Armistice Day

Jacob Levy:

There's commemorative cannon-fire outside my office right now, and I'm more disgusted than moved. Yet more artillery fire seems to me to miss what should be the point.

A Veteran's/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn't just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

When this day was established as an official holiday in the UK, Canada and the US, a lot of the rhetoric was about world peace and "never again." Funny that the thing has turned into another occasion for celebrating the heroism of soldiers.

Questions about BPA

Bisphenol A is a very common ingredient in all sorts of plastics; 2-3 million tons of the stuff are manufactured every year. However, it can mimic the activity of various human hormones, and large quantities of BPA have been shown to cause all sorts of health effects, from thyroid problems to neurological disorders. In particular, it can mimic estrogen. This had led to questions about whether it effects male sexual and reproductive health. A new study has just been published covering the effects of BPA on factory workers:

Researchers focused on 634 male workers at four factories in China who were exposed to elevated levels of BPA. They followed the men over five years and compared their sexual health with that of male workers in other Chinese factories where BPA was not present. The men handling BPA were four times as likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and seven times as likely to have difficulty with ejaculation, said De-Kun Li, a scientist at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute, which conducted the study with funds from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The US FDA has just announced a major review of existing studies of the effects of BPA, along with $30 million in new grants for additional studies. Canada and some European countries are also conducting reviews. Since it is very difficult to measure the effects of small levels of mildly poisonous substances, I do not expect definitive data on the effects of small amounts of BPA. I expect that with or without data we will see a tightening regulatory regime, justified by the studies that show bad effects from large doses, and a gradual phase-out of BPA in many products. Meanwhile, if you need an excuse....

Scythian Gold

I had so much fun with the catalog from the Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures exhibit, which I got from the library, that I was inspired to track down the catalog from my favorite ever museum exhibit. This was Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, which I saw in Montreal in 2000. I tried to get a new copy of the catalog at the time, but it sold out everywhere. This time I found a used copy through ABE Books, and since it arrived I have been immersed it its glories. These treasures came from the tombs of Scythian kings and nobles, dating to between 600 and 200 BC.

Most of the spectacular golden treasures were made by Greek craftsmen, probably in the Greek colonies around the Black Sea. Some of the designs seem entirely classical in inspiration, but many were obviously made specifically for Scythian clients. They depict people with Scythian clothes and weapons, for example, and some seem to show scenes from Scythian mythology. The famous "Golden Fleece" pectoral (above -- click for a larger image) is one of those objects. It is divided into two bands, one showing the domestic life of pastoral peoples, the other showing lions and griffins hunting horses and boars.

My favorite object is one of the locally-made pieces, the staff top shown below. Surely this was carried by a Scythian shaman -- it resembles staffs carried by Siberian shamans in the 19th century -- as he recited his tales of journeys to the Other Lands, made his prophecies, and performed his cures.

Who Should Go to College?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken up one of my favorite themes, asking a bunch of "experts" who should go to college. The Chronicle is a fairly conservative publication, but on the other hand its main audience is college educators, so I am not sure how to assess its likely bias on this point. Anyway, they publish a variety of responses. We have a few hard core open door types:

Alison Wolf: Anyone who meets the entry criteria and is willing to pay the fees should be able to go. In one sense, that just passes the buck—politicians then have to decide how much subsidy they are willing to provide. But it shouldn't be up to them to decide how many people go, what they study, and why.

But most seem to agree that many Americans who go to four-year colleges shouldn't. They cite numbers like, only the 10 to 15 percent most academically inclined should go, or only the top 25 percent of high school graduates. Even those who think that everyone should have the option of going to college don't seem to think everyone should go; they just think the way should be open for "non-traditional" students who have the motivation if not the background. On the other hand, the experts also seem to agree that almost everyone should get some kind of post-high school education or training.

Marty Nemko: All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at "four year" colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won't graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.

Daniel Yankelovich: In today's society and economy, virtually everyone who has the motivation and stamina should acquire some form of postsecondary education. That is a practical reality of today's economy.

Sailing on Light

The Planetary Society has announced plans to launch a test vehicle next year, Lightsail 1, that would be the first spacecraft powered by the pressure of sunlight. Lightsail 1, with a sail area of 32 square meters (about 18 feet across) will just be moved around a little bit in orbit, but the plan is to move on to larger sails that will eventually leave earth orbit and sail into space.

