Full up

My schedule for the coming semester - doesn't looks so bad, huh. Except for all that happens outside the boxes in one-on-one meetings with current first year and religious studies faculty and peer advisers, not to mention faculty I'm recruiting for next year, and various events for First Year and Religious Studies: don't imagine Fridays remain free. And class prep. (No, I'm not teaching Chemistry of Life: for the first time in my life I'm taking a chemistry class!) And reading daily reading responses (there are 35 students signed up for Theorizing Religion). If you've ever wondered why faculty at colleges look harried even though they "only teach a few hours a week," here's why.

Good thing I got myself a subscription to BAM's Next Wave Festival for eight Thursdays in the next few months: I'll be good and ready for diversion by Thursday night each week!

Worth waiting for

Meet Bohumil Hrabal, a famous Czech satirical writer (1914-1997). I know of him because, when I visited Prague in 2002 (for a pay-as- you-go conference on Evil and Wickedness!), my hostess recommended Hrabal's I served the King of England as the one Czech novel I should make sure to read. Read it I did, and love it, too. It tells the picaresque story of a tiny waiter who wants nothing more than to be rich - though he enjoys the company of ladies, too. He pursues his dream, oblivious to political changes around him from the 1920s to 1948, and nearly achieves it. But the joy of the novel is the absurd and tragic world around him, and the suggestion that Dite's experience and temperament are like that of the Czechs as a people, assistant waiters to the predatory fat cats among European nations. Somehow lovable without being admirable, amoral Dite is an antihero but an innocuous one; the world he manages to ignore isn't one you'd want anyone to be aware of.

Well, I Served the King of England has been made into a wonderful film, directed by Jirí Menzel. It opened today in New York. The twinky Bulgarian actor Ivan Barnev is terrific as the protagonist, and Julia Jentsch (the Sophie Scholl of "Sophie Scholl") is hilarious in a terrifying sort of way as the true believing Nazi Sudeten-German girl he falls in love with. Martin Huba plays the omniscient maître d' at the Hotel Paris, the only really admirable character, the noble version of Czech identity - but still a waiter at a restaurant whose rich clients are from other countries.

The film is full of delights, though I'm not sure whether the particular absurdist cynicism of the larger story works over here - the audience at the Quad seemed flummoxed by it. Give it a try, though.

(Oh, and lest you think me an oblivious Dite, concerned only with what to serve up to my students: I thought the perfidious Clintons gave better speeches than true-hearted Obama in Denver, though his was strong enough. I share Vladimir Putin's suspicion that the Georgian-South Ossetian conflagration was encouraged by the White House with an eye to the upcoming presidential election. These guys are unscrupulous, and very good - look at the way they stole the thunder of the DNC by announcing McCain's Cylon running mate the very next day.)

Eloquent walls

Went on a tour this afternoon of mural sponsored by an organization called Groundswell in Brooklyn. Groundswell's artists team up with groups of teenagers (mostly) who learn about mural painting, and develop a mural on some issue which concerns them. It's remarkable to see the murals and how they change the urban landscape. The one above shows children who've been killed by speeding cars as they crossed the road. The one below will be dedicated next Saturday but has already become a hub of controversy. It was designed by young women unhappy about military recruitment in their high school. Click it to see what the parachutes say. The black triangle is the BQE, from which the top half of the mural is visible.

Shell game

When I asked my students yesterday to introduce themselves with something about them that the other students did not already know, the first few reported on their dietary lives - "I'm a vegetarian," "I like grilled cheese sandwiches" - but then we got derailed by pets. In fact it was the grilled cheese lover, for she told us "I like grilled cheese sandwiches, and turtles." "Not together," I asked? "No," she smiled, unsure of what I was implying. But the turtles won out after all, for no fewer than three more students (out of twelve!) proved to have turtles in their lives.

What to make of it? I suppose I've myself to blame - of course they weren't going to risk anything less than unthreatening about themselves, so we ended up with kittens, turtles and tofu. But maybe there's more than meets the eye. When I recounted the turtle infestation to my office neighbor E, he thought it significant - a way of saying that one was timid and might quickly withdraw into her shell if confronted. V, our office manager, was dismayed - she had a turtle one, she told me, and he couldn't do anything, couldn't jump or race, wouldn't even play. (She then got a 6-foot iguana, apparently.) [Source of the cool picture above.]

