My students invariably assume that in every conflict the US was on the side of evil. Fifteen years ago, it was the exact opposite but it’s been steadily going in the direction of always reflexively condemning the US.
It’s gotten to the point where in the most recent winter semester 2 students informed me that in WWII the United States fought on Hitler’s side. When I asked “so whom did the Nazi Germany and the US fight against?”, they were completely stumped. This is a generation that has the vaguest possible knowledge about the USSR and is invariably shocked to discover it participated in WWII.
But forget students. How many adults in the US automatically support whatever side of a conflict detests their country the most? The entirety of many people’s opinion about the world can be summarized as “US bad; its enemies good.”
This is an expression I simply hate. It always conceals an intention to increase immigration. What I want is a complete ban on processing immigration claims of people who are in the US illegally. This is a simple, cheap and fast method to stop torturing both the US and Central America.
Any politician who uses this expression should be boycotted.
Here’s another interesting question from the anonymous app:
Thing is, I’m not seeing that. My most curious, sensitive and deep-thinking students tend to double-major in Spanish and computer-sci, Spanish and Chemistry, Spanish and pre-med. The students (always male) who’ll show up at my office to talk about poetry, history, and society are pretty much all future programmers. A new computer-sci major came today, and by the look of it, I’ll see him in my office now constantly. They are all very interesting guys with a wide range of interests.
Curiously, the discipline that absolutely despises foreign languages is English lit. English majors never take our courses beyond the required Beginner level. A double major in English and Spanish is more rare than a giraffe in the Arctic.
And this is completely off-topic but it’s very sad that female students never go to professors’ offices just to chat. I go down the hallway and see a male student chatting with a prof in every other office. Female students will only come with some nitpicky question about a grade but it’s the beginning of the semester, so grade worries haven’t begun.
I literally remember the last time I had a female student show up to express her thoughts about philosophical issues. It was 2011, she was older than me, and had a schizoaffective disorder.
Getting back to the subject, my husband is a quant. The friend I’m the closest to here is a Computational Chemistry professor. And the colleague who drives the whole campus crazy with philosophical musings is a physicist. Maybe I’m very lucky but I’m not seeing one-dimensional, boring science people.
We also have some great science types participating on the blog, by the way.
I found an article that I really need for my research. But it was in French. I opened it and started panicking. I need this article! But it’s in French! The text is incomprehensible! What shall I do?
And then I remembered. I read perfectly well in French. I’m completely fluent. And the moment I remembered that, the text changed in front of my eyes. All of a sudden, I wasn’t seeing confusing clusters of letters but meaningful and interesting sentences.
I received an anonymous question about focus and how to rescue it from screens and the phone addiction. I’m very happy to answer it because the battle for focus is the most important struggle of our times.
The neoliberal subjectivity is fragmented and scattered to the point where you almost don’t have an inner world of your own. Whatever is happening on a screen is so much more vivid and exciting that you prefer to live there than in your own mind. This is going to get really hairy for the kids who never lived in a world without handheld screens and never got to develop their own subjectivity. We will all pay dearly for raising a generation of humans who are projected completely outwards because they never developed their interiority. For one, this makes people extremely unstable psychologically and unhealthy mentally. Also, it makes them very prone to embrace totalitarianism. But that’s a different topic.
In a series of posts I’m starting today, I want to share some suggestions on how to preserve our inner world from the assault of screens. The only place where focus can exist is in there, but we have lost the map of how to get there. The focus posts are the directions.
Here’s the activity I suggest to kick off the series.
The Dolphin Exercise
Imagine that you are at the beach and all of a sudden you see a group of dolphins. They are so cute and they are jumping out of the water right in front of you. Your first impulse is to grab your phone and take pictures or videos. Resist this impulse. Breathe deep. Don’t place an object between yourself and the dolphins. Watch them, enjoy them, have an unmediated, unrecorded experience.
Try to do this with other experiences. Watch your kid sing in the school choir. Look at a sunset. Enjoy the light show at the local zoo. And take zero photos or videos. Make the moment completely your own. You don’t need to share it. You don’t need anybody else to witness you having this experience. It’s valuable because it’s yours. As you watch the dolphins (or a performance, a snowstorm, whatever), concentrate on how you feel about what you see.
This seems like a small thing but all of these exercises will be like that. Small steps will take us to our goal of dramatically improving our focus.
An anonymous reviewer of my article criticized me – get this – for quoting a book by a scholar who many years after publishing the book became “transexclusionary.” Meaning, she criticized Spanish laws regarding trans issues. Among other things, these laws allow 12-year-olds legally to change their sex. It’s the first and the most aggressive such law in Europe. The scholar I quoted apparently expressed disagreement with them. Shocking, I know.
The book I quoted and my article are in no way related to trans anything. I’m writing about Spain in the early 1950s. Clearly, nothing trans was much of an issue.