The pressure exerted by sunlight is very small, but with no air resistance to oppose it, it should be enough to move even large spaceships around, if they have big enough sails. We don't know, though, if other forces or micrometeorites or some other obstacle will make the scheme impractical. But let us sail, and find out.

Cambyses' Lost Army

Italian archaeologists Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni claim that they have found the remains of an army sent into the Egyptian desert by the Persian king Cambyses around 525 BC. According to Herodotus, the army was sent to conquer the shrine of Amun at the oasis of Siwa but vanished into a sandstorm.

The finds include a mass grave, bronze weapons, hundreds of broken water pots, and jewelry. So even if this isn't Cambyses' army, or part of it, it is a very cool discovery.

I might add that the mass grave that drew the archaeologists' attention was actually found by local Bedouin, who dug it up and sold the best objects they found to tourists. As the Bluffer's Guide to Archaeology puts it, "the easiest way to find sites is to ask somebody who knows where they are."

Adoption and Identity

As the parent of an adopted girl from China, I read with great interest the NY Times story on a major study of adults who had been adopted from Korea as young children. The news seems to be that adopted children are just like everyone else.

Like everyone else, they complain about being teased as children. Some seem to think that they were teased for looking different, but in fact all children get teased for something. Nobody ever looked more like the majority group than I did, and I seem to recall getting teased a lot. Also, the adoptees have struggled with their identities and the question of who they are:

“The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”

I don't mean to be glib, and I am sure that adopted children have greater issues about who they are, on average, then people who grow up with their biological parents. But it is important to see the identity struggles of adoptees as a particular case of an issue that almost everyone has, not something unique to their situation.

One pattern I found striking is that many of the adoptees spent their childhoods trying to blend in and be as white as possible, ignoring parental efforts to interest them in Korean culture. But then in high school or college they began to wonder more about where they came from and to get more interested in their Korean identities and their birth families. More than half had been to Korea. I believe this is also a very common pattern in our society. Children strive to be like their peers, whereas adults want to distinguish themselves and find a unique identity.

Where to Go?

Columnist Jeremy Clarkson of the London Times is so angry at the British government that he wants to emigrate, if only he could think of someplace to go:

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly ...

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. ... And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

The Wall Fell

I pause on this day to note that twenty years ago today, November 9, 1989, the German people broke through the Berlin Wall, the most optimistic day of my lifetime:

What confronted us at the Bornholmer bridge was beyond belief: a vast tide of people, some in tears, many just looking stunned, flooding across. Behind them were the huge glaring arc lights, guard huts, raised barriers and a line of puffing Trabant and Wartburg cars. Two East German border guards stood there looking bewildered. One, I remember, was crying. With no orders from above, the guards had simply buckled under the pressure of a 20,000 strong crowd of East Berliners chanting "Open the gate!" and raised the barriers.

Lions Know What to Do About Deer

A rather foolish deer jumped the fence into the lions' cage at the National Zoo yesterday. Although spectators cheered for the deer to escape -- evidently there were no gardeners among them -- the lions fatally injured the deer before keepers got them away. A bit of video here, revealing that zoo-bred lionesses are about as good at hunting deer as my cats are at hunting mice.

Given how many deer there are in Rock Creek Park -- last time I was there I stumbled into a group of 15, including two young fawns born out of season -- I am surprised this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time.

Los Angeles High School No. 9

Well, it truly doesn't look like most other schools. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can imagine some students loving it, especially if it becomes an arts magnet school like the architects hoped. I like that it is built around a courtyard. On the other hand the classrooms are in the four nondescript rectangular boxes you can see in the aerial photo, and there seem to be lots of blank concrete walls at ground level, so I can imagine other students calling it the prison and referring to the tall bit as the guard tower. More images here.

It also cost $232 million. I have to say, though, that this is probably not all that much more than it would have cost to build a pedestrian school of this size in downtown LA; the last time my county built a high school it cost $120 million for an ordinary building on a suburban site. (Think about that number next time you wonder where your local tax money goes.)

I also wonder, in a general sort of way, how much architecture matters to education. It seems to me that school reformers of various sorts have from time to time gotten captivated by school design as a way to magically make things better, whereas, really, what matters is the quality of the interactions between teachers and students. MIT seems to do a pretty good job with the ugliest collection of buildings in the world.

Cao Comes Through

When Joseph Cao won a house seat from New Orleans, I singled out this Republican immigrant from Vietnam and former Jesuit seminarian as a remarkable American story. Now he has repaid my praise by becoming the only Republican to vote for the House health care bill. I would be a lot more excited about this bill, which passed 220-215, if I thought it had any chance in the Senate.

