The Duties of a Professor

Jean-Baptiste Regnault,  Socrates dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure, 1791.

This blog post was prompted by a former student of mine who currently teaches undergraduate students; she recently expressed regret at possibly having acted inappropriately in front of her class.

I too have said and done things in class that I later regret or at least seriously question. It is disturbingly easy to say or do something inappropriate--so inappropriate, perhaps, that one's career would never recover.

We have a big responsibility as professors that often goes unacknowledged. We are held to a high standard of maturity, we are expected to always treat our students with the utmost respect, and we are even expected to model certain values--such as opposition to racism and other forms of bias or discrimination against marginalized groups.

Unfortunately, the popular culture and our own personal habits make it difficult to live up to these standards, because of the pervasiveness of inappropriate humor, cynicism, and sarcasm. Moral seriousness is quite rare, and when it does appear it is typically the subject of ridicule. It's easier for many of us to be rude and inappropriate than it is to be paragons of responsibility and maturity.

In order to fulfill our duties as professors, I think we should reflect on these facts, and make a personal commitment to do our best to treat students with respect regardless of the circumstances, and to model intellectual and other virtues.

We also need to cultivate a healthy attitude of shame when we fail to live up to the appropriate professional standard--a shame that is not enervating, but which is motivated by a sense of dignity and honor--the sense that certain behavior is beneath us (see Thanissaro Bhikkhu's dhamma talk on "Shame, Compunction, and Ardency"). If we engage in behavior that we regard as beneath our dignity, we need to be able to acknowledge that, but also motivate ourselves to do better in the future.

R. Crumb on the Decline of Popular Music

A wide-ranging and fascinating interview with comic artist Robert Crumb. Among other things, here is Crumb's take on the decline of American music and the commercialization of American popular culture after the rise of radio in the 1930's:

The America that I missed died in about 1935. That’s why I have all this old stuff, all these old 78 records from that era. It was the golden age of recorded music, before the music business poisoned the people’s music, the same way that ‘agribusiness’ poisoned the very soil of the earth. In the old days, music was produced by common people, the music they produced to entertain themselves. The record industry took it and resold it, repackaged and killed it, spewed it out in a bland, artificial, ersatz version of itself. This goes along with the rise of the mass media, the spread of radio. My mother, born in the 1920s, remembered walking in the street in the summertime in Philadelphia, and in every other house, people were playing some kind of live music. Her parents played music and sang together. In her generation, her brothers didn’t want to play an instrument anymore. It was the swing era and all they wanted to do was to listen to Benny Goodman on the radio. The takeover of radio happened much later. In places like Africa, you can still find great recorded music from the ’50s. I have many 78s from Africa at that time that sound like some great rural music from America in the ’20s. In the U.S at that time there were thousands and thousands of bands, dance halls, ballrooms in hotels, restaurants had dance floors, school auditoriums, clubs in small towns. A small town of 10,000 would have a least a hundred bands. In the mid 30’s radio spread very fast in America and the depression killed a lot of the venues where live music was performed. You could go to the movies for 10 cents. Then in the 50’s TV finished it all off. Mass media makes you stay home, passive. In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States. I talked to old musicians who played in dance bands. This old musician bandleader Jack Coackley in San Francisco told me that in 1928 when you went downtown in the evening on the trolley car to play at a ballroom, the streets were full of musicians going to work, carrying instruments in cases. Same thing happened in France with the death of musette, the popular dance music of the working classes. There hasn’t been a decent popular music in America for a long time.

Antoine Bruy, "Scrublands"

Photographer Antoine Bruy has an excellent "in progress" project documenting the lives of people living "off the grid" in Europe.

And here is an article about the project.

Beware the Internet Mob

"Justice for Cecil."

The shaming of Walter Palmer strongly resembles a witch hunt. Who among us would survive such scrutiny? Even if we haven't killed a lion, most of us have done some stupid or immoral things. Sometimes repeatedly. "He who is without sin, throw the first stone." (Right?)

