Monthly Archives: July 2002

Ephemera

Time to lighten up a bit. I can’t be an angst-ridden intellectual 24/7, after all.

I promised myself I would stop wasting space on these, but I found this and I just had to share it in light of how amusing my life can be:

Disney Princesses
Which of the Disney Princesses are you?

Apparently, You are a true bookworm and dream of a life better than the simple, quiet one you lead now. Your good looks can attract the town jerks, but you manage to ignore them most of the time. Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots. So what are you waiting for? You don’t need your father to be kidnapped to get out and see the world. Although you can be stubborn, you’re also very compassionate and see beyond people’s fa�ades.

And I thought this would lighten things up? “Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots” is just a colloquial way of paraphrasing my last two days’ worth of blogging on the devaluing of the intellectual in today’s society. My life, I tell you, is a comedy.

Also amusing: in flipping through the other princess descriptions, I found this in Esmeralda’s paragraph: Luckily you don’t die at the end of the Disney movie, although in the book you’re hanged.

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Gods, I love random blog links – through the Pepys project I just discovered a site called Wealth Bondage that touches on what I was trying to work out yesterday about art and capitalism, the role of the artist and philosopher in today’s increasingly inhospitable anti-intellectual society:

I think sometimes that we define altruism or philanthropy or charity too narrowly.We think that first you make money and then, if you are charitable, you give it away for a good cause. But, we all know that many people live lives of service, in which they voluntarily forego making much money: Saints, poets, teachers, artists, priests, activists, soldiers, firemen, stay at home Moms: All of these people are doing something other than profit-maximizing. Some have what used to be called a vocation or a calling, as opposed to a trade. They give of themselves, rather than accumulating what A. Bartlett Giamatti used to call “mucky pelf.”

The most generous and philanthropic guys are not Gates, but some poor schnooks who have devoted their lives to other people, accepting low pay and hard and often dangerous work on behalf of something larger and more important than themselves.

All of us have to make a living, but in setting up a business, or making career choices, or making choices outside of work, we can contribute to the social fabric, re-weaving as best we can what profit maximizing sometimes inadvertently and unintentionally tears asunder — the environment, economic justice, and the quality of our media and our culture.

You can profit maximize profit and give away some money, or you can simply devote your life[…] to something more important than money, or you can strike some kind of a balance.

We live in the world of economics, but […] we dwell in civil society. – from Nichomachean Ethics for Dummies

Whoa. Yeah, that. What he said.

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I tripped across a blog called Veiled 4 Allah this morning, and the young woman, Al-Muhajabah, who keeps it has a wonderful set of articles and essays on being a Muslim woman in American society. Many of them revolve around the visible, physical recognition of a Muslim woman, mainly the wearing of the hijab, the full body covering, and the niquab, the face veil. She is intelligent, highly articulate, and has impressed me to no end by writing plainly and thoughtfully about her faith, rather than using it as a club like so many others do. This is a woman who has thought through her beliefs, and has made a personal choice rather than being a sheep.

Second, we can look a little at psychology. Sometimes the observance of outward things, like dress, seems trivial. Surely it’s more important to work on the inner things and on becoming a good person. Yet the outward things can often help us improve the inner things. There are several ways this is true. A woman may struggle with herself over the decision to wear hijab. It may be that she’s nervous about it, or that perhaps she likes to take pride in her attractiveness. Finding the courage to overcome fear is a positive character development, and subduing pride is a positive character development. Thus, the process of coming to wear hijab can be beneficial to a woman’s inner self. Also, when a woman wears hijab on a regular basis, she makes a decision each day to put it on before she goes out, and she sees it every time she looks at her reflection. She may often think, “Why do I bother with this?” And she may answer herself, “Because God commanded it, and I know that He watches what I do.” Or it may be that her awareness that her dress makes her a walking symbol of her religion reminds her not to do things that would bring her or her religion into disrepute. All of these are ways that the act of undertaking an outward observance can promote inner development. A woman may come to have a greater consciousness of God because she chooses to wear hijab for His sake, and this can only improve her character. – from On Veiling

If only everyone who wore a symbol which identified them as belonging to one religion or another considered each of their actions as reflecting upon their faith! We are all ambassadors for our faiths, cultures, educational institutions, families. So often in this society we are determined to be seen as individuals, and yet we judge by appearance and association, pigeonhole people into groups, and make generalisations. Until we learn to treat others as we wish to be treated, how can we have a society that respects the rich and varied tapestry of life this planet has to offer?

Insh’Allah, Al-Muhajabah will go on being a quiet inspiration to those who come across her site, portraying her faith as a thing of beauty.

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Don’t think I’m anti-progress. That’s not what I’m advocating at all. I’m arguing for an educational system that values the past equally with the present and the future. Nostalgia certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s a dead-end, idealised, two-dimensional reality. Everything old is not necessarily good. However, everything new isn’t bad either. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater presents a problem eventually.

I was reading this article by Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times on the (ab)uses of nostalgia by the media, advertising, the populace itself, and the state. I was agreeing with most of it and getting all excited until I realised at the end why it all seemed so familiar: I wrote a thesis like this. In fact, the very title Up the Down Escalator sounds so darned familiar I’d almost swear I read it as research, except it was just released.

Leadbeater’s previous book, though, is called Living on Thin Air, which examines how to balance a society skewed:

Individually and collectively we are all trading on ideas, creativity and judgement to make a living. Put it another way, this is the thin air business and these are the thin air commodities. The difference is that we’re now promoting a new type of brand: ourselves. “Knowledge,” states Charles Leadbeater in Living on Thin Air “is our most precious resource: we should organise society to maximise its creation and use. Our aim should be to harness the power of markets and community to the more fundamental goal of creating and spreading knowledge.” Big ideas, but for the truly knowledge-driven society, the prize, he says, is “radical and emancipatory.”