Leaves

It was a gorgeous day today, warm, sunny and dry. Even though all the leaves weren't down, I decided to go ahead and rake -- you never know what next weekend is going to be like.

And leaf raking means a pile to jump in. Here Ben, Clara and three kids from two doors down do what fall always means to me.

The Last of the Garden

Yesterday I pulled out all the dead annuals in the garden, leaving just the bare bones of rose bushes and a few lingering perennials. And dreams of next spring.

A Modern Lullaby

Tell the monster that lives ‘neath your bed
To go somewhere else instead
Or you’ll kick him in the head

Tell the creature that lurks behind the door
If he knows what’s good he won’t come here no more
Cause you’ll kick in his butt at the count of four

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now it’s time to close your tired eyes
There are devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

Tell the monster that eats children, that you taste bad
And you’re sure you’d be the worst he’s ever had
If he eats you, don’t you fret, just cut him open with an axe
Don’t regret it, he deserved it, he’s a cad

Tell the harpies that land on your bed post
That at the count of five you’ll roast them alive
Tell the devil it’s time you gave him his due
He should go back to hell, he should shake in his shoes
Cause the mightiest, scariest, creature is you

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now it’s time to close your tired eyes
There’s devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

I won’t tell you, there’s nothing ‘neath your bed
I won’t sell you, that it’s all in your head
This world of ours is not as it seems
The monsters are real but they’re not in your dreams
Learn what you can from the beasts you defeat,
you’ll need it for some of the people you meet

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now its time to close your tired eyes
There are devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

--Aurelio Voltaire Hernandez

Listen to the song.

Uncovering a Dastardly Plot

Former FDA director David Kessler has written a new book in which he exposes a horrifically evil plot concocted by America's restaurant owners and junk food manufacturers: they make food that people like! From Reason:

Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed “insiders” to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious—or, as he breathlessly puts it, “design food specifically to be highly hedonic.” Kessler certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve people food they like. “We come up with craveable flavors, and the consumers come back, even days later,” a “research chef at Chili’s” confesses to him. Kessler also reveals that Nabisco lures Oreo eaters through a dastardly combination of sweet white filling and crunchy, bittersweet chocolate wafers, achieving “what’s called dynamic contrast" . . . .

Not only do these sneaky bastards create irresistible food; they then turn around and tell people about it. “With its ability to create superstimuli, coupled with its marketing prowess, the industry has cracked the code of conditioned hypereating and learned exactly how to manipulate our eating behavior,” Kessler writes. “It has figured out the programming that gets us to pursue the food it wants to sell.”

The abstemious moralism of Kessler and his ilk makes me feel the way a Cheesecake Factory menu makes him feel: queasy.

Seen on the Road

Driving around yesterday I spotted a couple of interesting things, a black Acura with a license plate that said 1BADESQ, and a bumper sticker that said GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, ESPECIALLY OUR SNIPERS. Do you suppose that was serious, or was it a pacifist joke?

Umbrella Art

Amusing collection of umbrella art installations.

All I Have to Say about Mass Shootings

Was said yesterday by James Fallows:

One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP.

Uncivil Students

The Chronicle has just republished a two-year-old essay by Thomas Benton about incivility among students:

There are the students who refuse to address us appropriately; who make border-line insulting remarks in class when called upon (enough to irritate but not enough to require immediate action); who arrive late and slam the door behind them; who yawn continually and never cover their mouths; who neglect to bring books, paper, or even something with which to write; who send demanding e-mail messages without a respectful salutation; who make appointments and never show up (after you just drove 20 miles and put your kids in daycare to make the meeting).

In my limited college teaching experience -- ten courses, all told -- I have never experienced much in the way of rudeness from my students, and I don't really know what to make of this. My biggest class has had about 40 students, so I have never had to face a huge lecture hall where who knows what might go on in the back row. But I still have trouble matching my own experience with complaints like these.

One part of it is probably expectations. Among Benton's pet peeves, it seems, is students who won't even pretend to care about his classes:

I don't understand students who are so self-absorbed that they don't think their professors' opinion of them (and, hence, their grades) will be affected by those kinds of behaviors, or by remarks like, "I'm only taking this class because I am required to." One would think that the dimmest of them would at least be bright enough to pretend to be a good student.

This doesn't bother me at all. If my students want a strictly business relationship with me, I am perfectly happy to grade the work they hand in, ask them a few questions in class and otherwise ignore them. I think it is the height of arrogance to assume that every student should care about what I teach, and bad manners to complain when people refuse to lie.

