Dan Schorr's Essays

The Loblolly Pine

2009-07-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

Through grafting, forestry science has developed an especially fast-growing variety of the Loblolly pine for timber (this variety has been termed a "super species", becoming ready for harvest in about 15-20 years). In Franklin County, Mississippi, stands of these artificially-planted trees are seen everywhere. In fact, in some parts of Mississippi (including Franklin County), the Loblolly has largely supplanted the native Longleaf pine.

Planted Loblolly stands give the appearance of a one-species scrub forest. Little other plant life can grow among them, as herbicide is applied among the trees to suppress the growth of hardwoods and other unwanted plant competitors. Some have termed these forests of cultivated Lobblolly a "biological desert", as they harbor so little other life (although a few animal and bird species do apparently like cultivated Loblolly forests).

However, one must remember that in Franklin County at least, if not elsewhere, in past decades one would have found cattle pastures, cotton, corn, or soybeans in some places where the commercial Loblolly now grows. Moreover, by the 1930's, much of the "old-growth" forest of Mississippi had already been exploited for timber.

And in discussing Loblolly cultivation, or any other type of monoculture, it is also difficult to avoid a certain preciousness. One is by implication rebuking society only for developing the resources that it seems we could not do without. Still, even an amateur's familiarity with the swamps, natural lakes, and forests that used to exist in Mississippi is enough to marvel at the elegant interdependence of life that once prevailed in them. A complex world existed and maintained its own balance, independent of humans.

One guesses that the natural world of Mississippi before the arrival of white settlers was brutal, inhospitable. Human beings* were seemingly its least important element: their greatest virtue (as regards the natural world) was their relatively small number and lack of technical ability and inclination to alter the land.

It is odd to think that the biological and cultural richness of the cypress swamps, lowland hardwood forests, and other largely vanished ecosystems of the South has gone mostly unmissed. They were only a kind of curiosity, without the clear human purpose of the Loblolly pine.

*the Choctaw and Chickasaw

Self-Abnegation

2009-05-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

The notion that through the act of suppressing one's sense of self, one could achieve a noble result is an idea that has generally inspired our conduct up until relatively recently.

However, our notion of the self has changed over time. In fact, the very idea of the self is fairly new one, viewed over the span of history. The consciousness of self that we take for granted would be unfamiliar to our earlier ancestors. And now that we know we have a self, we must treasure it. To deny the self, or to allow it otherwise to be diminished, would be viewed as a violation.

I am convinced that at one time, people occupied less aesthetic and psychic space than is the case today. In fact, it is undeniable that many of our citizens could not care less how they are viewed, and if it is a distasteful chore to look at them, it is none of their concern.

I don't believe it was always so. Our dress, manners, and other modes of expression were much more restrained at one time. This societally-imposed restraint on our way of being in the world, it has been said, made it difficult to achieve happiness. But did happiness used to be the goal of living? I think it was not.

Instead, I gather, that if any one principle guided our existence in former times, it was a desire to find our place in the moral order of the society (whatever that may have been). We believed that there was an abstract notion of the good and the not-good that held true for all members of society. Not everyone could live up to it, but all could be measured against it. I do not wish to claim that virtue used to be more prevalent. But, for example, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that, successfully or not, an attempt used to be made to try impart "goodness" in the young, as an aspect of one's overall education. Such an emphasis would be regarded nowadays as quaint.

Formerly in society, because the notion of good and not-good held so much sway, I think we walked a humbler path. We ourselves were not so important; the moral order of society was. We accepted our lot, by and large. Whoever sought to stand out did so because he or she felt in possession of something genuinely worth exposing to the world, and not as much in order to bring attention to one's own person. And if our sense of injustice was aroused at all, it tended to be over larger concerns. I think one could prove easily that the public today is somewhat indifferent to the larger concerns of society and the world, but is acutely sensitive to anything that would impinge on what it sees as its prerogatives.

Since the self was not a sacrosanct entity, as it is now, it used to be more within the bounds of imagination to take on suffering, and use it for creative ends. The artist, for example, used to exist more or less in opposition to society. Now, partly out of guilt, I believe, for our past treatment of artists, but more so out of distaste for the violence to the self that art clearly could demand, the artist has been invited into society. We have institutions that "nurture" artists that did not exist formerly: creative writing programs, fellowships, teaching positions and the like. We have publicity, lest the artist's work should go unnoticed, as used to be very often the case in earlier eras. But however much our solicitude for artists has aided in assuring their personal well-being, it is questionable whether this solicitude has done much to make the art itself any better.

Our over-protection of the self has not just been harmful to artistic endeavors; it has affected virtually everyone's daily experience. Without denying that there are still lonely people around us, nowadays it would take a super-human effort to experience the kind of solitude that used to be an accepted part of life. To live in a rural community as so many of us did, with transportation slow or unavailable altogether, without the means to connect to the outside world that we take for granted, with books and musical instruments one's only diversion -- this is a way of living that we would find intolerable. The self-denial of such a life would be disorienting. The 'affirmation' we all expect nowadays would have been brutally absent.

We are offered wonderful variety and diverse means of fulfillment. But we have also, as a practical matter, made it impossible truly to abnegate the self, and thereby attain true solitude. Such extreme solitude would be unlikely to provide happiness or even long maintain health and sanity. But it used to be more taken for granted that this kind of solitude could either occur naturally or be attained through effort, and out of such solitude we have gotten the benefit some of our finest actions, as well as our most memorable thought.

Changing Relations Between Labor and Society

2009-01-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

It would be ideal if nations viewed the contributions of their labor forces with close to the same respect, if not with as much regard, as those of their industrial corporations and financial institutions. In capitalistic societies, however, the two can probably never have equal value: at best, labor can be the sentimental favorite over capital; it can be lionized, but it lacks the hold over the imagination that the corporation does (on the other hand, socialist nations have, if anything, overcompensated for the tendency of capital to dominate over labor). Over the last 30 years, however, labor in general has been devalued in the West*, while the management, and especially, the financial class has been elevated in the popular mind to the point that no amount of malfeasance has been able to reduce its status significantly.

*manufacturing itself has also obviously been in decline; it too has gone down in prestige, as it has diminished as a business sector.

As has been plentifully noted, during the period 1945-75, the working classes of Europe and North America rose into the middle class as their wages and benefits increased. Obviously, the improvement in the standard of living for many ordinary workers was the result of a generations-long struggle. But in the post-war era, labor finally took its 'place at the table' in the new consumer society that was coming into being. It was true that in some ways Labor was feared more than respected, and the growing power (and oftentimes, corruption) of labor unions was resented. But at the end of the day, a person without much education could, through a union labor job, provide middle-class comforts for himself and his family. The larger society, in general, believed in providing this kind of opportunity to the workforce.

I can't exactly relate the series of events that has led to the precarious state of labor in the present day, but a couple of trends do stand out. The world is no longer as parochial, economically or culturally, as it used to be. There is now a willingness to have things manufactured wherever it may be cheapest to do so; at the same time, many more countries are able to produce consumer goods than before. In such a climate, a high-wage traditional manufacturing sector is difficult to sustain. The strongest argument for maintaining manufacturing jobs is, sadly, largely the sentimental one.

But for all the pain and dislocation caused by the loss of jobs making durable goods in this country, I have consistently been surprised at how weak the protest has been. The economy has probably adjusted well enough: other kinds of jobs, some high-paying (though many have not been so), have come into being; but the fabric of our society has been damaged severely by the loss of manufacturing jobs. For over 30 years, the regions of the country that formerly relied on factories, mills, mines, and so forth have sustained blow after blow, never really fully taking part in whatever prosperity we have enjoyed during this time period.

This is not a class-conscious society we inhabit -- that is probably one reason for the quiescence of the working class during these last decades of economic transformation. No matter our background, most of us don't like to be thought of as anything but middle class -- it would distasteful, in many cases, to see oneself as part of a victimized stratum of society, and to engage in protest on one's own behalf as a member of such a stratum. That social class is so difficult to define in a society such as our own has had the odd effect of making it slippery to try to defend the interests of those who are economically and socially most vulnerable. For all the evidence that birth often determines our station, we Americans refuse to believe that could be possible: at bottom, we believe that our place in society is always earned. So while we generally sympathize with the farmers, factory workers, and others whose ability to earn a living has dwindled in the past decades, the truth, I believe, is that we feel that if those whose skills have become obsolete or unneeded were just cleverer they could find the solution to their difficulty. This attitude is not particular to one's political affiliation, necessarily (and regrettably).

How else to explain the lack of engagement on the part of most of the influential classes regarding the diminishing rewards not just of all manner of blue-collar work, but of other kinds of jobs that are essential to maintaining society, such as teaching, nursing, and so forth? It might be romanticizing the past to say that work was ever held to be as intrinsically important as the product of that work. But the evidence that we at one time, as a society, believed far more in ensuring the long-term well-being of workers than we do now is incontrovertible.

The Republican Party is usually the most convenient scapegoat for many of the ills that have beset the American workforce. However, our government policy as it impacts labor issues, I would suggest, is as much the symptom of our society's changed (or more to the point, diminished) view of work as it has been the cause of Labor's ills.

When our society was more heirarchical, it was also more paternalistic. This paternalism could be heavy-handed, as inevitably would be the case when institutions act in loco parentis. Like any solicitous parent, big business and government are inclined to make glaring mistakes: giving the wrong kind of support to its citizens (old-style welfare I believe is a fair example), or withholding support altogether. But they also created programs that they thought would be in the best interest of citizens: Social Security, Works Progress Administration, Medicare, in the case of government; fully-covered healthcare and other generous benefits for autoworkers and some other blue-collar workers.

