Vast Triviality

One of the best feelings is the one you get when you grapple with an idea and distill it to a complete, concise argument.  One of the worst is when you present the argument to a smart friend and the friend replies in a way that misses the point entirely.  The kind of reply that implies, “I didn’t quite follow that, but here’s how I feel.”  

I’m not trying to be an insufferable snob, and I don’t claim any unusual smarts myself, but I can’t help noticing how many educated and successful people today don’t use or follow logical processes.

This is frustrating when you are trying to discuss a novel or a philosophical point, or at any time in an election year. 

A professor reported in a webcast interview (which I’d look up and cite if Gale Force weren’t crying on the swings outside and forcing me to hurry) that in his research of English-subject teaching methods in U.S. classrooms he found not only a classroom that uses group consensus to determine vocabulary definitions, but also that an overwhelming percentage of college freshman cannot give an accurate summary of the first sentence of the Constitution.  Not to mention identify its source.

Which is a topic of its own, but today it is just one more reminder of this question that bugs me.  If you can’t understand the constructions necessary to convey a complex thought, can you have complex thoughts?  When a person can’t verbalize a good argument for his position, is it a thoughtful position at all or just an emotional one?

The thing is, we harbor impressions, but we think in words.  I just watched that movie scene where Helen Keller suddenly grasps language, and I can’t help but find it analogous; you can only untangle or understand your impressions to the degree that you can express them in words.  So if you find scholarly language uselessly snooty and can’t put your own ideas into specific terms, are you really thinking or just emoting?

I don’t know the answer.  I’m just asking.

I like this analogy by Neil Postman almost 20 years ago (I took the title from him too):

“While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.”

To be more culturally relevant, if we think and express ourselves in tweets, we leave ourselves little of depth to discuss.  And maybe, left to atrophy, our brains can only operate on a superficial level.

Tracy Lee Simmons quotes an ancient Greek maxim that states, “Letters are the beginning of wisdom,” and explains “letters” to mean “the ability to convey the complexity and subtlety of thought and sense with words.”  He continues, “To live as an educated being in any higher culture is to act both as a builder of the house and as a weeder of the garden.”

So, one conclusion you could draw is simply that our culture is not so high.

Deathknell for Dewey

Here are some signs of the apocalypse.  Today this means the ultimate end of the modern educational paradigm a la John Dewey.  (Like Humpty Dumpty, I reserve the right to use this at a later date to mean something totally different).

The Dewey paradigm is a pinball machine model into which students are dumped conveyor-belt style.  They are then ricocheted from subject to subject, level to level, points at each of which bits of substance residue may or may not stick to the students until they are hurled back onto the conveyor belt and mechanically stamped with a smiley face denoting participation.

Signs of the Apocalypse:

1. Tests where you can bring in a 3x5 card full of your tiniest writing since you didn’t learn the material.
2. The removal of analogies from the SATs because kids can’t do them anymore [Marge is to Bart as Mary is to _______].
3. Calculators before high school.
4. This receipt from last night’s dinner:

No joke.  A spot for diners to round up because they can’t do that and then multiply by .2 in their heads.

Astroturf Gardening

Cookie and I were on a fabulous adventure the other night, eating 50/50 burgers, of which half the meat is ground bacon, in a restaurant with the kids at 9pm.  While we were enjoying their happy-tired delirium and our garlic aioli, the lady at the next table expressed to her partner her surprise that anyone at all would want to have children.

This was odd because our kids were actually being pretty good, but more so because she was seated about 20 inches away from Cookie.

Have you ever heard this sort of enlightened condescension about either married or family life?  I know we in the married-with-children camp do our share of inexcusable condescending too, but I’m thinking now only of a particular brand of “I’ve transcended tradition and built a blithe world of Me.”  When I am confronted with this strain of modernity, I am struck less by offense than something between amusement and pity, and much harder to describe. 

Like how no argument could convince that girl that missing easy evenings out without the hassle of babysitters or making permanent, sacrificial adjustments to accommodate a spouse are to me what $200 dollars for Jimmy Choos might be to her, except that I will still find my purchase fashionable come fall.  But I think I’ve thought of a way to illustrate, at least to myself, our mutual lack of understanding.

It’s like a gardener who, spying around him neighbors covered in dirt and sweat and laboring endlessly, thought, “I won’t be such a fool!” and set about covering his plot of earth with Astroturf.  He filled pots and beds with silk flowers and gazed about in satisfaction, then leaned back in a hammock with a pina colada, and applauded his ingenuity, imagining the envy of his neighbors.

The other gardeners looked up, each in turn as they paused from their work, and noticed the spray of color and their neighbor in repose.  Then, each in his turn went back to his work of tilling and planting, watering and pruning.  The gardener in his hammock was mildly surprised that the others failed to follow in his pursuit of solitary pleasure.  And his neighbors were mildly surprised that he would content himself with pigmented silk when the fruits of their labors were sweet and living.