Clarificatory update: I actually agree that it was wrong to kill the lion for sport, that the wrongness was made worse by the fact that lions are endangered, and was also made worse because of the role this particular lion was playing in the ongoing research on how to protect the endangered lion populations. So I agree with many of the grounds that people are citing to justify their criticism of and use of social sanctions against Mr. Palmer. But the response to Palmer seems excessive in the light of his actual moral error, and is yet another example of the angry internet mob's frightening power. You could be next!

Second clarificatory update: Lots of people cross moral lines and should be punished, whether through the criminal justice system or through social sanctions. I am not opposed to using social sanctions against people who commit moral crimes, or against people who break the law. We should shame murderers, rapists, and thieves, for example, and Palmer also deserves a certain amount of social censure. But we also have a duty to make judgments about what legal punishments or social sanctions are justified in a calm, rational manner, lest we inadvertently make moral errors ourselves through disproportionate responses to others' immoral actions. Anger, hatred, scorn, and the other passions associated with moral outrage have a way of burning unchecked. It's not that we should forgive everything and punish nothing, but we owe it to ourselves to be careful in how we go about judging and punishing others. I fear that the internet is enabling and encouraging us to give into crude vigilantism and a mob mentality (even in cases where someone really did do something morally wrong). The short of it is, you can't reduce considered moral judgment to instant, unchecked outrage. I don't like where this is going, and I fear it will not end well for our society.

Third clarificatory update, now with more Reason: Three points worth bearing in mind: First, even if outrage is sometimes morally permissible or obligatory, what seems to be happening is people are equally outraged by all immoral actions, regardless of the severity of the immorality. For example, people seem just as outraged against Palmer (or even moreso) as they would be if he had killed a person, or 20 people, or 200 people.

Second, even if it is correct to be just as outraged against Palmer as many people are, there is still something troubling about the way the Internet and social media are causing people to focus excessively and obsessively on the particular day's cause celebre, and ignore everything all of the other crimes that are going on in the world. This excessive, obsessive focus is feeding our lack of proportion and perspective, and is leading to the harassment, firing, bankruptcy, etc. of people around the world (sometimes people who have legitimately done something wrong, but don't necessarily deserve the level of harassment they receive, occasionally people who don't seem to have actually done anything wrong in the first place, and therefore don't deserve any level of sanction or harassment).

Third, there is a case to be made that outrage in general is not morally permissible, at least if 'outrage' entails burning anger or hatred. As the Dhammapada puts it: "Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal." (Dhp I.5).

Addendum: It seems others have been writing about this as well. 

Pictures of People Dressing Up as a Mummified Girl from the Nordic Bronze Age

The remains of a teenage girl from the Nordic Bronze Age were discovered near Egtved, Denmark in 1921, and nicknamed "Egtved Girl". 

A google image search revealed that, for some reason, lots of people have dressed up as her over the years. Here are some of them.

Guerrilla Gardening and the Culture of TED Talks

Ron Finley gives an astounding TED talk on guerrilla gardening as community activism, education, art, and therapy.

One thing I will add here: TED audiences often come across as hopelessly . . . privileged.

Two caveats. First, I say this as someone who is no fan of the contemporary privilege-bashing rhetoric, through which large segments of the population are effectively removed from rational discourse through a kind of ill-conceived ad hominem. This is not to deny the reality of privilege, it's just that invoking privilege as a rhetorical tactic to shut down debate has a tendency to poison the well, strain social tensions, and hinder the unbiased and cooperative search for the truth.

Second caveat: I don't wish to engage in the widespread knee-jerk anti-TED ranting that is so common nowadays, and that was perhaps an inevitable outcome of the unprecedented success and popularity of the TED talk videos. A lot of the TED talks are grade-A presentations which manage the rare feat of being equally informative, amusing, and inspiring.