Even when management and labor were in firm opposition (during the birth of the labor movement, for example), there was a sense that however much one side may have been anathema to the other, both were part of the same 'family' (forgive the continuation of this metaphor, for I think it is apt); there was no possibility of unilateral exit. Management treated labor at first as a disobedient child, but eventually accorded its respect to unions. Nowadays, companies must overcome a great deal of their own spite before even agreeing to the formation of a union, much less agreeing to union demands. And most manufacturers simply close factories and set up shop overseas to escape the burden of union contracts.

For reasons that are obscure (though they are ones that deserve to be elucidated), many Westerners, particularly Britons and Americans, grew weary of protecting and providing for workers. The costs were high, and strikes were disruptive. But something else was at work. We began to believe that the individual, unguided will was more efficacious than collective action. We no longer could see any advantage to large government, large management structures, and powerful unions: they stood in the way of individual decision-making and innovation.

Unquestionably, this last observation is at least partly true. Even if we were able to do so, we should not wish to replicate the old-style war of attrition between unions and businesss. Nonetheless, while our business environment is more open to innovation than practically any other in the world, and there are numerous ways to acquire wealth, we find that our wealth, once acquired, is terribly vulnerable. Our individual persons are also vulnerable, as we have less and less health care, retirement savings, ability to afford tuition, and so forth than formerly. Our new-found faith that work is only a private matter that large, general-interest entities such as government and unions should stay out of has undermined society. Our freedom to fend for ourselves has left our economic and social landscape barren.

The Three Possible Environmental Futures

2008-11-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

There are three scenarios that are, I believe, the most plausible ones regarding the future of the natural environment.

One might be termed "the environmental cataclysm". In this view, the depradations of humanity will cause portions -- perhaps even large portions -- of the planet to become harsher, or even uninhabitable. Temperate zones with adequate precipitation will become drought-stricken and overheated. Rising sea levels will cause flooding in populated coastal areas -- forced migrations will result. Disease and famine will affect many more countries than they do currently, and not just in the developing world. Natural areas will disappear, with extinctions on a massive scale. At best, civilization as we know it would exist in a very different form from what we know today. However, a few predict that the environment could deteriorate even to the point where it could no longer sustain life in a meaningful way.

For the second scenario, we can take all these developments, and imagine, if you will, a measured, rational response to them. In other words, the human race will simply adapt to the changes in the environment that it has brought about. Our population will still grow, as predicted; we will simply accept greater crowding as natural and inevitable (there is still plenty of space to house people -- we will simply have less compunction about using it). We will use technology to adapt our agriculture to the new climactic conditions with which we are presented. Medical science will find responses to the new disease strains that develop, etc.

The first scenario is possible, but the second seems more likely. We will adjust so gradually and skillfully to the new state of the world that we will scarcely notice the extent to which we have transformed the environment. Our relationship to the natural world, already so different from that of 200, 100, or even just 50 years ago, will have changed even further, 50 years hence -- probably this new view of the environment will just serve to rationalize whatever further environmental changes we are responsible for.*

*for much of history, we thave hought of the world as divided into two regions: cities and farms (for human habitation), and wilderness (unsuitable for civilized living, and therefore to be avoided or admired, but not necessarily exploited). When technology permitted us to use almost any natural environment to whatever end we liked, our thinking about wilderness changed radically. Even today, with all of our understanding of the importance of preserving natural ecosystems, the survival of wilderness remains only an intellectual ideal.

The relationship with the environment we have maintained for most of history (this relationship also being so much part of our cultural legacy) has changed in the last 50 years or so, but is now being altered even further, to the detriment of nature. Our cities, which have been, in their own way, harmonious, rational conceptions, are sprawling outward in an improvised response to rural-to-urban inmigration and other trends (in the few instances where the growth of cities is actually being planned, as in China, the construction is on not on a human, but a gigantic and impersonal scale). Our farms, which once had a cultural significance that was almost as central to them as their practical function, are becoming factories in all but name; in this country they have become expendable, as we have become convinced that any type of uninhabited land could be better put to other human uses. Freedom, convenience, and the potential to benefit ourselves materially have become the measures we use to decide the purpose to which we put our land. The survival of natural or even just pastoral areas is not just a noble but a vital cause to fight for -- I think that if these areas succumb to human pressure, as they may well, our conception of ourselves will have to change fundamentally.**

**There is still at least a sentimental attachment to the idea of natural systems that exist independently of humans. But in very few cases do we deny ourselves the chance to encroach upon these same natural areas. However, if they disappear fully, as they are seemingly on their way to doing, it would be the first worldwide calamity for which almost no one could be held blameless. The notion that there is, somewhere, always some enclave of moral goodness would be contradicted with unprecedented force. The damage to our self-image as ultimately wise beings would be permanent.

The conversion of the world from a more or less natural environment to one that is merely adequate to sustain human life would be a soul-destroying turn of events. The dedication of all of the planet's resources towards our material well-being would also permanently weaken whatever is left of our culture. This may seem a bit alarmist, and though I always hope for the best, the cultural undermining that goes hand-in-hand with the aesthetic deterioration of the environment is already underway. In this country, this is obvious if one has been alive for at least 40 years. One proof that America is culturally much weaker than it was even just a few decades ago may be seen in how we use our land. For as many wonderful places as are still left, much of the country is an eyesore, a place where, the people notwithstanding, one would not wish to be for any longer than necessary. The inhospitality and inhumanity of our new buildings, roads, towns, shopping areas, etc. weaken our sensibilities; they undermine the notion that life should be exalted.

However, there is one more way things could be. One can envision a cultural change that would cause material betterment to be viewed only a means to achieving a certain level of comfort, not of achieving happiness. We would ensure our survival not through sheer population numbers, but through an apportionment of resources; neither would we equate our primacy in the world with our dominance of it. We could give voice to our personalities through achievements, work, family life, and other pursuits with meaningful but less tangible goals, and less so through acquisition.*** It might seem precious to suggest that a view to the future might take more precedence in our thought, that the rational self might be permitted to come to the fore, when presented with the awful environmental and cultural consequences of submitting, more or less without question, to a desire (which is not our need) to be gratified; however, it is worth making an argument for an environmental future based on such thinking, if one feels attached to living life as we conceive of it now.

***Do not confuse this for the argument that possessions are corrupting. In a rational conception of the environmental future, we could all enjoy possessions-- we would just have to plan (though only a humane course of action in this regard would be at all acceptable) for there to be fewer of us than we might at first have thought; we would also have to be more selective about what those possessions were.

The Two Competing World-Views

2008-09-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

From the time of the French Revolution until very recently, two opposing ideas about the possession and distribution of wealth have vied with one another. One has held that seeking and holding individual wealth was basic to human nature, and the pursuit of wealth should be only minimally regulated, if at all. As importantly, those who amassed wealth would be entitled to use it as they saw fit -- private property is a basic right that should always be protected, in this view. Any program to redistribute wealth would have been seen as taking it from its rightful owners.

The opposing school of thought maintained that individual wealth-seeking was not to be trusted and would lead to unfairness, or worse -- wealth could only benefit society if it was held and applied more or less collectively. Capitalism could be allowed to create wealth, but through taxation and other instruments, its benefits would be spread throughout the society. But as we know, it was often the case that the capitalist system itself was seen as pernicious, and such concepts as private property, profit, and so forth were anathema. The economy would have to be run by the state, not private interests, in order to ensure that all citizens might share wealth equally.

As we have also seen, economic systems have evolved that have successfully drawn from both capitalism and socialism. However, in the main, the economic philosophy that most rewards individual wealth-seeking (free-market capitalism) has been seen to triumph over the variants of socialism (represented by a range of governmental and economic models -- from capitalism with some elements of socialism, as in Western Europe, to the 'pure' communism of the early Soviet Union and the first 40 years or so of communist China). State-run socialist economies have shown themselves to be failures, in the main. In the West, socialist policy survives only in Western Europe and Canada, in the form of pensions, health-care plans, supports for maternity and child-rearing, etc. (though many do argue that these supports come at a high expense economically to the nations that try to maintain them; these social welfare systems may not even be sustainable for much longer in their present form)*.

*There is the example of Venezuela. However, in Venezuela, wealth redistribution is not formal, institutional, as in Europe. When Hugo Chavez leaves power, it is possible that his social programs for the poor would be altered or discontinued altogether. For the purposes of this essay, I am also excluding the examples of North Korea, Myanmar, and other such countries.

For 300 years at least, the question of which economic and social model could most benefit society has preoccupied the world. During that time, religion has mainly been in retreat. And though the long decline of religion obviously has had many causes other than economic ones, it is clear that material well-being has taken up ever more of our attention, and religious faith, while still very strong in some quarters, has lost its hold; religious life has long since ceased to be central to Western society , whereas economic life has been so ever more. One could add that atheism was the official policy of many, if not all the communist states. Secularism was one of the thrusts of the Arab nationalist movements and the modernization programs of such countries as Turkey. Some major religions -- Catholicism for example -- have been forced to modernize or face obsolescence.

Religion has not been the only traditional institution that has been threatened by the indomitability of capitalism and its social corollaries. Traditional cultures and their values have also been in retreat. Whether it is a question of the society and values of the rural United States, or the indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin, the machinery of commerce and communication has been steadily eroding local mores and cultural practices. Indigenous cultures throughout the world are every bit as endangered as the natural environments in which these cultures are frequently found.

However, over time, a resistance movement has arisen against the trend towards materialism in the world, and has become especially potent in recent decades. It is largely religious in nature, but it would be a mistake to see the movement as solely religion-based. The principle embodiment of this anti-materialist force has been so-called 'radical' Islam (but there are other groups that are in many ways aligned with Islamism in this movement, in some cases while being mortally opposed to it -- Islamism simply having the greatest number of adherents).

