The Meaning of History and Life, Part IV

So far I have dwelled on how history reveals the limitations of historians (and other human beings).  Now I am going to turn to some broad generalizations about what history reveals about our current state, particularly those of us living comfortable lives in the western world.

Historical study and a bit of travel have underscored to me how peculiar the modern western world has become.  The scale of our affluence is staggering.  We live much longer and more comfortably than have any other people in the history of the world.  We also have tremendous freedom, are free to abandon our parents, spouses, even children--let along friends and neighbors.  Though we still rely closely on others for food, clothing, and a multitude of other requirements, that reliance has been obscured and monetized.  Most adults can meet the basic obligations of life pretty easily (food, clothing, shelter), and without having to rely on direct collaboration with others.  This means that we can, if we choose, dispense with family and friends altogether.  Most of us are free--again, if we choose to arrange our lives that way--to spend hours every day playing video games, volunteering at soup kitchens, watching porn, mastering a foreign language, collecting salt-and-pepper shakers, lobbying our elected officials, or training for tri-athalons.

From an historical point of view, this degree of freedom is bizarre.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part III

Historians are constrained not merely by their humanity, by their finite intellectual and moral capacities.  They are also limited by the nature of the evidence with which they work.

We commonly think of history as a noun, as everything that has happened.  But we are able to retrieve only a tiny, tiny fragment of what has happened.  Until recently, few human lives generated any evidence to speak of.  Even famous people, such as queens and generals, recorded just a small proportion of their thoughts and actions.  Those recordings, moreover, are always at least a bit biased, at least one step removed from what actually happened, are never quite the same thing as the thought or the action itself.  Most letters, for example, are written not to capture precisely what one thought or did, but to create a certain (usually favorable) impression.  And, as the saying goes, the winners get to write the histories, for the winners are most apt to have the opportunity to write, preserve, and disseminate their versions of given events or processes.

This is why books that set out to offer you the voice and perspective of the "subaltern," of poor people who lived on the margin, are often so deadly dull, a succession of statistics or abstruse theories--or tell us instead about what elites thought about the poor suckers they oppressed.  It is not that the authors would not like to quote the diaries and letters of enslaved Chinookan Indian women from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Rather, such documents simply don't exist.  The descriptions we do have of such women are both very rare and biased, coming from people who had neither much respect for of knowledge of them.

Pity the poor historian!  Not only is her vision beclouded, her hearing impaired; the fragmentary, dim figures and sounds she perceives are more often than not vaporous or false.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part II

Not only are we limited intellectually and morally.  We are also bound socially and by mortality.

All of us can count on decaying and dying.  This is, to be sure, a truism.  But it's one that modern western society does its best to disguise.  But there is no cheating death.  And death is a process.  Each day one is closer to it, and as middle age approaches, life goes South in many respects--literally as well as figuratively.  Our body, brains, and mental faculties decay.  Everything that seemed to distinguish us, to set us apart, gradually dissolves.  Aging humbles us.

We are also bound socially.  Foucault remarked years ago that eighteenth-century Europe essentially invented the individual.  And it may have been wrong.  Evolution, after all, is more of a social than an individual achievement.  Humanity learned how to speak, travel long distances, organize itself into family, kin, and other social groupings through shared rather than individual endeavors.  Again, modern life obscures this fact, tempts us to think that we are the captains of our own ship, autonomous actors, heroes in our own movie.  But our food, clothing, homes, ideas, and peak experiences are the work of many hands.  We are socially imbedded in all sorts of networks, seen and unseen.

In sum, history suggests not simply that the each human being is limited in her/his capacity.  Her/his very existence as an individual, discrete entity may be something of a modern misunderstanding.

Next week I'll examine the limitations of historical evidence and, therefore, inquiry.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part I

I decided on this decidedly pretentious title for a introductory video I'm putting together for my fully online courses.  On the blog, it will come in several installments.  I hope to make it available on Youtube in a couple of weeks.  Despite the ironic sounding language, I'm sincere.  I'll cover four broad topics that I think the study of history bears on: our limitations; the peculiar nature of modern life; the unusual dilemma in which we find ourselves; and, of course, a solution--of sorts.

