be arguing that I've drawn the "skewed conclusion" that all departments have gone leftist. But obviously I haven't. I showed at the beginning of the first post that it is specifically English departments.
4520777 I think there are two simply policy issues that well-outline the problem with the Republican AHCA they just passed that explain why (At least in my eyes), the policy is tantamount to murder.
In the US, Health Care is delivered through insurance. Unless you are crazy rich, straight up paying for it is impossible; the cost of cancer treatment is so high as to be unaffordable to bankruptcy-inducing for the vast majority of people.
So you need insurance to mitigate that cost. We have no single payer (Apart from Medicare or Medicaid). So it's insurance, financial devastation, or death.
The current proposal rolls back the ban on insurance companies charging more for people with pre-existing conditions. Now, there's some argument to be made for cases where said pre-existing condition has a clear causal link to behavior - lung cancer for smoking, cirrhosis of the liver for tons of drinking, type 2 diabetes for a diet high in sugar and low in exercise - but plenty of them are gained through no fault of your own, like being born with a weak heart.
The old system let insurers charge people more because of that, or just flat out deny coverage. If you were born with a heart defect, then you were screwed for life and would be paying more forever through pure bad luck. Or, you'd just get denied.
So the ACA banned that practice by mandating that geography & age be the only two factors, although they did to my knowledge allow some exceptions for things like smoking that can charge higher premiums because of the extremely clear causal link between it and cancer.
However, if someone can get it for the same price whenever, the logical play for a chronic condition like Type 2 Diabetes becomes 'Don't get insurance until this happens, then join in and socialize the cost' - you've skipped out on contributing to the funding pool while you are a net positive, and only join up when you are a net negative.
Which is where the individual mandate comes in, and why it's necessary. You have to have insurance or pay a penalty; that's to prevent people from exploiting the system.
And, well, the AHCA rolls all that back. So either you go back to massively expensive high-risk pools, which screws people who play fair to discourage people from being free riders - or you screw over everyone playing fair if you get rid of the mandate.
Getting rid of one without getting rid of the other breaks the system, and getting rid of both means people go back to dying because they had the misfortune to do things like 'Get shot in the back' or 'Be in a car accident' that leaves them with chronic conditions needing lifelong care.
For me - I think that now that we've found a way to address that problem via the ACA's dual system of flat pools & individual mandate, then yes, undoing that is tantamount to handing a death sentence to those people cast out once again. It's not directly pulling the trigger, but it's as good as killing them.
4520600
If I tell you about Creative Writing, I'll sound really crazy.
<sigh>
According to Eric Bennett in "The Pyramid Scheme", in MFS vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (2014), the American creative writing department got its start with the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936. Its second director, Paul Engle, brought it to national prominence by getting money from right-wing organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Asia Foundation (a CIA front) to fight communism. It was supposed to be a counterweight against the Soviet Union, which was spending a lot of money to give young writers from all around the world scholarships to come to Moscow and take writing workshops (and receive Marxist indoctrination).
The actual writers, however, were a combination of conservative New Critics and disillusioned New York City communists whose common ground was a hatred of science and reason (p. 66). This resulted in embracing the modernist style described in my Anne Dillard post, which was supposed to make it impossible for the writer to deceive and mislead the reader (the way they thought science and reason did). (I don't think this makes sense, because the arguments are made both that the minimalist "just the ideas" style avoids deceiving the reader by making the argument plain, and that the maximalist "show don't tell, don't narrate, just describe huge amounts of detail to no apparent purpose" style avoids deceiving the reader by not making an argument--and if they're both right, then everything avoids deceiving the reader.)
Anyway.
According to Chad Harbach, in "MFA vs NYC", chapter 2 of the same book, the creative writing programs--which are now often taught by the english department, but are sometimes a separate department--have created their own culture of literature and their own canon, based on short stories rather than novels. Chad writes (p. 23-24),
So the reason short stories in literary magazines are so much worse than literary novels is that they are what creative writing programs teach people to write.
4520832
What invective? A simple description of their motivations and results is all it was, and it is quite obviously applicable. The results are clearly and unambiguously inhumane. The best that can be said about their motivations is that they are callous, insensitive, and entirely detached from reality. There has to be a reason for what they do, and they have clearly enumerated that reason. Multiple GOP congresscritters have said openly (if politically unwisely) that they do not consider poor people worthy of healthcare, and they do not consider certain minorities deserving of simple human decency. This is not speculation, this is documented fact. They have expressed an inhumane callousness toward the lives of others.