The Islamic world has many resentments against the Western, capitalist world (note: this essay should not be taken for support for or judgement against these resentments). Some of these are neither economic nor cultural: for example, the Palestinian question. But one of the main ones (and one that is less often talked about) is of the social decay that the bourgeois capitalist model seems inevitably to carry with it. We value the freedom of Western society, but much of the world is fearful of the cost of that freedom: crime, the decline of family life, the unclear social heirarchy, the emphasis on material well-being at the expense of spiritual integrity. We are fearful of the absolutism we see in Islamism (which is why some of us are given to calling it 'Islamo-fascism'); in some of the non-Western world, both within and outside of Islam, many are fearful of losing their religious and cultural foundations in a flood of commercial homogenization.

We now have a world-wide free market not just in commerce, but in culture. In both cases the large have an advantage over the small. But while the rain-forest tribes of Ecuador face long odds against the global culture of homogeneity, the Islamic world, with its broad territorial span and ample population, intends to put up a fight. The conflict between Islam and the West is most often charactarized as a religious one, and in some ways in may well be. But it is just as much conflict between two opposing attitudes about culture and the role it should play in everyday life. In the West, culture is seen merely as an embellishment to life. In fact the word itself is much more commonly used to refer to the arts or to entertainment than it is to talk about behavior and customs; in some of the rest of the world, including, I believe, much of the Islamic world, culture means the various traditions of a place, a tribe, or of a nation.

I think it is more than coincidence that during the same period (the last 40 years) that the Islamic world has become more assertive, evangelical Protestantism has entered the cultural mainstream, not just in this country, but in other countries that formerly were dominated by the Catholic church. And if one looks a little past the well-known stances the evangelicals take on so-called 'social' issues, and tries to see the motivation behind them, one detects that at the root they are just trying to impose order on a world that they see as bewildering, bereft of moral order (I feel obliged to say, as I did regarding Islamism, that I am in no way trying to be an apologist for any views you may associate with evangelicalism -- nor am I critiquing those views). It may also be significant that the trend in Judaism, especially in America, was once assimilation, but that nowadays, the Orthodox and Hasidic Jews -- living in separate, self-sustaining communities -- are becoming more numerous and ever more influential both in this country (within Judaism) and in Israel.

I am not in a position to postulate as to whether religions can be reconciled with one another or not. But I do think that if any one religion is hardening its stance towards the rest of the world, the true reason may be found in cultural changes now taking place globally -- every bit as much as one may find the reason within the theology of that religion. We would do well to evaluate the role of culture in our own society, and see just how much that role has been altered -- diminished -- over the years.

Population Control

2008-09-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

Any discussion of controlling the global human population brings up a dilemma. On the one hand, in much of the world, the population is too great to allow for much more than subsistence living for the majority of citizens. And in those countries that have been able both to sustain large populations and to develop their economies relatively successfully, the environmental impact has been severe, and is being felt both within those countries' borders and outside of them.

On the other hand, the value of individual human life is not ours to measure; it should never be assessed solely on a numerical basis. While limiting population growth might reduce strains on the environment and the economy, however great these strains may be, we realize that it also would prevent individual people from being born, with all their potential for productiveness and happiness. We cannot easily deny the unborn the same right to existence we ourselves enjoy.

We know that these latter arguments are more than just ethical: they are also moral and religious ones for many of us. We would be right to consider the moral and religious facets of the problem. But if we may, let us first look at the two strains of thought that have dominated the population control debate.

Making predictions about the impact of unchecked population growth, controlling human populations for rational ends, and other 'scientific' approaches to population control were once fully part of mainstream thought. With Thomas Malthus as their intellectual father, many writers in the 19th and 20th centuries speculated imaginatively on what would happen if human beings grew in number indefinitely. They usually made dark predictions: mass starvation, irreversible environmental damage, and so forth. Most saw birth control as the most humane solution to the problem of overpopulation (though some also viewed famine and disease as a natural and ultimately beneficial control on population).

In more recent times, population growth has been seen as inevitable, and the goal has been not so much how to prevent it as to adapt to it, even benefit from it (meanwhile, population control, once the topic of best-sellers, has been relegated almost to the intellectual fringe). We are trying to devise ways of feeding the billions more people who are due to arrive, and are forecasting (if not planning adequately for) their energy and housing needs. The human-life-as-statistic of the Malthusians is out of date; now we have made a fetish of the individual will to reproduce. For example, we have become very respectful of individual cultural and religious dictates that foster larger families: it would be in intellectual bad taste to question the multiple-child family in the country with 35% unemployment and over-taxed natural resources. We acknowledge 'demographic changes' (often a euphemism for population growth), but rarely discuss our potential to alter those changes (almost as if they were weather phenomena). And just as it was once acceptable to view large human populations as burdensome, it is now the fashion to tout the 'potential' of the billions more people expected to be added to the planet in the coming decades.

Our new view of population growth is more humane than that of the cold Malthusians. But it contains disturbing contradictions. We pay lip-service to protecting the wild natural areas that still exist, but do not squarely acknowledge that adding to the current world population on the order of one quarter to one third (as I believe is forecast) will all but ensure the deterioration (if not destruction) of these areas (as it is well known, large and still-growing populations are already putting unbearable pressure on rain forests, oceans, and other critical ecosystems). Global warming may be a proven threat to the livability of the planet, but every forecast of energy needs I have seen shows fossil fuel use growing to levels that common sense tells us are unsustainable. It is uncommon to see a discussion of how population growth increases the demand for energy; instead, the rise in energy use is attributed instead (again, euphemistically) to 'growing economies', or some other impersonal force.

However, this does not remove the basic dilemma of population science that I acknowledged at the beginning. We Americans use up natural resources out of proportion to our numbers, but we would be offended if we were viewed as 'excess' population whose disappearance would aid in the planet's survival. But if our lives, our ideas, and our potential are indispensable, then so then are everyone else's.

The only solution to the problem of human overpopulation, it seems to me, is to acknowledge the sacredness of human life while also allowing that an over-abundance of it will eventually degrade the quality of that life irreversibly. At the present, these two notions are seen almost as mutually exclusive, and from what I can see, irreconcilable.

The contemporary trend is to concede that human life will inexorably multiply as much as the environment can possibly support. It is seen somehow as eccentric to predict that in time our great numbers will infringe on the very sanctity of human life that we would like to uphold. We hold simple human existence to be sacred; we might also define what it means to protect the sanctity of being.

The Master of Arts Degree In Teaching

2008-08-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Note: the author has taught education courses both at the undergraduate and graduate level.

The MA in Teaching, required for permanent teacher certification in grades K-12 in most, if not all American states, is misguided requirement, at least as it is now generally designed. The degree is based on the premise that the craft of teaching can be transmitted through formal study, when in truth it can probably best be acquired through experience and guided practice. The Master's is meant to give professional as well as a kind of intellectual status, but only succeeds in conferring the former -- and this only because diplomas do, after all, foster respect, but also because the degree itself is a prerequisite for permanent teacher licensure. If you don't have a Master's in Education, you simply can't have a career as a teacher.

The body of knowledge acquired in the Master's in Education course of study is oftentimes lightweight. Graduate schools of education expose prospective teachers mainly to theories about how children think and learn; these theories tend to reflect educational fashion and are often pseudo-scientific in that they are can’t be proven (leaving aside that many of them have been shown to be ineffective or even deleterious over time). Other coursework tends to center around 'issues' in education: addressing the different 'learning styles' of children, 'teacher-centered' (old-fashioned teacher-led) instruction versus 'student-centered' (in which teacher acts more as an enlightened guide) instruction, and the like.

Oftentimes, graduate education course material can verge on the silly and irresponsible. For example, students may be asked to read a set of articles representing different points of view on the topic of giving homework (some will be for it, though it is also likely that many of these articles would be against giving homework). All will cite research that supports their positions. However, when teachers arrive at their first teaching job, it is almost certain that they will have to follow school and district mandates regarding homework. Teachers may rightly question the usefulness of an intellectual debate in an area that really isn't debatable in actual practice.

I am not suggesting the study of education theory should be done away with altogether. Any seriously-intended theory of education is worthy of study. Teachers should be exposed to all ideas current in educational thought, especially given the complex teaching environment we find today. But entire courses and units should not be dedicated to many of the topics that are considered the most important in education theory; they should be condensed, and approached from a more common-sense point of view*. Additionally, knowledge not only of one's core subject area, but general knowledge should be placed at greater value in teaching schools than it now is. I don't want to be lectured ad nauseum on the different 'learning styles' I will encounter in my classroom. Must I constantly distinguish between 'visual' and 'kinesthetic' learners**, and be obliged to come up with ways of engaging them at all times? Or might I just be trusted to come up with a common sense approach on my own or in collaboration with fellow teachers? As a graduate student, I was appalled at the lack of emphasis on learning how to instruct properly in the actual subject area you would be teaching. I was forced instead to learn about the aforementioned 'learning styles', 'democratic classrooms', the umpteen different ways of arranging one's classroom, the pros and cons of having students contribute to making classroom rules, and other soul-deadening material -- never once was I taught how to, say, teach a substantive American history lesson to an elementary school class.

*The writing quality of the contemporary educational education theorist also needs to be addressed. I wince when recalling all the polemical literature I had to endure both as a graduate student and later as a professor who had actually to teach it. Education writers seem not to believe that their audience is capable of making an inference. I should mention that a good deal of the education-related reading material of recent authorship is much in need of editing for style and form.

**visual learners learn best through pictures, graphs, films, etc.; kinesthetic learners apparently learn best in ways that allow them to move about freely (!); 'tactile' learners must handle objects that represent geometric shapes (if they are learning geometry), etc.

Education theory is seemingly willfully separated from classroom experience, particularly from the experience of teachers in low-income schools. For example, the aspect of teaching that most bedevils teachers, particularly new teachers -- classroom discipline -- is rarely treated with the proper urgency in teacher-education courses. Though the topic is covered over several different courses in the typical graduate education program, it is rare to see a course solely devoted to classroom management.