But I've thought of a way (maybe) to turn the turtles into a teaching moment. You've surely heard this story:

There is an Indian story — at least I heard it as an Indian story — about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave) what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 28-29)

Or maybe you know Stephen Hawking's version in A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Other versions exist but "turtles all the way down" is the punchline, and - I hope - will prove an interesting challenge for a course on religion and secularism. I might give the students both versions. For Hawking, "turtles all the way down" shows the reductio ad absurdam of faith claims. But for Geertz, it shows the wisdom of ancient cultures, or at least of the naive fatuity of the wish to get beyond culture. As he goes on to say: Such, indeed, is the condition of things. ... Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. (29)

Hard of hearing

Had my first meeting with the students in my first year seminar on Secularism today. We didn't talk about the course - the semester doesn't officially begin until next week; the purpose of the meeting was just to get to know each other, and to discuss yesterday's orientation speech by Eddie Glaude. My eleven students are nice, seem to like each other, and seemed comfortable participating in seminar discussion from the start. There are big differences in experience waiting to emerge, I learn from their application essays, but for today we had a friendly discussion about politics and education.

Not about Eddie's talk, you ask? Well, it was supposed to be. After some brief introductions I had everyone write down what they thought important in Eddie's talk, telling them that the purpose of the exercise was both to make sure that everyone's concerns were voiced and to show how various people's impressions are - which is why seminar instruction gives you more perspectives than a lecture. Two students hadn't been able to attend, so I periodically asked them, "based on our discussion, what do you think Eddie Glaude's speech was about?" Sad to say, they never had a chance to find out - the other students (at least the most vocal ones) missed Eddie's main points, or confused them with what our dean, who introduced him, said.

We're going to have to work on this! Listening is hard, but learning can't happen without it.

Generation by generation

Well, our academic year started with a bang today! Our orientation speaker, Eddie Glaude, gave a terrific address for the incoming first years. Eddie and I overlapped in graduate school, and it was wonderful to see him in action again. It was also wonderful to see how seriously he took the task of giving the first lecture a new crop of students would hear in college - more than can be said, alas, of past orientation speakers, who tended to be obscure, patronizing or lazy. I'd told Eddie we wanted something about liberal arts, democracy and diversity and if he could throw in some John Dewey (a New School founder and one of his intellectual heroes), so much the better.

So much the better indeed - he did all this and more, in an address entitled "The liberal arts in a time of war." I won't try to summarize his talk (though I'll ask my advisees to try tomorrow when I meet them for the first time), but I'll share with you a line from Dewey which played a central part: every generation has to accomplish democracy all over again. It's a familiar Deweyan (indeed Jeffersonian) idea; in other places Dewey asserts that democratic life has to be enacted anew in every generation, in every year and day, in the living relations of person to person in all social forms and institutions, and that Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

What a fantastic idea to offer idealistic (though fearful of being betrayed by a certain Kenyan-Kansan, if not by the American electorate) young people, especially in connection with the equally Deweyan idea that American democracy is an incomplete project. And yet one student stumped us all during Q&A (though only Eddie had to answer): If every generation has to accomplish democracy anew, does that mean it's always getting better? I've no idea how I would have answered, but was interested that Eddie's first response was "no."

A right to a name

Learned something interesting today: the UN's 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child asserts that every child shall be entitled from his birth to a name (Principle 3). I'd really like to know who came up with this, and what their reasoning was. Principle 3 goes on to say and a nationality, a more practical and actionable matter; but they're quite different things.

Discussing this over dinner with my dear friends J and A (J had read about it in a book about Hannah Arendt, in connection with Arendt's claim that the most fundamental right is the "right to have rights"), we decided that this is very deep. A name makes you a member of a community, a society, just as a number (the KZs were probably in the back of the writer's mind) does the opposite. But then things got (interestingly but frustratingly) complex. What of children called by different names in different parts of a divided society or family? What of those who don't like their given names? And what of names, like the Japanese, Ichiro/Taro 一郎, Jiro 二郎 or 次郎, Saburo 三郎, etc., which are essentially just numbers (1, 2 or next, 3, etc.)? A name may assure you of a social location (at least on paper) but by itself isn't enough to ensure you social respect, let alone autonomy...