I don't have to "believe" it, as there are open documented instances of people saying this exact thing. Even moreso when it comes to minorities, especially LGBT minorities. One can go all over the various news outlets and social media sites and find records of people saying exactly this. I recently had to ban a number of them from my own Facebook page for flooding a post with such comments. 90% of which were middle-aged and older white men, BTW (I had to visit their pages in order to block them).
There's a strange disconnect among these people. When their dealing with their own misfortune, and that of their friends, then it's never their fault, it's always the result of malicious actions by "liberal", "immigrants", "muslims", "queers", etc. When it's the misfortune of some group that they dislike, it's always the fault of that group. White poor people are getting screwed over by liberals and immigrants, black/hispanic poor people are just lazy violent drug addicts and deserve to die. This is a profoundly common thread in middle-American culture.
4520838
Redefinition fallacy. We're not using it in different ways, you're cherry picking what you define as "values".
"HITLERCASH, Part 2."
It's so weird. I always just assumed English lit was about literature. Fortunately, I've never seen this sort of thing first-hoof.
4520917
Okay, then change every instance where I say "values" to something that means the things I said I mean. Because that's what I'm talking about.
4520618 From what i heard from people in america i know, the price of medication and medical services is insane. From what little "research" i did and remember its pretty much a open non regulated market, in the sense that companies are able to inflate prices as they desire?
Wouldnt fixing that then be a great way to aid and enable beginning to set some universal healthcare or such? Just slapping a band aid on a infected wound doesnt do much.
Then again i lack actual knowledge about the american system ( or lack of one?).
4520813
If you said that values can be wrong, I could understand that. You would be claiming there is some natural law. But you are instead saying that values can make us wrong. I don't think that's coherent. It implies that rightness/wrongness derives from some source other than some combination of values and physical realities.
"Rightness" or "wrongness" can be measured as the degree to which your actions satisfy your values. In that case the klansman isn't "wrong". Let's keep the word "wrong" for things which are factually or logically incorrect.
But also, your model of cognition is very GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI), in which everyone has terminal values, and an infinite amount of computational power to compute plans to satsify those values. That isn't how cognition works, nor how values are encoded into humans. Human values aren't terminal. Evolution has given people final, qualia values that are always actually instrumental to producing more copies of their genes. Attempts to sort human values into terminal and instrumental doesn't work. For one thing, we have as values things that appear at different levels of completion of the full underlying plan they fulfil to reproduce our genes, and these values exist side-by-side, and the degree to which we emphasize the different values varies based on our hormone levels, our momentary circumstances, the nutritional status of our mother while she bore us, the climate we were born in...
You then get into arguments over whether "human values" means "the average values of humans found on Earth", and then in what environment the humans must be born or raised for their values to count as "human", and... there's no end to it. Human values just aren't terminal. All that humans have are evolved values which are instrumental to reproducing their genes. It's a very deep problem.
But my point is that this makes it impossible to use a model in which a thing is right or wrong wrt how well it satisfies some mythical universal human terminal values under logical closure, of the kind Eliezer Yudkowsky believes in, because there are no human terminal values. Only genes have terminal values. A white supremacist has adopted heuristics saying racial preservation is the best thing for... well, he's not sure what the final purpose is any more, but that turns out to be the same way everyone else operates. You can't single out the white supremacist as being "wrong" in a principled way. If you tried, you'd have to evolutionary psychology, and would probably end up proving that the white supremacist was the most "right" person, because his goals would be the most-successful at increasing his genes' share in the future gene pool. The intuition that he's "wrong" is based on using evolutionary psychology to arrive at human values on prevention of suffering, sanctity of life, friendship, and so on, which evolved to perpetuate a group's genes, but then stopping there and not continuing on to also include the human values for promoting your group's genes over those of other groups, which are values that lead whites to endorse white supremacy.