Let's take this matter of teaching discipline in graduate education programs separately for a moment. Classroom discipline problems are the main reason new teachers become frustrated with the teaching profession. And the problem of classroom discipline is seldom approached honestly. In the public schools, the regulations governing discipline are fairly weak -- they are usually an inadequate deterrent to the student who misbehaves chronically. In all teaching settings, the teacher is and must be the primary disciplinarian. But teachers must also receive the unequivocal, firm backing of their school administration and their community to give the proper weight to their own disciplinary actions.

Regrettably, teachers do not always receive proper support in matters of discipline. To digress for a moment, this is ultimately a reflection of contemporary society's ambivalence about controlling the will of the individual; it also reflects our collective view that the rights of the few should be considered on an equal basis with the welfare of the many. At any rate, many teachers, particularly (but not exclusively) in disadvantaged areas, are left to get along as best they can with the most challenging students. Many teachers with disadvantaged student populations find themselves overwhelmed, and leave the profession within a few years.

Teacher education programs idealize the classroom setting, and would have us believe that there is no such thing as the classroom where a program of behavioral modification would not be sufficient to control an unruly student. I have taught graduate students who are working in challenging urban schools, and the difference between the largely middle-class school settings profiled in the course readings and those where my grad students have to work is truly galling. In their coursework, education students are taught how to deal with students who possess some sense of remorse, who have 'internalized' the norms and expectations of society, at least to a degree; they are not taught what they really need to know: how to deal with students with overwhelming behavioral and social problems.

II.

So, far too often, graduate education courses are intellectually stultifying and, worse, do not do a good job of preparing teachers to lead classrooms. The teachers who do succeed are the ones who somehow manage to survive their first years in the profession, finding the toughness and possessing the dedication to weather challenges that very often have to be experienced to be truly believed. Their master's degrees are decidedly not what give them the resources to be successful.

Yet dispensing with formal training altogether is not the solution. Instead, we ought to restructure the training to make it both more intellectually invigorating as well as more practically oriented. We should keep what I believe was the original intent of the master's in education (training people to teach), but revise and shorten the degree course, combining it with a more rigorous apprenticeship than we generally have had prospective teachers undergo up to now.

Teaching is not a science or an 'art' but a craft. Master's degree courses are taught as if education were a kind of applied social science -- through readings, lectures, and discussions, though without the enjoyment of getting to do experiments. It would be better instead to have the students watch videos of actual classes, for example -- not as a special feature but as a regular element of class. Instructors could select readings that support (or refute) the practices that the graduate students witness in these videos. Any papers the students write could be in response to the teacher practice that is observed, using the theory to comment on the practice. Other creative teaching methods should be freely employed: student dramatization of discipline problems, instructional films made by the graduate students that illustrate educational theory, debates, mock trials, and so forth.

Aside from one or two courses on classroom discipline and behavior management, I wish I'd had one on managing paperwork, record-keeping, and other administrative tasks. Like the class discipline course, it would be practical in nature. Class time could be spent grading sample homework assignments, learning to enter grades, do report cards, etc. Videos could again be used to show how teachers can best manage classroom routines.

I'll say again that it would be unwise to dispense with educational theory classes altogether. Students should be able to choose from among courses that emphasize different educational philosophies. A useful (and interesting) course would be on the problems and history of urban education since World War II (ideally, the course should be as free as possible of an ideological slant), with an emphasis on the recent innovations that are showing so much promise in inner-city settings.

In order to allow these or any other suggestions for change in the teaching master's program to work, the teaching quality at schools of education simply must improve. Teachers are incessantly reminded that they must be 'engaging' in their own classrooms by education professors who are anything but engaging themselves. While there is a minority of professors who strive to engage their students, to connect the (at times) disconnected or abstruse theory to classroom reality, many (intentionally or not) treat their graduate students with condescension, believing that Gardiner's theory of intelligences or Piaget's stages of development are sufficiently interesting on their own to stimulate graduate student interest. No educational theories have any real interest save when they are thoughtfully connected with real teaching and learning experiences. We need more professors of education who can teach educational theory creatively and with a more practical aim.

I am not as familiar with student teaching internships as I am with graduate education courses. I'm sure some student teaching experiences are invaluable to prospective teachers. However, if we could follow the principle that greater rigor in teacher training should always be the goal, we might create apprenticeship experiences that demand more of participants. I'm not sure if serving as a teacher assistant for a semester is adequate preparation for taking on the responsibilities of a classroom single-handed. Graduate teaching programs should be leading the way in devising internships that give a realistic experience of working with children, especially the kind of challenging student teachers are ever more likely to encounter, and that allow one to handle, in some small way, the many demands of teaching (paperwork, lesson planning, parent contacts, etc.).

Some graduate programs probably are not in need of any alteration. Institutions such as the Bank Street College of Education are philosophically perfectly attuned to the kinds of learning environments to which they send so many of their graduates. The preparation they offer is probably more than adequate for the teacher at the 'progressive' school. However, many schools are (sadly) too overwhelmed to be progressive, and the only way for teachers to do well in such schools is to be as well prepared as they possibly can be before entering the classroom. If they are teaching and getting their Master's at the same time, they should not be made to suffer through coursework that has little connection to their everyday teaching experience -- that will make them cynical, and ultimately disheartened. The Master's in Education should be looked at just as closely as all the other elements of public education that are currently being subject to revision and reform.

Cultural Poverty of the United States

2008-07-13T04:14:00.000-07:00

In recent times, some of our political candidates have spoken up against 'poverty'. I wonder if this is the right term to use. If what is being referred to is poverty and the destitution that goes with it, then the priority should be to eliminate it. Without denying that poverty still can be found in the United States, I think what people are more often referring to is not true poverty, but income inequality, lack of access to health care and good schools, lack of well-paying jobs, and other impediments to getting and maintaining secure wealth: in other words, economic insecurity. My observation tells me that economic insecurity is much more often the problem than true poverty, as I understand the term. It threatens our national way of life.

There is no question that we are vulnerable economically at this time in our history, and that some kind of decisive action needs to be taken to forestall long-term decline. Unfortunately, the kinds of decisive actions we would need would go against the grain of not just our political, but our social culture. And when I mention social culture, I feel I should also add that we do suffer, as a nation, a kind of poverty that would drag down any effort towards national improvement in any arena of life; I am referring to cultural poverty.

America used to possess a vital 'vernacular' or folk culture (another term would be popular culture, but the common meaning of that term has changed so much as to make it misleading in this instance). In our country, folk culture could be found in many locales: the immigrant enclaves of our cities, our rural areas, particularly in the South; threads of a distinct American everyday culture could actually be found anywhere that had a distinct regional character (which was, at one time, most areas of the country). Our folk culture had many wonderful manifestations: regional folk music styles, certain sports, ways of life, crafts, customs, foods.

Nowadays, most of these products of regional American culture require conscious preservation for them to survive in any form. It is obvious to everyone that we have become homogenized; we have lost our regional folkways (the ones which have produced some unique cultural products, from blues music to stickball*). Consumerism, mass communications and entertainment are some of the powerful agents of conformity that have caused this. The only cultural sub-groups that exist authentically outside of the mainstream are the ones primarily guided by their religion.

*though the effort is self-conscious, some vernacular arts, such as bluegrass music, are actually thriving as the result of a massive effort of cultivation and preservation.

Independent creative folk culture is seemingly on the wane. The hope is that through thoughtful preservation, the folk arts can somehow remain vital. They may not be integrated into our daily lives as intimately as they once were, but at least they won't die out altogether, and could even continue developing.

However, the decline of traditional folkways is not the primary cause of the cultural poverty I was referring to earlier; it is a symptom of it. In discussing this, let us switch over to a second definition of 'culture': the local and national norms, customs, rituals, conventions etc. that shape our behavior, sometimes inhibiting and regimenting it, at all times giving our lives some kind of order, if not value and meaning.

This aspect of culture has never been as strong in the United States as in the older nations. We may have social classes, but no class system. We may practice politeness, but decorum seems more than what is necessary. There is no institution we do not alter in order to give ourselves more freedom, when possible and practical: law, religion, marriage, family, school. Our personal ideal is to be open and free with one another; social reserve makes us suspicious. The hauteur we perceive in some foreigners is repellent to Americans.

Many people have observed these things about us. And I am only repeating what we have all heard already when I say that another tendency of ours is to make convenience and practicality the measure of a thing's value. This is especially true of food, to give just one example. I'm pretty sure that breakfast cereal, fast food, pre-packaged snacks, and other ways of making eating less troublesome were American innovations.

I know all these are banal observations. But while our love of personal freedom, convenience, choice, and so forth have been enduring parts of our character, they have never been as unfettered as during the last two to three generations. We have become more convinced of our entitlement to absolute freedom of action, while doing away with any central guiding principles for our personal and civic lives; the effect on our society has been confusing, and even damaging in some cases.

What 'guiding principles' could I be referring to? Not 'decency' or 'morals', or anything like them. As it is with our folk culture, any decline in the sense of right and wrong that one may perceive is not a cause, but a symptom of something else that is larger but less visible.

Ours has never been as hierarchical a society as some others, nor has it been especially authoritarian. But there was a time when we shared a greater faith that authority would be used for a benevolent purpose. We once believed, more so than now, that authority properly lay with government, with family, with school, and other institutions of society; we did not question it because it would not have occurred to us to to do so. We believed in the accumulated wisdom of these institutions. We also had a passive belief, but a belief all the same, that society's natural order was indeed hierarchical. Parents, school administrations, police, the military, government representatives, etc. were above the rest of society, and it was our natural place to follow and obey them.