I also wonder if maybe Thomas Benton gets more than his share of rudeness because he is kind of weird:

Every morning, after setting up all the multimedia components I'm going to need, I stand at the door of my 8:30 a.m. classroom in my jacket and tie and say, "Good morning" to each entering student.

Only a few will say "Hi" or "Good morning" in return. About half will give me a somewhat confused nod, not quite making eye contact. The rest will not even look at me; they look at their shoes and keep walking, exuding a vaguely suspicious and hostile air. . . . Whatever the explanation, I sometimes feel stung by students' rudeness.

Now, see, part of good manners is acting according to the accepted rules of the situation. And standing in the door to your classroom, saying "good morning" to every student, is, as far as I am concerned, a violation of protocol. It's just not done. No wonder students look at the floor; they are so confused by this peculiar behavior that they don't know what to do or say. After setting up the multi-media components I am going to need, I leave the room and return at the moment when class is to start. This seems to be what my students expect, and they always respond well to it.

I am curious if any of my professor friends have had experiences like Benton's.

De Soto was Here

It seems amazing that the passage of Hernando de Soto and his small army across the Southeast in 1539 to 1540 left so many clear traces, but archaeologists have now documented what seems to be the third site where De Soto and his men must have visited. This one is an Indian village near McRae, Georgia. The other two are the camp where De Soto spent the winter of 1539 to 1540, near Tallahassee, and a small fort in western North Carolina.

Worse than Slovenia

Nick Kristof has been noting lately that the US does not have the best healthcare system in the world, and that, for example, we rank 31st in life expectancy and 37th in infant mortality. But he seems to have gone too far in comparing American healthcare to what people get in Slovenia:

In several columns, I’ve noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone — worse than Slovenia! — gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

On the other hand, there are a few things we do right:

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.

Message: when it comes to healthcare, socialism works.

Win Some, Lose Some

A new Australian study suggests that when pregnant mothers take folic acid supplements, which are recommended to prevent neural tube defects, they increase the risk that their children will get asthma.

Windfarms vs. the Sunrise

From the Associated Press:

MASHPEE, Mass. (AP) -- From a blustery perch over a Cape Cod beach, Chuckie Green gestures toward a stretch of horizon where he says construction of the nation's first offshore wind farm would destroy his Indian tribe's religion.

The Wampanoag - the tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims in the 17th century and known as "The People of the First Light" - practice sacred rituals requiring an unblocked view of the sunrise. That view won't exist once 130 turbines, each over 400 feet tall, are built several miles from shore in Nantucket Sound, visible to Wampanoag in Mashpee and on Martha's Vineyard.

Tribal rituals, including dancing and chanting, take place at secret sacred sites around the sound at various times, such as the summer and winter solstices and when an elder passes.

The Wampanoag fight to preserve their ceremonies has become the latest obstacle - some say delay tactic - for a pioneering wind energy project that seemed at the cusp of final approval.

"We, the Wampanoag people, who opened our arms and allowed people to come here for religious freedoms, are now being threatened with our religion being taken away for the profits of one single group of investors," Green said.

The Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag claim Nantucket Sound is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property. The tribes say the designation, which would come with new regulations for activity on the sound, is needed to preserve not only their pristine views but ancestors' remains buried on Horseshoe Shoal, where the turbines would be built.

Cape Wind supporters say the tribes' claim for a National Register listing for the sound is baseless and was sprung late, in league with the project's most vociferous opponents, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

"I think this is clearly a tactic for delay, for delay's sake," said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind. "I think it's fair to say, looking at the past eight years, that opponents to Cape Wind have tried every conceivable strategy to slow down or stop the project."

Green bristles at the notion that the tribes, prodded by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, are jumping in late just to gum up the works. Green and Audra Parker, the alliance's executive director, said the alliance supports the Wampanoags' claim, but didn't engineer it.

Cape Wind, proposed in 2001 and expected to cost $1 billion, aims to provide up to 75 percent of Cape Cod's power. Other offshore wind farm proposals are in earlier stages of development in several states, including Rhode Island, Delaware and Texas.

The picture above shows what the wind farm would look like from the closest point on land, according to Cape Wind.

The Restless Voter

It is one of the oddities of Democracy that elections are decided by the people who think and care the least about politics. These restless "independent" voters seem to have no idea what they want, just a perpetual dissatisfaction with the status quo. This has the advantage of making it difficult for any party to stay in power for too long, but I think it is mistake to read too much into their fickle choices.