What led to this discussion, by the way, was my observation that Rick Warren's question to the presidential candidates "At what point does a baby get human rights?" wasn't just a pro-life formulation but an odd invocation of "human rights," a concept not even a century old. (He just wanted the baby/human contrast, I suspect.)

So what does one do on a beautiful late summer Saturday after being out of New York for a month? Why, one goes to the Met to catch up on exhibits (like one on the early history of photography, from which this view [taken in 1856!] of - through - Roslin Chapel's South Porch and yard by Roger Fenton hails), and then walks across a Central Park bathed in golden light to stock up on cheese at Fairway.

Cross country

On the flight back from San Diego to New York this (early) morning I spent most of the time snoozing and reading Victoria Nelson's bizarre but fascinating The Secret Life of Puppets (recommended at the Religion & Theater focus group at ATHE and blurbed by Neil Gaiman). Occasional glimpses out the window showed the radio towers atop Black Mountain (but for the marine layer we'd be looking back towards the Pacific); remarkable Dali-worthy shapes somewhere in the West beyond the Grand Canyon; marshes on approach to Newark Airport. Wish the window'd been as clear as last year, or I at least knew how to photoshop so the tint from the dirty window would disappear!

The sea, the sea!

It's a small world

Have I tired you with my paean to Lego? I'll just say this: Just as I'm over the moon that my nephews have fallen in love with the surf, so I am delighted that they love Lego. The wonders of Lego are like the wonders of soccer and the Macintosh combined, squared, and blessed by Noam Chomsky (linguist, not political commentator). The same pieces make an Alpine village one day, a space station the next, trucks, dining rooms, animals, spaceships, railroads and dancing figures and, in the latest iteration (literally building on yesterday's Hills Hoist), It's a Small World, by way of a Swiss paper cutout and perhaps the memory of the top of a May Pole. Why would anyone want toys which only do one thing?

Lego Hills Hoist

Like breathing out and breathing in

As the summer winds its way to a close, I'm feeling that what I've learned - that is, learned to see, since it's been all around all along (for instance here) - is the regular irregularity of the world. There are patterns, rhythms, cycles all around us: everyone knows that, and I'd noticed it too. But these patterns are ragged. The rhythm comes not from particular iterations but cumulatively. A statistical average - and beyond it, a mystery. If things aren't precisely the same time after time, what makes it that their average stays the same, enough to keep the wobble from tipping things into chaos?

I'd like to think I'd learned this from the surf - above is the tide calendar for these parts - but that's not it; my father and I have been referring to these calendars (favorite Christmas presents) for years, but I never fully processed what the wobbling line meant as a line. This was the summer I started to appreciate the wondrousness of regular irregularity because of the way it began: with the IMS meditation retreat where I finally got to square one, and observed my breath long enough to notice that it's not the same from breath to breath, but varies widely (while still keeping me going!). It takes me a while to absorb things, so it's taken until the last few weeks for me to start to notice that the surf, the breath of the sea if you will, is the same. And to connect it to the same thing all over everywhere. Wondrous.

One needn't be Buddhist to see this, or make sense of it (not that I think I've made any sense of it, or really expect to). I see now a deeper rationale for the medieval debate about universals and particulars (realism v. nominalism). I'd comfortably sided with the Aristotelians here, who think there's nothing but individuals, with universals no more than the generalizations of our minds. But now it seems way more complex. It may be by generalization that we arrive at universal ideas, but some kind of general tendency or consistency or commitment is at work in the particulars, too, in a way I can't fathom. The question about universals and particulars now seems to be about this: do the variations matter? Or: how do they matter, why do they matter? Are they distractions from universals, or do they constitute them through their very variation?