One can't go any further without acknowledging that in a hierarchical society, certain groups are held in an inferior position unfairly and against their will. We know this has been true in our society no less than in any other; we have also learned that it is unwise to follow authority unquestioningly. Those who have fought, often heroically, against hierarchies of race, class, and sex have bettered our society immeasurably; the same may be said about those who have fought against the unwise or unfair use of the official instruments of authority.

Perhaps in order to ensure that we would suffer the least possible injustice at the hands of societal, governmental, or familial authorities, we have weakened them, and given them an excess of oversight. The school, the policeman, the parent, the government, and so forth all hold less power over us than they formerly did. This is not entirely unwelcome -- individuals should not be totally powerless in the face of an arbitrary instrument of authority. And we need to have continuing vigilance to make sure that the power of authority is wielded fairly.

I would offer that the dilution of authority in our society has been a double-edged sword. It has made every action, every decision that would have an impact on others frought with ramifications; as a result, we are often paralyzed. One can easily find examples of large-scale projects that would have been undertaken decisively by earlier generations lying half-finished, or languishing in the beginning stages. Specifically, I would argue that the stalled effort to rebuild New Orleans, the decision about how to build on the World Trade Center site, the search for alternative fuels and modes of transportation are but three examples of how our ambivalence towards authority has led not to more enlightened decisions, but simple inaction.

Our thoughtless rejection of authority on principle has done as much harm in the private as it has in the public sphere. While we may agree, if asked, that parental authority, for example, should be final, the broad culture undermines parental authority. In the popular culture, parents are often shown as well-meaning dolts, self-absorbed, or simply incompetent. And if many parents heave off the burden of having to wield authority over their children, it is because the 'culture' (or, what is 'in the air'), gives them tacit permission to do so. Certainly, parents who try to be strict go well against the grain of contemporary thinking. I can't say for certain whether kids are any less well-mannered than in earlier generations -- every generation complains about its children's manners -- but I'm pretty sure that children are no longer expected to present themselves with any amount of formality, in private or in public.

The authority of the teacher and the school is also greatly diminished by our rejection of authority as an abstract principle. For as much lip-service as we pay to the importance of education, the teaching profession itself is not respected; the decisions handed down by the teacher or administration are seen as provisional, if they go against the wishes of dissatisfied parents or of other parties. The multifarious cures being offered for our underachieving schools would be unnecessary if the incivility, slatternly personal self-presentation, and watered-down thought and intellectual content that are tolerated in the broader society could somehow be kept away from the classroom.

In the domain of the arts, it is seen as stodgy to maintain that there is a body of visual art, literature, history, and so forth that is deserving of preservation and study more than the rest. With the abandonment of a hierarchy, as it were, of culture, we have allowed almost every cultural product to have its day. This is not an entirely bad development. Leaving aside that any set of criteria for judging the worth of art is biased and myopic, obviously some of the art that once would have been considered 'low' deserves attention on its own terms. But in (rightly) recognizing that standards of 'quality' are arbitrary, we have then allowed ourselves to think it is better to have no standard at all. This attitude, combined with our faith that technological progress should always be embraced, is causing society to be altered in unpredictable ways.

I would love to have it demonstrated that our everyday culture is as strong as it once was. But by almost every measure I can think of, American culture is has become progressively weaker, across the social spectrum. Families in which there is strong, intact structure have become the exception; with the decline of family life there has also been the gradual disappearance of handed-down cultural traditions: foods, crafts, rituals. People increasingly live in communities that, either by accident or by design, are culture-free, in that they have no ties to any kind of shared past. In most households, what culture there is to be found is of the instantaneous, electronic kind. Though some would have us believe that the new electronic media are allowing the mind to develop in new, possibly beneficial ways, time may show that they have a spiritual cost we cannot measure.

I won't try to convince anyone that our country is a coarser place than it was before. But it is a less interesting place than it used to be. The negative social effects that stem from a lack of a strong, agreed-upon culture apparently can be withstood; it is almost harder, somehow, to live where there is little sense of place.

The Decline of Everyday Photography

2008-07-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Photographs may confound the viewer as much as they reveal, and if I'm not mistaken, that is at least some of the allure of photography, and is a justification for calling it one of the fine arts. I love the ambiguity of photographs; the best photographers (not including nature photographers), it seems to me, are the ones who can expertly blend the chance and mystery that are intrinsic to captured images with their own artistic intention.

Ordinary snapshots, yearbook pictures, portraits and so forth don't have that kind of "intentionality", but to me they reveal something about the personae, if not the actual characters, of their subjects. Go through any collection of American family snapshots from the 1930's to the present, and you will probably see some striking trends. Up until the early 1970's, people seem more restrained in photographs. The range of behavior that was captured on camera was quite limited: usually the people are posing; occasionally they may be sitting in an automobile, or swimming or engaged in some other leisure or sport activity. Nowadays almost every aspect of life seems a worthy subject for a snapshot.

Prior to about 1973, you would seldom have found anyone making a face deliberately at the camera, or being otherwise provocative (the exception might have been pictures taken in photo booths). There is nothing inherently good or bad about this in itself; it is just something that one notes in looking at family photographs across the decades. However, there is a troubling feature of snapshot photography that one can't as easily dismiss (beginning, again, around 1973 and continuing on up to the present) : at a certain point, people generally began to look awful in photographs.

This generalization is as broad as they come, but I can defend it easily if you show me your family pictures (if they span at least forty years). The pictures up to 1970 or so will have a restraint about them. The human subjects will be well-, if more conservatively and uniformly clothed -- their hair-styles will be old-fashioned, but not displeasing. Most of all, the people in them will present themselves with a noticeable reserve, one for which one nowadays might be nostalgic. For to look at your family pictures, from the early '70's onwards, would cause one, in many cases, to blush and to cringe.

Part of the problem was technical advances in quick photography that made colors more lifelike and the visual sense of the picture much more immediate. Of course, one can't discount the hair and clothing styles that seem so laughable with a little hindsight. But these aesthetic landmarks are not the real cause of what I believe is a terrible decline in everyday photographs.

I am convinced that we are the ones who ruin, however innocently, most of the photographs that are taken of us. We feel obliged to show a whole set of emotions all at once when the shot is taken; this often gives us a distorted or vulgar appearance in the resulting picture. We think it is not worth our trouble to maintain our dignity before a camera; it should not then surprise us that we appear undignified in most of our pictures. Our clothing is of generally low quality, with too many garish colors and designs -- our clothes don't come out well in pictures. We also never seem to mind being photographed, no matter the time of day, the setting, our physical state, our frame of mind; we could be much more discriminating in permitting others to take our picture. We don't pose as often, or as well as we should for our pictures; we are happy to be captured in a state that we would consider more 'normal', not considering that our normal, moment-to-moment actions come out appearing very ordinary when caught in an instantaneous moment in time. Our photographers themselves are not blameless either: they take their shots at awkward angles; they surprise us, and they take too many pictures of us for more than a few of them to be any good.

While we might, on an individual basis, do more to ensure that the ever-expanding photographic record of our lives should become more bearable for others to look at, the problem and the responsibility are beyond the reach of our own decision-making. Our culture allows us to show ourselves in public in practically any state whatsoever without anyone's disapprobation (let's admit that we have all benefitted from the convenience offered by this lax attitude at one time or another). But your family's picture collection is diminished by the many images it contains of you and your loved ones in a more or less disheveled state. I might have trouble convincing you that public places are harder to bear now than they used to be, merely because of peoples' appearance; but I believe I would have a better chance of convincing you of it by showing you your photograph.

Education Reform

2008-05-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

For about 30 years, American public education has been seen as ‘failing’. To combat the low performance of so many of our public schools, efforts of reform have been mounted, though usually only at the local level. There is disagreement about how well these reforms have worked, though some have clearly performed quite well, and deserve wider implementation.

Public schools are, by and large, still administered by and are answerable to state and local communities and governments; for this reason school reform has been piecemeal. A thorough re-doing of the public school system has not been attempted on the national level. The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act has many mandates that local systems are obliged to obey – these have apparently forced schools to use more instructional time on standardized test readiness, and have (more happily) required that teachers be licensed in their subject area. Some schools have even been forced to close or reorganize for failing to meet the performance criteria set forth by the NCLB Act.

However, in this country, no national effort has been undertaken to change the basic character of our schools. Though some reform efforts have (to their immense credit), been directed at demanding higher performance from students, often in poor rural and inner-city school districts, the average school is still not extremely demanding of students academically.

Some very influential thinkers have become impatient with the pace of school reform, and with the general condition of our schools. I agree that there are, in certain cases, vested interests that may be overly wary of changing schools too radically, and that these interests sometimes interfere with school improvements. I also believe that teachers, for example, should have a high level of general education (higher than is generally the case now), and should also be exposed to a more practical, common-sense training program than is offered in most college and university education departments. But there is often a striking omission in the ongoing (the less charitable person might term it ‘unending’) debate on education reform. I am referring to the low demands placed on the students themselves in the majority of American public schools. We are unwilling to make students work harder, and at a higher level. We condemn low student performance generally (we profess to be aghast at our middling to low ranking in student performance vis a vis other nations), but seem to have a failure of nerve when it comes to making school curricula more challenging.

I agree that some of the resistance comes from our national unwillingness to invest properly in public education. Take science education as an example. Teacher salaries are too low to attract candidates with backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, and so forth; they can find more lucrative (and higher-status) employment in other fields. And what if we were to increase the number of periods of science by two a week on the national level? We would have to hire teachers, purchase equipment, and build or renovate classrooms. The money to these things would not be forthcoming.

However, a good deal of the resistance is also cultural. As a twenty-year educator, I can say with assurance that some aspects of learning that are inherently difficult or dull (however necessary), have, over time, been minimized or taken out of school curricula altogether. Ancient languages are no longer studied, except in elite institutions. Literature selections have become more ‘readable’ – i.e., easier. Poetry memorization is seen as anachronistic. Personal essays are in; research papers are out. Mathematics is more ‘engaging’ perhaps, than it used to be, but I have found that since students do not master multiplication tables and other basic computational skills, the ‘engaging’ qualities of today’s math lessons are lost on many of them.