Of the three major political contests yesterday, the Republicans won two, the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, and Democrats won one, the House election in upstate New York. The only messages I see in this result are, first, that people in New Jersey and Virginia cling to the mysterious belief that the governor has some power over the state economy and, second, that people in upstate New York, like most Americans, seem to resent having their local politics made into contests between national interest groups who couldn't find their home towns on a map -- the losing candidate in that race was endorsed by many national figures and raised a lot of out-of-state money, but was not well known to voters in a district where he doesn't even live.

For me the only important election yesterday was the vote in Maine on gay marriage, which sadly went to the anti-marriage side. But anti-marriage voters are dying by the day, and young people are solidly on the virtuous side, so we will outlive the anti-marriage forces soon enough.

Archaeological Nationalism

Another fossil discovery in China, of a jaw that looks sort of like a Neanderthal's and sort of like a modern humans, triggers more claims by Chinese archaeologists that modern humans originated in East Asia. That nobody outside China takes these claims at all seriously only seems to encourage the Chinese. There are also Russian archaeologists who insist that modern humans arose in Siberia. The whole business is a reminder of how much what even experts see is determined by what they want to believe.

Trotting out the Cliches

I was reading some obituaries for Claude Lévi-Strauss, preparatory to writing my own farewell. But I was so disgusted by the claptrap in the Times obit that I have to vent. I understand that this was written quickly, but is that any excuse for this garbage? First, to exaggerate Lévi-Strauss's contribution, we have to make everyone who came before him seem stupid:

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Accepted by whom? I mean, really. Western intellectuals had been collecting myths and folktales around the world for 200 years when Lévi-Strauss was born, which suggests at least an interest in the imaginations of primitive peoples. Lévi-Strauss lived 150 years after Captain Cook went to Tahiti, bringing home the famous account of how happy and devoted to pleasure the Tahitians were. He came a generation after Malinowski, who documented the complicated web of mutual obligations that underlay ritual gift exchange in Melanesia. I could go on, but this is such an obvious falsehood that it isn't worth our time.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

A fair summary of Lévi-Strauss's approach, but so far nothing not accepted by most anthropologists of his time. Here we get to the interesting part:

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

True, and an perfect example of how one gets to be a famous intellectual. You take an old idea, that people have a tendency to think in binary terms, well known to both philosophers and ethnographers, and you inflate it into a grand principle that, you assert, explains everything. People are impressed by the many examples you can adduce in support of your view (after all, people do like to think in binary terms), and by the universal sweep of your law. The obvious fact that people also think in lots of other ways is brushed aside, and Presto! a genius is born.

And then more appalling claptrap:

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Gag. The most common criticism of nineteenth-century anthropology was actually that it was too abstract and too interested in universals. Every missionary who went up the Congo or the Amazon was eager to show how the customs of his neighbors illustrated the universals of human nature and God's Plan of Creation.

Which brings me to what I was going to say about Lévi-Strauss: he was the last great intellectual of the nineteenth-century world. I suppose what I really mean is that he was a modernist, a man of the "modern" era that stretches from about 1750 to 1960. This was the age of reason, the age of big ideas and big systems, of revolutionary ambitions in every field. It was the age of synthesis, of discovering the universal laws that underlie the apparent randomness of daily events. It was the age of classification. It was an age when an obscure professor could author a political manifesto calling for abolition of the old world, which might be taken up by a gang of bomb-making students, or even an army of jungle revolutionaries.

Our world, the post-modern world, is not so in love with grand theories and revolutionary agendas. We are suspicious of both big ideas and big changes. The most famous French intellectual of the generation after Lévi-Strauss was Foucault, to whom grand theories led inevatibly to terrible oppressions, and who ended up celebrating the anti-modern, anti-Western revolution of Iran. Most contemporary anthropologists are more interested in celebrating primitive culture and defending the rights of native peoples than in pronouncing theories; the only theory that gets any real attention in anthropology these days is biological evolution.

Lévi-Strauss was one of those thinkers who is most known for his theories, but whose work is best when it is least theoretical. His books on myth are sometimes wonderfully phantasmagorical, leaping from one strange story to another based on strained metaphorical links. He had a profound respect for all human thought, and believed that the shamans of the Amazon were intellectuals equal to the philosophers of Europe. He took people seriously and found them fascinating. What I remember best about his books is the wondrous rainbow of examples he could trot out, and his conviction that the weirdest vision of the most drug-addled shaman means something important. Somewhere in his books there is a long discourse on the myths of the half man, who has only one leg and one arm, and I remember how Lévi-Strauss's insistence on taking this notion seriously brought home to me how weird the idea is, and thus how interesting it is that it appears in myths all over the world. I never liked his more didactic passages, when he starts to insist how everything reflects the Big Idea. But he was a remarkable thinker and a humane man, and for that I celebrate him.