The reviewer says my article is excellent but I should remove the citations of the “transexclusionary” scholar. Which, obviously, I’m not going to do.
It’s so upsetting, though. I’m really proud of this article. It’s quite poisonously sarcastic. I’m adopting this writing style in my scholarly work that readers of this blog greatly enjoy. It’s where I start kind of praising a book and then absolutely demolish it with venomous fake compliments. I was hoping that reviewers would give me suggestions on how to improve the article, take it deeper into the text I analyze. I tend to be more superficial than is good for me, and I need to be pushed to go deeper.
Instead, I got many compliments and this weak-sauce suggestion about the ideologically unsound scholar.
First of all, I have no idea why it works, people, but I know that it does, and it’s very fun. And I know I already mentioned it before but this is for the people who missed it back then and have asked in the anonymous comments to hear about this again.
Look at somebody you know and make a list of words to describe their look. Clothes, shoes, accessories, and the general style of their behavior.
Then turn this list around completely and you’ll know this person’s biggest strengths.
For example, somebody who dresses in a very feminine way, always in cute skirts or dresses, sparkly makeup, blingy accessories. She’s gregarious, goofy, and kind of scattered.
Me, this is me.
What this person hides is a great capacity for focus. Her greatest achievements happen when she is silent. She is aggressive, competitive, and has a male-type subjectivity.
I heard this at a workshop and almost fell out of my chair because yes, that’s me.
The advice we got at the workshop is that if you need to achieve a breakthrough in whatever you are working on, you should take some time to dress and deck yourself out as the opposite of what you normally do. For instance, I should try a male business suit with a shirt in a boring color and sensible shoes. A guy who wears plaid should go with a mint-green shirt and a colorful scarf. A woman in jeans should try a frilly skirt with a lacy blouse. In short, let the secret shadow that hides deep inside and animates everything you do come out for a bit.
Academics and activists teamed up to create a guide to teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) to young children, arguing that kids exhibit racial bias from as young as three years old. . . EmbraceRace, the organization behind the guide, claims that “children’s racial sensibilities begin to form in infancy” and that kids “develop racial and other biases by kindergarten.”
All true. Children exhibit a strong preference for people of their own race since birth. And it’s a great thing. It’s an evolutionary mechanism in service of biological survival. Babies associate safety and comfort with their parents and react well to people who look like them. (Except, of course, when parents are abusive, and kids can show preference for a daycare teacher of a different race who is kind and non-threatening).
My friend from Africa has 3 small children. I’m the only white person who comes by the house, so they don’t see many white people. In the first years of their lives, they detest me and are terrified of N. The 8-month-old squeezes his eyes shut to avoid seeing me and twists his whole little body away for me. The 2,5-year-old has moved out of the fear and repulsion stage and is now in the curiosity stage. I came by on Saturday, and she brought over a napkin and started rubbing it against my cheek. She analyzed the situation with her little brain and decided that I must have poor personal hygiene habits to be this strange color. It’s so cute! Only an absolute moron would be upset over something like this and decide that the kids need to be re-educated out of this normal, healthy reaction.
We all want our kids to feel comfortable in our multi-racial society. The only way to achieve this is simply to be normal around people of different ethnicities. There’s no need to talk about it, lecture, hector, and educate. Just be normal. Interact with people normally. Nobody has workshops or teaching guides about people of different heights, and it works out fine.
Look at how utterly stupid the graphic created by EmbraceRace is:
At birth, babies don’t “see”. Their sight is unfocused, blurry. It’s precisely by 3 months that they start distinguishing different people with different features instead of perceiving vague, colorless blobs. Also, it’s not “caregivers” that they prefer. It’s mommy. Mommy has a comforting effect on a baby without the baby needing to “see” her.
And no, silence about race doesn’t reinforce racism. But endless stupid prattling about it does.
In the anonymous questions, some kind person asks for good, non-woke book recommendations similar to Franzen’s Crossroads.
Thank you, the person who asked. I love the anonymous questions.
In recent years, the best books I have read in English in the realist tradition (which I’m guessing is what you prefer based on the mention of Franzen) are Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Ohio by Stephen Markley. I’m looking very hard, believe me, and the moment there’s anything else of value, I’ll mention it.
Last week, I plowed through the opening pages of at least 15 recent releases. None of them remotely attracted me. But I’ll keep looking, I promise.
Recently, I’ve been getting into Australian literature. It has a flavor all its own among Anglo literatures. Madelaine Lucas, Helen Garner – the writing is so bare, so austere, so absolutely controlled. Unadorned, direct, and somber. You’d think, from that writing, that not a ray of sunshine ever broke through the iron-grey skies. And most importantly, nobody is trying to be funny.
I like books that are the exact opposite of my personality, which is actually well in keeping with the theory of self-presentation. (Which is, briefly, that your biggest strength is the opposite of what you show to the world).
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