The notion that children are fragile, that they may be permanently harmed by pushing them too hard, has become a guiding principle both among some parents as well as with educators. This school of thought, now a couple of generations into being, is, I believe, cowardly at its root; it shows a misunderstanding of the basic nature of children. We take the inner feelings of children more seriously than children themselves naturally would wish us to do; and we show a misplaced solicitude by protecting them from failure and other kinds of consequences, both in and out of school.

Influences On Social Behavior

2008-03-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

Aside from the people who are around us most consistently, there is another impersonal influence on our behavior that is almost as strong. Some would use the word 'culture' to describe this influence. For purposes of this discussion, I would define culture as follows: a set of well-defined norms for personal comportment, for family relations, for the taking of meals and other routines, for what constitutes 'decency' and 'indecency', for what behavior is tolerable and for what behavior is not.

Whenever there is a distinctive, well-formed social culture of the type I have just outlined, there is a consequence for violating these and other of the culture's norms (most frequently, this would be some form of ostracism). There is also a tendency towards conformity which, to our way of thinking, might appear quaint. In this country, as well as in many other places, we have freed ourselves from the restraints of the old-fashioned social culture, consciously in some ways, unwittingly in others. The result has been mixed.

A strong social culture does impose rigid precepts regarding our place in the world. Such a culture would demand a certain uniformity of dress, and prescribe what clothing to wear for certain occasions (comfort would not be the foremost consideration in each case, but rather, appearance). All of our interpersonal dealings would be far more formal. Incivility, or even mere breaches of etiquette would be seen as more shocking (and possibly less likely to occur). Families would arrange their daily schedule around shared meals, and not the other way around. Sexual and other kinds of morality would be more or less absolute, not relative. Social relations would be predetermined in more cases; the relationships between parents and children, for example, might well be more authoritarian. Social contracts of both the legal (marriage) and the unspoken (filial duty) kind would be seen as more or less unbreakable, etc., etc.

There might well be more hypocrisy, as the ideals of society would be much more difficult to attain in individual cases. There could be greater prejudice even than at present, because highly structured societies can be more exclusionary, and we would inevitably make the criteria for inclusion into society more rigidly based (even than is now the case) on inherited or received attributes (race and social class, for example). Compared to the kind of society we have now, the ordered, heirarchical society that used to be prevalent would be experienced as stifling by the majority of the populace. Most people would see no advantage to having so many unspoken rules governing their behavior.

There could also be benefits. The probability of having a respectful interaction with a stranger would increase. People would have to set aside their momentary desires more frequently and pay greater heed to the demands of the larger group of which they were part -- in the case of the family, setting aside time for meals and other rituals could strengthen the bond between members. It would make being in public places more pleasant, because the behavior one would encounter would be more predictable, and therefore probably more civil. Ambiguity and impossible arrays of moral choices would not bedevil relationships -- marriages, parent-child bonds, etc. -- any more than could inherently be expected.

Only the tiniest handful of figures in history have been influential enough to alter the social characteristics of large groupings of people -- and even they can have an impact only on selected (if important) aspects of the self: religious belief, tolerance, attitudes towards authority, etc. Changes in technology, wars, and other impersonal developments may be seen to have equal or greater impact on how we think and behave in the world than the conscious effort of any person or group of persons. In any case, social rules can not be enacted, as if they were laws; they can only evolve. It is not possible (as desirable and beneficial as it may seem) to 'turn back the clock' to a time when we imagined people behaved more virtuously.

However, I do think we could benefit from re-imagining a world in which we acted with more general restraint than we do now. I am grateful to live in a society as fluid as ours. I am ambivalent, though, about the freedom of personal action that is tolerated in such a society. If we have lowered or removed altogether our standards of private as well as public behavior -- one could easily make the case that this is indeed what has happened -- we have also exposed ourselves to a great deal more in the way of unsavory and even harmful actions on the part of others (and from ourselves!). We have made life easier to live, while making the it at the same time more unpleasant, even treacherous, to navigate.

A Childhood Recollection

2008-03-18T03:35:00.000-07:00

There is a species of ant -- the fire ant -- that has moved up from the tropics and established itself in the South. When I was a child I had heard the fire ant was a pest, so I resolved to search the property for fire ant nests and eradicate them. I believed I had seen the fire ants before, but I could not distinguish them in my imagination from other harmless kinds of ants. I believed the only way of becoming familiar with fire ants was getting bitten by one. They could kill animals with their stings; this frightened me, but also attracted me to them.

There was a number of small dirt mounds scattered around the yard. I could see tiny red ants going in and out of holes at the tops of these mounds. Surely these were the ones. Only wicked, fearless insects would have established themselves so conspicuously and so near human habitation.

In appearance they were not fearsome creatures, but something in their comportment was unsettling. Their movements seemed deliberate, even measured. I believed they were conspiring in some way, and would accumulate in numbers until they became invincible.

The only appropriate way to kill them would be in a duel of wits. I wanted to challenge them on their own level, test their defenses, find and exploit their weaknesses. I hoped for circumstances that would require me to devise ingenious and bizarre weapons against the ants.

I first chose a certain ant nest off the side of the house. Once I had destroyed it, I would move on to the others.

The fire ant is very tough, and can withstand a blow. The only way of destroying one by force alone is by rubbing a stone or some other hard object over it repeatedly. At first I thought of digging the nest out of the ground with a shovel, then crushing the ants with my shoe. But this would have been too hazardous. Then the idea occurred to me of burning the ants to death with a magnifying glass.

I found this weapon worked well on isolated ants that were simply minding their business about the mound, if they were moving slowly enough. Surprise was necessary to get the beam of sunlight squarely upon them. If they detected the heat, they scurried away before the light could do harm. After a time I realized I was not killing enough of them to affect the life of the nest. They had to be drawn out and killed in numbers.

The ants were sensitive to disturbances around the nest. When I pulled on a blade of grass that was on the mound, or pushed a stick into an entrance hole, ants would stream out, ready to attack. In this defensive mode they were very agitated. But as soon as they sensed there was no intruder they began merely to mill around, and then they were easy to pick off with the magnifying glass. In this manner I increased the number of ants killed by two- or three-fold.

My methods of drawing out the ants were very damaging to the mound itself. Soon it was completely razed. The ants began to come out in smaller and smaller numbers. I assumed this was because I had killed most of the worker and warrior ants. The next step was to get at the higher castes, and eventually, the queen ant.

(Eventually, I did get get stung by some of the ants. The sting felt like a violent pinch, although it did not leave a welt. The stinger is in the abdomen, and the ant applies it by raising the rear of its body up, then pushing the stinger down into the skin.)

To reach the lower levels of the colony, I set off firecrackers in the gound. The explosions drew swarms of angry ants. After the smoke cleared I would light a second firecracker and drop it on the ants themselves. They would swarm over the firecrackers and sting them -- apparently thinking them living creatures -- and scurry away just before they exploded. Afterwards all the ants would be gone.

I began to see ants of other castes. There was a type with a larger abdomen that looked very fierce. There were also puny winged ants that were less aggressive than the others.

I could not tell how deep the nest went underground. I had made a crater about four inches deep with the firecrackers, but each explosion revealed new tunnels. Moreover, the ants seemed to be getting used to my attacks. I jammed sticks deep down into the tunnels and exploded quantities of firecrackers to draw them out, but they reacted less and less angrily each time. After a while, I felt they were ignoring me.

Finally, I decided to destroy the nest in one quick blow. I boiled water and poured it slowly over the nest, allowing time for the water to sink in. It was satisfying to know that the ants would be destroyed in the lower reaches of the colony, where I had not been able to reach. I left, expecting that when I returned I would find the nest completely lifeless.

When I came back some time later there was a neat pile of ant carcasses and destroyed larvae in the middle of a crater. The surviving ants were bringing more dead from underground and adding them to this pile. They went about their work with what seemed a horrible patience. Now and again a winged ant crawled to the surface and flew away -- later I surmised that these flying ants would begin new nests elsewhere. After that time I did not kill any more of the ants.

Education and Idealism

2008-01-07T03:37:00.000-08:00

The field of education, particularly elementary education, would seem a natural harbor for idealists. The child's openness, natural hunger for guidance and for a meaningful connection with adults are, in principle, an opportunity for people with creative spark and the urge to give of themselves. The guilelessness of children should moreover make teaching a perfect fit for those who wish to avoid the worldly perils encountered in most workplaces. Surely, there is one profession where purity of intention is not a liability, but is instead a thing that that can fuel one's sense of purpose, and lead to eventual success.

I should say straight away that many creative and thoughtful people are successful career teachers. But I have seen many idealists founder in education, and the reasons for their failure are not always so simple as they may appear.

Actually, part of it is glaringly simple. The insurmountable discipline problems of many schools would be daunting even to the most hardened veteran teacher. It does not speak well of our society that for generations certain groups of students have been left to languish in schools that have been wholly unwilling or unable to establish student discipline sufficient for basic learning. In practice, the perceived rights of a student who chronically misbehaves are seen as equal to the right of other students to learn free of distraction. In many instances, schools offer endless due process to misbehaving students and are loath to bring meaningful punishment upon them -- regardless of how the classroom climate may suffer because of this chronic misbehavior. I would guess that if there were one reason above all others for so many teachers leaving the profession within 5 years of starting out, it would be because of their school's equivocal (and I think often cowardly) treatment of students who, for whatever reason, consistently frustrate the educational enterprise.