Oh, the Horror

From New York Magazine:

Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: So, what were your kids for Halloween?
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: It was adorable. They love art and architecture, so all three of them dressed up as different museums — the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the New Museum. What about your little boy?
Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: Oh, he was a, uh ... a pumpkin. He likes pumpkins.
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: Oh, that sounds ... cute.
Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: Yeah ...
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.

The Blessings of Sadness

Reuters:

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," Forgas wrote.

"Our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."

This sort of study has inspired a little movement of people devoted to "depressive realism," that is, the belief that a realistic view of the world makes one depressed, and optimism is based on delusion.

Revisiting Core Knowledge

A few weeks ago I complained about an essay by E.D. Hirsch on the "American speech community," extolling the virtues of his "core knowledge" approach to education. Since then I have corresponded with a friend whose children attend a "core knowledge" elementary school with a very good reputation, and I have read some other things that tout the successes of Hirsch's approach, especially in Massachusetts. And I accept that an approach like Hirsch's focused on having children learn a certain set of facts, can get results. After all, I used to teach Western Civ.

But this article by Sol Stern perfectly illustrates what I was complaining about, the danger that any "core knowledge" curriculum will degenerate into an ideological operation that indoctrinates children rather than expanding their minds:

After Hirsch has memorialized early American education, you can almost hear his remorse as he surveys what passes for higher thinking today in the education schools and teachers’ organizations. In The Making of Americans, Hirsch again shows how consensus science proves that “a higher-order academic skill such as reading comprehension requires prior knowledge of domain-specific content.” But the ed schools’ closed “thoughtworld” (Hirsch’s term) has insulated itself from science. For that matter, future classroom teachers must search far in ed-school syllabi to find a single reference to any of Hirsch’s work—yet required readings by radical education thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers are common. From these texts, prospective teachers will learn that the purpose of schooling in America isn’t to create knowledgeable, civic-minded citizens, loyal to the nation’s democratic institutions, as Jefferson dreamed, but rather to undermine those institutions and turn children into champions of “social justice” as defined by today’s America-hating far Left.

The interweaving of sense and outrageous nonsense in this paragraph takes some unraveling, but I think it is worth doing. The central assertion of the "core knowledge" approach is that children can't just learn, they have to learn something. I believe that this is true, and I regularly use this argument with my children when they ask, "why do I have to learn this?" "You don't," I say, "but to train your mind you have to learn something, and this works as well as anything else." The second part of Hirsch's argument is that it is very hard to understand things about which one knows nothing, no matter how well trained one's brain is. We should, therefore, strive to teach children important facts and expose them to important arguments, so that when they encounter them in civic life they will have some basis for understanding them. I believe this is also true. But the example Sol Stern gives is a test involving a paragraph from a book about the Civil War; not surprisingly, students who had some knowledge of the Civil War scored higher on a "reading comprehension" test based on this paragraph than those who did not. Ok, fine, but why is it important for Americans to understand books about the Civil War? Who decides that Civil War history is important knowledge, but not history of the labor movement or of paranormal belief?

Many of the most hotly debated topics in our civic life concern changing patterns of marriage, child-bearing, and sexuality, but I very much doubt that Sol Stern would endorse of curriculum giving high school students a decent knowledge of how much these things have varied across human history. We debate war and peace all the time, but it seems to me that to judge correctly when war might be necessary we should expose students not just to the glories of D-Day and Bunker Hill, but to My Lai and Wounded Knee.

And what about this business of creating citizens loyal to our institutions? I am myself a great fan of our constitution, but I have a suspicion that what Sol Stern has in mind is history as a grand whitewash. Does it make me an America-hating leftist to think that think that it makes no sense to teach about the Civil Rights movement without pointing out how many people opposed it? To teach the Civil War without mentioning that the secessionists were motivated by their desire to preserve slavery? To discuss the Cold War without sparing a few words for the growth of secret government?

I consider myself a patriotic American, but to me that means recognizing my nation's crimes and working to redress them; it means not just believing that my nation is good, but trying to make it better; it means not believing that our way is the best way, but wanting to make our way the best.