Okay, now for the critique. So often when I'm watching TED talks about very serious problems, including the one linked to above, the audience erupts into laughter at seemingly inappropriate moments. It's as if the audience's main goal is to be entertained or amused, and not to be informed or shocked out of their complacency. These people are hearing tales of poverty, disease, hardship, misery, and struggle, and their whole focus is on looking for any moment or a comment which can serve as an occasion for roaring with laughter.

Even as Ron Finley, the speaker in the above TED talk, was issuing his firm and serious call to action, the audience continued to merely laugh in response. What the Actual Fudge?! I get the impression that these wealthy TEDsters are so insulated from genuine hardship that they can't authentically empathize with the reality of others' suffering and struggles. Even their altruistic efforts come across as a type of half-hearted noblesse oblige, or (what's worse) as a type of pseudo-altruistic status-seeking, a type of social activist bling or a charitable feather in their cap. Perhaps I'm going too far here, but the question remains: HOW COULD THEY BE LAUGHING? HOW ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH COULD THEY BE LAUGHING?

Valentine's Day Special

Hans Baldung Grien, Death and theMaiden, 1517.

1. The price of love: spending the big bucks on that special someone for VD.

2. Learn to love the algorithm: a program selects dates for you.

3. The mathematics of love.

Preserving Culture in the Internet Age

There's a real risk that the twin forces of corporate (and individual) greed on the one hand and passive indifference on the other are going to doom large swaths of internet history and culture (or--more pessimistically but probably more accurately--of human history and culture) to utmost oblivion. 

To clarify: the corporate side of this dismal duo refers to the politically-connected private interests that are preventing increasing numbers of cultural products from entering the public domain, thus preventing them from being cheaply and efficiently preserved by crowd-sourced projects. The corporations also frequently attempt to claw back cultural products from the public domain; examples here include Milton Bradley's "Monopoly", and [if memory serves] Disney's attempts to assert ownership over elements of the Alice and Wonderland mythos.

The indifference side of the dismal duo simply refers to the fact that most people lose interest in cultural products once references to them have fallen below the top screen of their Facebook or other social media feed. If there is a guiding spirit of our age, it is surely the god of Blind Novelty--or else his cousin, Heedless Forgetfulness.

However, this article profiles the good work being done by the Internet Archive and other kindred projects to counter the two disturbing trends aforementioned. If druthers were to be had in this dreary domain, I would that a few idealistic billionaires part with a handful of millions to put projects like these on cultural and legal terra firma. (And while they're at it, could they please create an endowment for Wikipedia, and also set up an open-source, nonprofit, ad-free social media project? Cheers.)

The Future of PUA?

Kong Feng is a Beijing-based pick-up artist who, thankfully, has more in common with the judicious "Dr. Nerdlove" (Harris O'Malley) than with the more well-known, sleazy representatives of his profession. Hopefully Feng represents the future of PUA: a move away from teaching how to manipulate, deceive, and coerce women, and towards teaching basic social skills, nonverbal cues, the art of conversation, and simple confidence.

Tyler Cowen's "Los Angeles Notes"

The economist offers up some prescient observations of the city and its changing relation to the rest of the country:

Los Angeles no longer seems so superficial, perhaps because so many other parts of the country have been revealed to be the same or worse.  Their bookstores are no longer an embarrassment because now everyone’s are an embarrassment.  The city feels less glamorous and more normal, a better place to live but a more difficult place to talk about.  It remains an oddly forgotten city, overlooked in America’s love affair with Brooklyn and Silicon Valley and yes the Southeast, yet better to live in than perhaps anywhere else on this continent.  (Provided you do not have school-age children.)  The city has lost relative ground in one major way however: California no longer has such a monopoly on good Asian and Latin food.  Nor do movies exercise much of a hold on the American imagination nowadays.  It is no longer easy to identify what is essential about Los Angeles, yet no one here seems to care.

As is his wont, he also offers up ethnic dining recommendations (see the link for details).