La Brea

Just took a splendid little trip to Los Angeles - drove up yesterday evening, dropping my brother in law off at LAX on the way, to my dear friends R & A in Eagle Rock for dinner, staying over through a beautiful breakfast at seventies relic Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena. Then I met Suzanna Guzman for coffee, and we got on like a house on fire (somehow, somewhere, something collaborative is going to happen!), before finally wending my way down Arroyo Secco and much of the impressive length of Wilshire Boulevard to meet my friend G, who's just moved from NYC to the City of Angels. We met at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a very pleasant complex of museums, from the 60s Worlds Fair-like Japanese Pavilion to the new building by Renzo Piano for the Broad Collection of contemporary art (which is the opposite of Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum: dully unremarkable as a building but facilitating wonderful exhibition spaces and an impressive collection, including a whole room of giant Cindy Shermans, Mark Tansey's "Forward Retreat," above, and a wonderful double-S by Richard Serra) to Hancock Park, where we heard a concert by Chucho Valdes. LACMA has a bit of everything - in their African collection I was made deliriously happy by El Anatsui's 2007 "Fading Scroll" (woven from recycled aluminum!), below. LACMA is right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, which I remember from childhood - tar pits into which hapless woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and the like slipped, drowned and eventually got perfectly fossilized. Sort of an odd neighbor for an art museum, or is it...?

TPSR art

Ripples

All sorts of unexpected causal chains in the news recently. Higher oil prices mean Americans driving fewer miles, which means revenue shortfalls for highways but also a fall in the number of traffic fatalities. Threatened and actual home foreclosures mean some people wanting divorces can't afford them, while their swimming pools, the filters turned off, are breeding grounds for mosquitoes (some of whom, in San Diego, may carry West Nile Virus). Job losses are leading some people to marry to qualify for insurance through their spouses. And abroad, chemical factory shut-downs in Beijing to improve air quality for the Olympics have led to shortfalls for Indian pharmaceutical companies...

Antinomies of race

Hey, did I ever tell you that essay I've been working on forever (you saw a version in March) is just a few months from appearing in print? I corrected the proofs last week, and had to write a 300-word abstract (which I spent the better part of a day futzing about, not that you can tell!). Now, after my months of rewriting, you don't need to read the article at all!

Antinomies of Race:
Diversity and Destiny in Kant

This essay reads Kant’s pioneering work in the theory of ‘race’ in the context of his intellectual projects from ‘physical geography’ to ‘pragmatic anthropology’ by way of ethics. In different periods of Kant’s career, ‘race’ assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of what man ‘can and should make of himself’.
The first part of the essay traces ‘race’ as an advertisement for Kant’s new disciplines of physical geography and anthropology in the 1770s. Giving new meaning to a foreign term with strong associations of breeding and husbandry, Kant proposes the supposedly exceptionless hereditary traits of ‘race’ as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns are not merely classificatory; his 4-‘race’ scheme, modeled on the temperaments, allows a special status for ‘whites’ as at once a ‘race’ and a transcendence of ‘race’.
The essay’s second part follows the refinements of the ‘race’ idea in essays Kant wrote in the 1780s and published in the same journal as his essays on enlightenment and the philosophy of history. Given a new status by the critical turn, ‘race’ is offered a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason; its empirical verification shows Kant’s whole critical system is no chimera.
The essay’s third part argues that Kant’s theory of ‘race’ came into its own in the 1990s, gaining wide acceptance. Kant relies on familiarity with it (complete with husbandry-like echoes) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought ethics impossible.
Understanding how the concept of ‘race’ interacted with and absorbed more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns for Kant, we gain a better sense of its fateful attractiveness to 19th century thinkers.

You should see these guys dance

Meet (mustachioed) Topsy, (sunnies-sporting) Dude and (cross-eyed) Lego Boy, and notice they're on gears: one spins, they all spin.

Perfect web

Latest web in a series which started with one at Melbourne Uni and another outside my home window. This one's under the eaves of our house here, thankfully not as big as the one of which my father sent a picture.

Whatever

Here's a discouraging report on what students learn in college:

During the college years, most students make significant progress …, but large majorities remain in a naïve relativist state, persuaded that many problems have no single correct answer and that none of the possible answers is necessarily better than the others. Only a small minority of seniors emerge convinced that ill-structured problems are susceptible to reasoned arguments based on evidence and that some answers are sounder than others.

(Derek Bok, Our underachieving colleges, 114)

Bok's referring to developmental theories that see college students as intolerant of complexity when they arrive (they think there's a right answer for every question, and seek an authority to deliver it to them) and, if all goes well, moving through a stage of bewildered defensive relativism (there are only opinions and every opinion is equally 'valid') to a comfort with complexity (or "commitment within relativism," as it is sometimes called). Too many get stuck in the relativist rut.

I wonder if our college does better than the average here - or worse...!