Opinions, art, debate
I told my husband that we were going to celebrate today. When he asked what we were celebrating, I couldn’t say. It was only when a reader of this blog reminded me that today was the anniversary of the October Revolution* that I realized why I was feeling the need to celebrate. The power of the subconscious is, indeed, amazing.
* October Revolution is celebrated on November 7 because of the change in the calendar. The Russian Empire was on a different calendar before the revolution.
Kotkin writes:
While it was true that almost all the leading lights of Georgia ‘ s Social Democrats emerged from the Tiflis Seminary – like the many radical members of the Jewish Labour Federation (Bund) produced at the famed Rabbinical School and Teachers’ Seminary in Wilno – that was partly because such places provided an education and strong dose of self – discipline.
Here Kotkin is allowing his belief in the all – conquering power of hard work and education to steer him away from a more profound analysis. The Russian revolution and the system that it ended up creating was based on a deeply religious model. Stalin recreated the Holy Trinity, the prayer corner, the adoration of the Holy remains, etc in the supposedly atheist country he led.
The revolutionaries of the Russian Empire rejected the religions of their ancestors because they found a more convincing religion.
Nobody is as incapable of preventing their ideology from seeping into their research output as historians. I knew who Kotkin, the author of the new biography of Stalin, votes for by page 2.
This isn’t a big problem in itself. I’m not looking for books written by robots. But it does get funny when the author of a scholarly book on Stalin begins to massage Stalin’s life into the narrative of the American dream. “And so little Stalin read a lot, excelled at school, tried to better himself, believed in God, and as a result of his hard work and religiosity, achieved great social mobility.”
It is also very funny how dedicated Kotkin is to proving that Stalin doesn’t come from a dirt – poor family in a tiny backwater town. In Kotkin’s world, it just isn’t possible to gain the importance Stalin did without growing up middle – class. Kotkin’s efforts to make Stalin’s family middle class are so intense that they smack of desperation.
I’m loving the book.
From Kotkin ‘ s biography of Stalin (released today):
Over the more than four centuries from the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia expanded an average of fifty square miles per day.
I never considered it in this light but the statement explains a lot. Of course, the Russians can’t leave Ukraine alone. They have interiorized the need to expand as their only raison d’etre. And now they just can’t stop expanding.
P.S. So far I’m enjoying Kotkin’s book. The style reminds me of the way I explain this same material (Europe in the XIX th and early XXth century) to my Freshmen. Kotkin even uses my favorite rhetorical device of “if somebody were to fall asleep in 1900 and then woke up 30 years later, they wouldn’t recognize the world they’d encounter.”
“The status of a world superpower is worth, for most Russians, going hungry and suffering privations,” a very calm professor of economics explained on Russian TV. “We only recently created the kind of economy where people have free access to goods and services, and this means that the people of Russia value the free access to goods very highly. But they value the status of the global superpower even more.”
The saddest thing is that he is not wrong. Now compare it with the sacrifices Americans are willing to make to retain their status of the global superpower.
And now you can easily draw your own conclusions.
An interesting article on male hysteria:
This opening was, according to Micale, eclipsed as “a great wave of amnesia regarding the nervous disorders descended on European medicine around 1800” (p. 49). During this period, “medical science and practice were aggressively pressed into the service of . . . maintaining a regime of difference between the sexes,” thus excluding behaviors such as hysteria from being ascribed to men (p. 49). Of course, there were a few dissenting voices, like that of the French physician Étienne-Jean Georget in the 1820s, but these were drowned out by a much wider consensus that insisted on strict gender boundaries between the sexes. It was left to the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s to establish male hysteria as a legitimate diagnosis. Unlike his predecessors, “Charcot had genuinely come to believe that men and children were susceptible to the same nervous disorders as women” (p. 124). In “propounding a theory of hysteria in the male,” writes Micale, “Charcot was also attempting to undermine a theoretical model of the disorder that had led to some of the most deplorable therapeutic practices of his day” (p. 128). Nevertheless, as Micale shows, despite his eagerness to identify male hysteria, Charcot continued to ascribe traditional gendered attributes to the distressed, including assumptions about the “otherness” of male hysterics as inheritors of degenerative constitutions.
This is the most profound thing I have read all week. And possibly in this entire year: “The level of emotional health that any person has (and also at any one time), will have to do with how much of the ugly they are able to take in and sublimate (turn it into something necessary and true, if not quite beautiful).”
“Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system. University counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady increase in numbers seeking help for mental health problems over the past decade.” This totally reminded me of that joke were a Soviet man says, “These French women are so dirty! They take showers every day!” The possibility that people might simply be getting more comfortable with the concept of psychological hygiene doesn’t even occur to the authors.
Please read this short but crucial post on the neoliberal academic evolution.