It is in a way tragic that many of the schools that could most use idealistic people can only be endured, in the long term, by teachers who are able to abandon their exalted notions for the sake of survival. To teach successfully in some our most challenging schools, what is required is frank and unbending realism about the enterprise at hand, combined also with uncommon mental toughness, a tolerant view of one's own failures, and lastly, an unbreakable kernel of belief in what one is doing. These combined qualities are relatively rare in one person, which is why, unfortunately, teachers do not often last in our toughest schools long enough to have a significant impact on the educational life of their students.

Those deceptive beings -- children -- have intrinsic qualities that in themselves might both inspire, but also challenge any idealist. These qualities are to some degree common among all children, regardless of background. I feel I have developed a profound sense of connection with the children I teach. I enjoy working with them immensely, even more so than when I started in my profession. But I will say, with the greatest affection, that children are ridden with contradictions, ones with which one should be prepared to contend, humanely but firmly, if one wishes to teach successfully.

Children, when in a group setting, may attempt to engender chaos while at the same time they hunger for order and safety. They will try, in many cases, to frustrate your efforts to provide a rational structure to their setting; at the same time, they unconsciously hope that you will succeed in those efforts. They will often be contemptuous if you let them prevail over you. If you strike a familiar attitude with children, you are committing an error. Yet it is to your advantage as a teacher to convey a certain amount of tolerance and ease to your students.

Many successful teachers learn to convey warmth and even humor while maintaining their authority. But this is a skill, and it takes time and may be difficult to learn. Maintaining one's authority over a group of students requires a significant expenditure of social energy. Many teachers don't realize how difficult, and at times distasteful, it is to maintain authority in a classroom, and in fact never become comfortable with it. The need to be an authority figure seems at odds with the 'innocence' of children; it seems a contradiction, and to some it is an unpleasant one.

What is required to manage a classroom full of kids successfully and humanely is very often at odds with the notions one may have had at the outset of one's career. The popular notion that you have to be a tyrant to survive in the contemporary classroom is misleading. But the public suffers from a certain naïveté about the characteristics of children in a group setting; their behavior in groups becomes radically altered from what you would encounter individually (as any teacher will tell you, children, once grouped into sufficient numbers, can take on unexpected characteristics -- not all of them by any means negative, but certainly distinct and challenging ones).

Another thing that might, over the long term, work against the idealist in the education field is the sheer hard work of the job. The work hours of the teacher are not the ones most people would naturally set for themselves: the workday starts early, and time must be put in before and after the school day in order to complete the many different tasks demanded of the teacher. The pace of the job itself is unrelenting. Teaching requires constant planning, strategizing, improvising, reevaluating. Inevitably, most teachers are saddled with clerical work; they have to grade assignments, fill out forms, communicate with parents, arrange class trips. The sheer amount and diversity of what a teacher must accomplish may make it difficult in many cases to lead a life outside of the job, or for that matter be successful in the job itself.

Romantic notions can not long survive in many educational settings. But there is more than a sentimental satisfaction gained from the practice of helping children acquire knowledge. Teachers can bring as much knowledge and experience to bear on their lessons as their imaginations and resourcefulness will allow. I often compare a class to a kaleidoscope, because the minutest action on the part the teacher can vastly increase or decrease the receptiveness of that class to learning. A small action on the part of one or more students can also radically change the tone of the class. A classroom is highly sensitive to very small disturbances, and the actions of the students themselves, as I mentioned earlier, may tend (though usually not maliciously) towards chaos; it takes exceptional, even inordinate skill and practice to influence your students' actions so as to have the most beneficial result.

It can be terrifically gratifying when one has been successful in helping students attain a goal, however modest. I feel fortunate also that I am able to experience a great deal of satisfaction from even the routine aspects of teaching a class. But I recognize that the overall demands of the profession can be overwhelming. The authority of the teacher, like authority everywhere, has been brought into question; the social status and remuneration of teachers is not as high as it ought to be (this keeps some who might be effective teachers from entering the profession, or having entered it, from committing to it). While I believe that my own idealism had to be tempered in order to be successful as a teacher, I wish that teachers as a whole did not have to be disabused of their idealism as violently as they too frequently are.

Social Stigma

2007-12-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

There is much evidence that in many (but by no means all) societies, the stigma of possessing characteristics that are inherited, or that are otherwise are out of our control has at last begun to be lifted. This is a generalization that I should qualify. More and more people believe in -- or at least accept on some level -- the idea of racial equality; that people with disabilities should be, as much as possible, viewed as the equals of other citizens; that different religions and their practices should be allowed to coexist and flourish.

You may want to reject this proposition out of hand. After all, murderous prejudice abounds in the world. And people of racial and religious minorities would not be quick to declare a breakthrough in their acceptance by the larger societies of which they are a part. There is even evidence that in many areas, intolerance is hardening, particularly (though not exclusively) in matters of religion.

However, in the last 60 years, the notion (for example) that non-white peoples were inherently inferior has gone from being a generally accepted one to a fringe view, publicly espoused by a loud but relatively small number of violent (and of course, still dangerous) people. That said, many people, perhaps even a plurality of citizens in Western nations, may only reluctantly or grudgingly accept the idea of equality of non-whites, or of others from outside their racial or religious grouping. But most people, even if they harbor private prejudice, believe in coexistence and theoretical equality, if not full acceptance of others not like them.

I want to emphasize that I am not contending that anything like equal treatment for all citizens has been attained in this country, or any other. But the shift in ideas I am describing has, I believe, genuinely occurred. Proof of it lies in the universal outcry against people in Western countries who publicly insult other racial groups. Those who publicly express racist notions do not always suffer the lasting consequences they deserve, but the revulsion against them is general and forceful. That such a negative reaction against racists would be seen at all is a relatively recent development.

I would hope that we all would welcome the continuation of trends that led to removing completely any stigma associated with race, religion, physical or mental disability, or sexual orientation.

Western societies are also well advanced in the process of removing the stigma that used to be associated with certain behaviors and actions and their consequences. I am referring to things that in some cases were once the stuff of scandal, but that are now seen as unremarkable: divorce, adultery, certain kinds of public behavior, etc. These all involve some sort of personal choice, to a greater or lesser degree.

Such stigma should of course be distinguished absolutely from the kind I have just described. For purposes of argument I am trying to avoid judgement as to whether these actions would be wrong in any particular instance. Instead, the thing that should be noted is that many behaviors and acts that were formally stigmatized (even if you accept that it was because of society's hypocrisy) either did harm to others or had the potential to do so. This is without regard to the intentions of those carrying out the actions. Adultery, regardless of what brings it about -- a 'loveless' marriage, for example, almost always is injurious; divorce, even if it is the most sensible and humane solution in certain instances, and results from no one's original bad intention, will cause harm to the children who are obviously not parties to the case. One could continue the list.

If we somehow able to consider the harm caused by an act without passing judgement on the person who commits it, we can take a more measured view of the ramifications of that act. In my case, I try to be compassionate as possible towards individuals, and to avoid harsh judgements, so long as it is not a question of an actual crime. Yet I am able to understand why, for thousands of years, certain behaviors and acts that nowadays are seen as inevitable were once stigmatized. The social stigma, for as much as it may have been unfair and hypocritical, was a powerful disincentive to do things that could weaken the fabric of society (the word itself of course means 'permanent mark' or 'stain'). It was more potent than a legal statute could ever be, because it carried with it the threat of ostracism.

All the empirical evidence shows that laws, by themselves, are not adequate inhibitors of behavior. Neither, it would seem, is the general (and therefore, vague) disapproval of the public. People are too apt to attribute behavior to extenuating circumstances, and even to take delight in certain kinds of exhibitionism, or to simply resign themselves, for 'public outrage' ever to be a strong enough deterrent. Societies have always fallen back on stigma as their ultimate protection.

It seems to me that the purpose of stigma was not primarily to punish individuals, but to preserve societies and their institutions. I believe they were quite possibly effective in doing so. I hold this belief as something distinct from my own personal views on social stigma, which are more in accord with contemporary thinking.

An opposing argument -- and I think it is a strong one -- is that stigma crushed individuality, and was also imposed selectively, and therefore unfairly. Women adulterers were punished more severely than men (and in most societies, they still are). Divorces also reflected far worse on women than they did on men, regardless of who may really have been the one to harm the marriage. People would resign themselves to stunted lives rather than pursue a course that might lead to greater fulfillment, because of their fear of being stigmatized. Stigmas attached to personal actions could therefore be as unjust as the ones attached to race, religion, and so forth.

There is one category of behavior --public coarseness -- that needs to be considered separately. If coarse behavior and gratuitous incivility were at one time kept to within tolerable levels, it was because societies had agreed-upon standards for what constituted 'decent' individual behavior. I don't think it mattered, in a sense, that these standards may have been artificial, or even arbitrary; what did matter is that almost everyone in the society believed in them. People who violated the general standard of acceptable conduct risked the opprobrium -- in a sense, they risked being stigmatized --of their peers and larger community. No one can plausibly argue that this is truly the case any longer. I am not saying that people nowadays are more depraved than previously, but that society, having discarded standards that could apply to all persons, regardless of their station or their circumstances, finds itself confused about when to pass judgement on acts that might be against the general public good.

As societies develop and 'traditional' behavior norms are discarded (even if some of these norms, arguably, held together the social fabric), they enter an ambiguous phase. In our society, we expect much less of our citizens as regards both their public and private social conduct than we did at one time. By removing the stigma from most (obviously, there is, fortunately, still a stigma attached to the most heinous crimes) behavior, we have given ourselves unprecedented freedom of action. The benefits of this freedom do seem to come at a price, however. We have to make far too many moral choices completely on our own, because the larger society no longer provides a frame of reference.

Pop Culture and Literary Merit

2007-11-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

Like millions of others, I love to listen to as well as to play rock and other popular music genres. In the world we live in, life without pop music and other forms of pop culture would not only be less enjoyable, but also unimaginable. Pop culture is woven into nearly every facet of our being: our dress, our manners, our eating habits, the way we speak and write. Some people have been able to avoid the influence of pop culture, but their numbers are dwindling. At this stage, it would take an act of self-imposed isolation to escape it fully.