I'd like to begin with my first two of four points of what a study of history (or just plan common sense, which is closely related to historical study, I think) reveals about our limitations:
1) That our knowledge and understanding is always limited.  Brilliant people disagree on all sorts of fundamental questions, and life is far too complicated for any of us to fully grasp.  I love the perspective of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who asserted that there are indeed ultimate truths, rights and wrongs (a belief that is not very popular among contemporary intellectuals), but that no human being will ever know what all of them are, will ever get everything right.  We can therefore rest assured that some of our most cherished beliefs are right and some are wrong.  We just don't know which ones.
2) We are also limited in our moral character.  Some of us have persecuted evils of epic proportions, are responsible for the deaths of thousands, even millions of people.  Most of the rest of us have learned to tolerate or ignore such evils, including ones that we could easily do something about.  Thousands of children perished today from the consequences of hunger or common diseases that could easily be cured.  People from so-called third-world countries come to the U.S. and are startled to find homeless and hungry people living in this land of plenty.  Furthermore, if we are honest, I think that the great majority will admit that we exercise all sorts of petty acts of cruelty in our every-day lives, from wishing misfortune on people we envy or our intimidated by to failing to offer some small act of kindness to a neighbor, family member, friend, or stranger.

Next week: Two more human limitations.

No One or Everyone Gets a Trophy

A recent story on BBC Africa related the interesting fact that out of 25,000 applicants for entrance to the University of Liberia, not one passed.  Though this is obviously an aberration, it is not unusual for students at all levels in West Africa to be graded very harshly.  This makes the dedication that many of their students possess all the more remarkable.  The system is often perceived as unfair and opaque, but people still work very hard to try to succeed in it.

This is of course a great contrast to the U.S., where many of us feel or even believe that everyone should finish first at everything.  Yet in spite of incredible educational advantages and opportunities, most students seem to view school not as a priceless opportunity, but as a necessary evil if not a conspiracy by adults to rob youth of their freedom.

These two sets of generalizations are exaggerations, but they illustrate major differences--and strengths--between the two educational systems.  West Africa would benefit from a more humane approach to education, and the U.S. would benefit from higher standards and expectations.

Kudos for "The Butler"

Sensitive to criticism that a guy should take part of a day off once in awhile, I went with my leisure-loving life partner to see "The Butler" today--and was quite impressed.

The film has been criticized for being a bit too formulaic or artificial or tidy, a sort of black counterpart to "Forrest Gump" that goes out of its way to cover every iconic moment of modern American history.

I nevertheless liked the film for two big and interrelated reasons:

1) It's very rare to see a big movie that's not about white males.  All of the major characters in this film are black.  So is the director.

2) "The Butler" takes black life seriously.  It shows blatant and subtle aspects of racism that most white people don't much think about, and it also shows why black people have responded to that racism in such diverse ways.

Race continues to be the "elephant in the American living room."  Most of us like to act as if it doesn't matter.  "The Butler" reminds us of why race and racism have long resided at the heart of American life.

Course Design for Middle-Aged Professors

As I have mentioned before, college teaching is an unusual profession in that most of us have received very little training in how to teach.  Graduate school focuses largely on doing original research (writing a dissertation that will hopefully become a book) and attaining a certain level of knowledge in several historical fields.  Of course that knowledge can be passed on once one starts to teach.  But very few of us are trained in the art of teaching itself, how that knowledge is to be conveyed.  Who has not suffered through a lecture from a brilliant professor who knew a given subject backwards and forwards but who did not have a clue--or any evident interest in--of how to convey that knowledge.  Or perhaps you are fascinated by the lectures or readings and then surprised to learn that the final exam bears little relation to what you studied.

Given the above, it has been exciting and humbling to learn more about course design, how to think about teaching from a student's point of view.  The key principal here is alignment.  Start by deciding what skills you want your students to learn, then align the rest of the course behind those skills so that every aspect of the course contributes to acquiring those skills.  Those skills may need to be learned gradually.  If, for example, your ultimate goal is for students to write a sophisticated essay that is supported by diverse evidence and is sensitive to counter-arguments, then break that daunting task into smaller components.  Make sure that everyone knows how to write a clear thesis statement.  Then work on supporting that thesis with evidence.  Then move on to incorporating or addressing counter arguments.

Most professors have very sophisticated research plans.  Few of us approach teaching with the same thoughtfulness.