A weird experience at a scholarly conference.
A very informative post on Qur’anic Revisionism.
Of course, anybody can make fun of David Brooks. But few people can do it in such a brilliant way as the linked blogger.
An interesting recipe for scholarly productivity: “At the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Matthias Krapf, Heinrich W. Ursprung, and Christian Zimmermann looked at the publishing output of people with and without children, quantifying productivity by how much the academics produced. They found that women with at least two children at home are more productive, on average across their careers, than those who have only one child, and mothers of one child are more productive than those with none.”
Important musings on grad-school work ethic. A long but very valuable post. Beautifully written, too.
“Paul told CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday that his strong statements weren’t driven by a 2016 presidential run (although he said his position would help in that endeavor, should he enter the race). “I want the Republican party to be bigger and more successful because I think our philosophy will help the country more,” he said.” It would be amazing if somebody finally revealed this philosophy to the masses. I’ve been waiting for years.
A disturbing development: “China is…making a less-noticed push in the west to enforce claims along its 2,200-mile (3,400-kilometer) frontier with India. India says the number of what it describes as Chinese “transgressions” across the two countries’ ill-defined boundary has climbed sharply—to more than 400 last year from 213 in 2011.” The last thing we need is for the world’s next greatest superpowers to start fighting openly.
A very upsetting video about the attempts to block Bill Maher from coming to speak at Berkeley.
Why, why, why doesn’t every car come equipped with this amazing, phenomenal, fantastic object?
“Thus research cannot be planned and managed like, say, teaching duties or a Walmart store. If you could manage it, then it would not be research.” This must mean that my research isn’t really research. Always good to know.
I keep suggesting to people that they see a sexologist but if this is the kind of advice American sexologists offer, it’s better to stay away.
“Sontag died a decade ago, but there is something compelling about knowing that she was on Sephora’s mailing list.” And what does it compel you to do? Shop? Freaks abound.
Remind me again never to do any stupid multiple choice tests. They are supposed to be easy to grade but what I didn’t take into account was that the autistic brain can’t keep track of the meaningless ABCDs. My mind clouds over and I descend into a deep fog when I try to keep track.
I feel like my head is about to explode. Of course, I could have asked the TA but I relied on the accounts of people who kept saying this was easy.
Fuck multiple choice. It was a pain and a half to create the test and grading is even worse.
I received some very interesting question from one of the readers of this blog and I want to share them here.
1) How do you improve reading and writing skills in children?
The best way to raise a voracious reader is to create an intolerable home environment that the child will be desperate to escape. She will try to escape through books and will grow up to be a professor of literature. To ensure the complete success of this project, never let her outside and make sure she is incapable of making friends.
Jokes aside, here is what I have to say on the subject. During every stage in life we solve different problems and achieve different goals through different methods. The main goal of a child is to develop and get socialized. This is achieved through one crucial activity: playing. There is no person on this planet who is working with a psychoanalyst to address the problems arising from her or him not having read enough books as a child. However, there are crowds of people who are seeking psychological help because they didn’t get to play as children.
A 9-year-old who frequently says, “I don’t want to go out and play, I’d just rather sit here and read” gladdens the hearts of many adults. However, this is a child who is much more at risk for subsequent psychological problems who prefers to run around with other kids day and night.
Play – any kind of play, but especially active play outside with other kids – is the most crucial activity any child can engage in. There will be ample time to read, write, study, and work later in life. But there will never again be time to play.
For people who fear that children will not be successful professionally and economically if they don’t engage in educational activities since the cradle, let me share the story of a man I know who didn’t even know the letters of the alphabet until the age of 7. Much later in life, he got a PhD and is now a voracious leader and a very high earner. He is also one of the most brilliant intellectuals I have ever met, which is one of the reasons I married him.
I realize that I’m not really answering the question that was posed to me. However, in our developed societies, parents who only have 1 or 2 children have way too much energy to format, observe, and mold that poor little kid. And those who don’t have that time and energy (because they have more kids than that or because they are too occupied, etc.) feel guilty for not being able to dedicate every second of their existence to doing educational activities with the children. Just a few weeks ago, a was talking to a woman who had 2 kids and then when the youngest was 4 also had twins. So now she is feeling enormously guilty for being “a bad mother” because she lets the two eldest kids play in the backyard all day long while she takes care of the twins. I tried to communicate to her that her kids were lucky little tykes and she had nothing to feel bad about but she didn’t look like she believed me.
2) How do you raise them to know the value of hard work? Being a plodder is so underrated!
It’s true that the world belongs to patient plodders. The only way, however, to foster the love of work in children is by personal example. The child who sees his or her parents happy and excited about their work, whatever it may be, will be doomed to finding the work that will make them happy.
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