The best we can do now to make sense of it is to agree that that those values our society will publicly proclaim as "best" are those which, under the present circumstances, do best at mutually satisfying our desires. We can't phrase this as "right" or "wrong" because we can't encode these desires in a logic with non-contradiction. The white supremacist's values would be "best"--a set of heuristics which best-satisfy America's desires on average--if the world were as he believes it to be. His values are "not best" when his other beliefs are "wrong." We can use the word "wrong" here because these beliefs aren't values, but factual beliefs he uses to model the differences between races and the nature of a world without whites, the inevitability of race war, the destructiveness and rapidity of a race war, the degree to which it would divide American whites, and so on. Note these are context-dependent, not absolute truths.
Here's the brutal truth: People in the past weren't worse people than people today. They lived in circumstances in which coordination on prisoner's dilemma and tragedy-of-the-commons etc. was harder, and so being genocidal and racist was the best solution for each group at the time. Reducing suffering doesn't result from teaching people to be "better"--how have we not learned this yet?--but from providing the technology to reduce competitive pressure and reward cooperation.
4520865: "STEM remains more immune because STEM inherently depends upon quantifiable results"
Canada: "Hold my beer"
Ottawa to universities: Improve diversity or lose research chair funds
So, unless we can conjure up not just more "diverse" STEM graduates, but Research Chair grade STEM professionals, kiss the funding goodbye. If it's inflate the qualifications of some "diverse" candidates or lose the funding, well... I wouldn't bet on too much principled opposition here.
4520939
No, I said supporting the wrong values make someone wrong. It was quite clear, and clearly self-evident.
4520906
Really? You are unfamiliar with the use of the word 'to believe' to mean 'accept as true.' Really?
Interesting.
So, am I getting your argument correctly: some people you've met or read about hold opinion X, therefore approx. 63 000 000 people hold this opinion. And holding this opinion makes them morally equivalent to a Klansman.
I mean it's not the best argument, I must say.
So if you can't talk to or convince these people (because they absolutely do want poor people to die, even the poor among them want poor people to die) what is your solution? Gas? Machine-guns? Genetically engineered anthrax strain? What?
EDITED TO ADD: I forgot to mark who I was replying to.
4520867
It's the part where you "keep hating those motherfuckers and the motherfuckers who voted for them," I suspect. "Motherfuckers whom I hate" is generally not the sort of group you seek to understand and open up a dialogue with.
4520939
While I think your analysis is good, I think you read too much into the original comment. I understood it to mean that there is a natural law, that the poster is privy to such natural law, and that certain values are simply and flatly evil, and that therefore compromise with those values is, likewise, evil. In other words I think that, metaethically, you are dealing with a natural law deontologist versus preference utilitarian.
4521045
Yours is a deliberately uncharitable interpretation of English. It is simply not a fact that the absence of a qualifier in written colloquial English indicates that the absolute qualifier is present in all cases. Generally speaking, English is not a cloth we cast over Aristotelian logic, and the null qualifier in English is in fact "significantly many given the context." This is not amenable to analysis but that's why mathematicians write their definitions if and only if they use their peculiar jargon which, as a matter of face, is a cloth cast over mathematical logic.
Note how I can use metaphor there and speak of cloths and so on without interspersing it all with 'figuratively' and so on. I'm trusting in context. All people who write English do so.
Not, also, the fact that I used all above. If how you read Bad Horse is correct, why would I? Would not the sentence 'People who write English do so." be equivalent? Is it? It doesn't appear to be to me.
Either way, I make a plea that you interpret what Bad Horse writes with charity. Discourse goes much better that way. And much worse when you write things like:
You know he didn't. For one, at the very worst, he compared your brother to a harmless scorpion. Except he didn't do that either. He made an analogy using, as one does in analogy, things quite unlike the thing one is analogizing except in one single aspect. This aspect is that, like harmless lethal pet scorpions, your brother is rare.
And that's not even slightly insulting. Pretending that it is, well, it's beneath you.
4521158
Why?
4521158
Welcome to one of Bad Horse's political blogs! The ride only ends when everyone feels that way.
4521145
I don't see a clear and self-evident distinction between these three statements.
Anyway, my position is that the word "wrong" should be reserved for factual or logical errors, not bad values. Values thus can't be wrong, and can't make someone wrong. Keep bad reasoning distinct from bad values.
4521158 Sorry--I shouldn't have made a big deal out of it. I'm going thru the comments and trying to respond to everything, not picking comments out to respond to because I'm angry. I wasn't angry. Didn't mean to insult your brother.