You would have to go against the entire grain of our society, avoiding virtually all newspapers and magazines and even many kinds of books, eschewing the electronic and computer-driven devices that now do so much to fill the quotidian existence of the average person, and of course, allowing yourself to hear very little music except for Western classical and perhaps some kinds of world music. Public schooling would be out of the question for your children, because the watered-down curriculum of even many (though there are a few exceptions) of the best public schools may be attributed in part to the preeminence of mass popular culture (education is nowadays unquestionably influenced by it); you would have to find a rarified private or boarding school that dared to adhere to rigorous standards of classical scholarship (Home schooling? As for me, I am not disciplined enough to provide the rigorous indoctrination that would be needed to counter the long reach of pop culture). Your social life would be highly restricted, if you could indeed have any at all, as all of your current friends and family would still participate in the popular culture and consume its products more or less unhesitatingly.

Over the years (but interestingly, much less so in recent times), cultural critics have inveighed, rather in vain, against the perniciousness of rock, movies, and other mass entertainment. I have neither the educational background nor the inclination to follow their efforts. To me there is something else of interest: the curious cultural leveling that pop culture has brought on. Pop culture excludes no one and wants to include everyone. Scions of Europe's royal houses listen to some of the same music as inner-city as well as suburban Americans (of all races), using the same music storage devices. While the visual arts are still largely practiced, curated, and appreciated by elites, these have also been successfully marketed to a mass audience. The subject matter, materials, and media of the visual arts, while they may be used still in order to shock from time to time, are often taken from everyday objects and people, and can be found in dumps, grocery and hardware stores, comic books, and other places that were at one time thought to be lacking in artistic potential. Pop culture has inculcated the idea that the mundane, the overlooked object may also be art, and does not necessarily have to be substantially altered to become an artwork, only "recontextualized" (this is not meant to be a blanket description of contemporary art; still less is it intended as a dismissal -- but I believe I am giving a fair description of some of its tendencies).

Pop music may have been the most significant change agent of all the 'media' that make up the mass culture that has arisen during the last 60 years or so. The idea of 'popular music' of course goes back well before World War II (into the 19th century), but no one needs to be told that it realized its promise as an all-inclusive, taste-shaping entity more recently than that.

As much as I love so much of this music, I have always found there are those who believe in it and revere it more than I ever could. Because it changed youth culture, though also the way we approach living in general, we have ascribed to it virtues, some of them deserved, others not. We have said that some of our pop music has literary merit. Some of our rock stars have been compared to Eliot and other poets. This is a mistaken notion, but even worse, I am certain it is a deluded one. Though I am always regretting the gaps in my education (resulting not from a lack of investment in it but from the era in which I went to school and university), I do know enough to say that great literature and great pop culture (believe it or not, I think there is a great deal of the latter) are experienced in ways that are fundamentally divergent. Please do not think I am making that tiresome and untenable distinction between 'high' and 'low' art. I am only claiming that the experience of reading "Le Rouge et Le Noir", "The Golden Bowl" and the like is not better or worse than listening to a Beatles record, or even a Dylan record, but that it provides very different sensations, ones that nourish the being and not just gratify it. I enjoy the titillation of a great pop record or film almost as much as anyone, but would wish for more time and space for the stillness and contemplation -- most of all, the precision of feeling -- that I experience with literature.

Because pop culture is so dominant, I think we have made a kind of virtue of necessity by saying a great film is equal in importance to a great book, a piece of contemporary art must have the significance attributed to it that we have also given to painters of 100-600 years ago; and most egregiously, that some writers of today are the Fieldings, James, Balzacs or even just the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of our time. Leaving aside that we have arrogated to ourselves the right of determining whether a literary work will be of lasting significance (this ability has eluded every generation preceding our own), we have an unhealthy interest in the lives of authors that has nothing to do with their writing, but that we use to evaluate them: their background, personal history, personal and political opinions. Even worse, we expect authors (and they comply eagerly) to speak to us, as it were, in a familiar manner, on subjects that we would also find familiar. In doing this, I find that they reveal little, for however much they may satisfy our need to see ourselves reflected. And as much as I am frustrated by the labored cleverness, the unasked-for conversationality of contemporary novelists, what I find most perplexing is the limited scope and ambitions of their books, as if they were afraid to leave us in the rear.

In contemporary literature, we find many references to the mass culture ("Gary's hopes of extracting quick megabucks were withering in the absence of online hype." [quoted from a critically acclaimed recent novel -- italics mine]), but also a flashy imprecision and reliance on cliche that is probably influenced by advertising (the worn-out expression, 'withering hopes' has lost all connection to the original meaning of the metaphor; the author just means 'perishing' or 'extinguished'; but the word 'withering' at one time provided an evocative image of a certain kind of long-term demise. 'Extracting' is another metaphor that has lost all its original association; the word 'getting' would have provided just as much meaning in this setting.)

The moralist's view that pop culture is merely harmful is no longer a constructive argument, if it ever was. But it is worthwhile to say that our wish to have art that is familiar, accessible -- that does not aspire to be 'omniscient', 'oracular' or otherwise 'super'-human, probably has come from pop culture's influence on our tastes. We should not let our reflexive anti-elitism prevent us from sorting out the elements of pop culture that have done real harm to our perception. There is no inherent contradiction in this task, and possibly some benefit.

Social Class and Family Music

2007-11-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

I feel uneasy bringing up the topic of social class at all. To assign anyone to a particular class seems so alien to our time, to our unspoken aspirations to liberated classlessness. It might be seen as reductionist to try to describe the attributes of social classes -- to say that a person is from a certain class (in our country at least) is to do violence to that person's individuality, even to deny his or her humanity, in the eyes of some.

Yet so long as the class we're talking about is more or less an abstraction, and if we are at a physical or historical remove from the parties being described, we have less trouble with speaking of social class as a determining force in people's lives. The "working class" of pre-1939 Europe, or the "landless peasantry" of pre-communist China, colonial India, or of Central and South America in very recent or contemporary times are objects of impassioned allegiance with many people in America and in other affluent democracies. The above-named groups, to our minds, have definite characteristics; they can be thought of almost as individuals with their own personalities, thinking and acting in a certain ways which can be charted and predicted. It seems to me also that we have ascribed a great deal of virtue to the class groups mentioned above, as well as to the working classes in many other places around the world.

We read a statement such as "The urban working class in pre-Revolutionary Russia was almost as virulently anti-Semitic as the rural peasantry" (I am not actually quoting, though I could well be), and might be inclined to accept it uncritically, but if we were asked to take in the proposition that "In our times, the American working and lower-middle class is suffering from the effects of weakened family bonds, as well as from high consumer expectations frustrated by reduced spending power", we might well be offended.

Actually, I shouldn't say whether you would be offended or not. But I do know that honest discourse about social class and how it influences people's choices is very rare. I find this baffling, though not surprising in that we don't conceive of ourselves in terms of where we would be ordered in a class system -- the very notion of a class system itself probably seems arcane or irrelevant to most people.

Again, I share your distaste for even broaching the subject. But my interest in the connection between how the middle class (especially the upper-middle class) views itself and the phenomenon of family music is too great.

You may be aware that within the family music genre there is a division between the kind that is viewed as highly commercialized (The Wiggles, Disney, Barney) and another kind that has arisen at least partly in reaction to and even in protest against the first kind: 'independent' kid music: Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants, Justin Roberts, and many others (the list is constantly lengthening); at any rate the latter category tends to be more home-grown, quirkier, less produced, etc.

The self-aware, conscientious subset of the middle class (which may be wealthier and better educated than the middle class as a whole) has embraced this latter-day flowering of independent family music. But I am struck by how sentimental so much of this independent kid music is, both musically and lyrically -- every bit as much as its 'unhip' counterpart. This is surprising, because the audience for this music is skeptical about institutions and authority figures, and is highly discriminating in how it goes about life in general -- it instinctively rejects the inauthentic or artificial in almost all arenas of life.

But in the music and lyrics of indy kid performers, maybe people are just looking for an appealing reflection of themselves: celebrations of looking for bottlecaps, your favorite childhood dog, sitting on front stoops, going to the thriftshop (this last activity is exclusively engaged in by upper-middle class, when it is done as a diversion). There are no dark corners, no misgivings, no regrets sung about in indy kid music (I am emphatically not referring to 'unhappy' childhoods, only to normal feelings experienced by children). I find this frustrating, because even placid-seeming childhoods are chock full of these things (the joyous experiences of childhood, which I would agree strongly deserve celebration in song, are, on the other hand, often written and sung about with a self-satisfaction that can be off-putting). It just doesn't ring true to me (the irony and the pop-culture throw-aways I hear in some of the music also seems somewhat glib). The indy kid music audience is very demanding about most other things in life: schools, pediatricians, food ingredients, toys, TV viewing (if that is even allowed at all). But I would have expected such people to want music that was a little more challenging (which does not necessarily mean louder or more dissonant).

One theme running through family music (this theme is certainly found in indy kid music as well) is that there may be much wrong with the world, but there is much to celebrate in ourselves. I would not go so far as to call this attitude a smug one, but I'm not sure how much the rest of the world sees things in this way. Or maybe it does, and I am wrong: some of the most prominent indy kid performers are getting mass exposure, and their popularity could prove broader and deeper than anyone would have thought. But the following is either an unscientific, unprovable generalization or a truism: children outside the warm confines of the comfortable, secure segment of the middle-class have not been much affected by indy kid music. Indy kid music (though some of it will certainly stand up to the test of time) speaks mainly to the upper middle-class world-view. And though I am uncomfortable admitting it, I find this view to be unconscionably restricted.
(this essay is taken from friendlyblobs.com/news)