[…] Ultimately, Living on Thin Air is concerned with the task of channelling the tensions and energy between the major forces in society towards a new era of harmonious collaboration: “a society devoted to financial capitalism will be unbalanced and soulless. A society devoted to social solidarity will stagnate, lacking the dynamism of radical new ideas and the discipline of the competitive market. A society devoted totally to knowledge creation would be intelligent but poor. When these three forces of the new economy work together, they can be hugely dynamic,” he concludes. It makes a provocative manifesto. (Or so sayeth the Amazon.co.uk review.)

I’m now very curious to read what else he has to say, and how he says it.

Losing Literacy

My poor book club witnessed a wide range of my emotions last night, from despair through righteous fury in our discussion of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 last night. We talked for quite a while about a society that is losing its ability to read (one theory that arose was connected to scientific tests being done which are suggesting that the physical act of reading text is an increasing effort for the evolving human brain, as opposed to pictograms or other forms of communication, which was quite interesting). Naturally, that led to talking about the educational system repeatedly dropping its standards. Education is expensive; failing a student means you have to pay for a year of that student’s education twice; and heaven forbid we discourage their efforts by negative reinforcement. No, no, we must empower them instead by passing them despite their lack of skills necessary to acquiring the next set of skills, which in turn undermines the next level, and so forth. Why is it a crime to do this with faulty screws on an assembly line of, say, airplane engines, but not with the human mind in an educational system?

Today I discovered an article in the Times Online (that’s the UK times, not the NY Times) that addresses the same problem. The author of the piece had agreed to teach a journalism course, and began by asking the students which news programmes they watched. They couldn’t answer. Nor could they name newspapers that they read regularly. These were journalism students, who should be studying the medium to which they aspire. Or, if not studying, then at least aware of, exposed to. One assumes that they must have heard about journalism somewhere!

Was it not reasonable to expect undergraduates who had signed up for a three-year media degree (encompassing subjects ranging from print journalism and website design to video production and broadcast news) to have more than a passing interest in the news agenda?

Apparently, yes.

�Many of the students I teach have basic language and writing problems which have not been addressed at school or by the university,� says a lecturer in broadcast journalism at another university.

Foreign students paying to attend media courses are being misled by universities, says the departmental head, who is obliged to take a significant percentage of them each year. �In my view, universities that take students who don�t speak English to a good standard are taking money under false pretences,� he says.

Foreign students? At least they have the excuse of a language barrier. How about the local students who can’t write an essay, because they’ve never been taught how, in all their years of schooling?

An interesting point came up in the discussion last night. Once education became compulsory, it began communicating ideas and analytical methods to more people than ever before. Suddenly there were more educated people, bending class boundaries, flooding professional career positions. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, educational standards have been lowered alarmingly, perhaps in response to that flood of educated persons. Is society top-heavy with thinkers, who can so easily become agitators? The paranoid side of me which reads too much science fiction and dystopic novels wonders if the lowest common denominator has become the measuring stick for us all in order to keep better control over society. The point was made last night that time and again in various societies, the intelligensia has become the ruling class, and anyone of promise is usually plucked out of the masses to either be locked away, terminated, or to become part of the system of government. Which means, as soon as a government educates its citizens, they are in immediate danger. (And you may choose who I mean by �they� � the government, or the people it has educated. Or both.)

Bleak.

It returns to the question which crops up every once in a while: what purpose do artists serve? The philosophers, the writers, the painters – what function do they serve in society? Granted, yes, entertainment is one of their functions, but by no means their primary one. Artists are the conscience of a culture; they question, they compare, they cast issues in a different light, they challenge and they overturn… so long as they are free to do so.

Creative writers enjoyed great prestige in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union because of literature’s unique role as a sounding board for deeper political and social issues. Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes. As a result, the party rapidly established control over print and electronic media, book publishing and distribution, bookstores and libraries, and it created or abolished newspapers and periodicals at will. – from the Library of Congress’ Russian Archives: Attacks on Intelligensia: Censorship

With the intelligensia on your side, your regime will be quickly accepted. Having artists on staff (or the patrons who fund that art on your side) to uphold the current status quo is a clever move. It leaves the artist open to accusations of not producing “real” art, however – art produced freely and without allegiance. Defining that state is problematic, as artists throughout the ages are usually at the mercy of some sort of patron, or at least those clients for whom s/he produces work. Ideally, however, freed of the capitalist imperative (ha ha ha), an artist has the right � perhaps even the duty � to respond to the ideas of the day, to discuss, to question, and to push the envelope ever further. Building a better mousetrap may have gotten us to where we are today technologically, but it has been the philosophers who have made us, morally and ethically, the thinking and feeling human beings we are presently. (Interestingly enough, they used to be one and the same. Leonardo da Vinci, anyone?)

So where are today’s artists? The one who are to serve as our moral compasses? Probably at the bottom of a slush pile in a publisher’s office. Turned away from a film production company because their idea “just wouldn’t sell”. Check out this rant on the current state of art prostituting for the state entitled No Baudelaires in Babylon: Tom Bradley’s Comments at the Paris Sorbonne International Conference on Electronic Literature. Wicked and grating and not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps my frustration stems from the apparent devaluing of the intellectual aspect of our culture in favour of speed and efficiency. There must be some way the two can co-exist instead of one triumphing at the expense of the other. Maybe I�m too idealistic (as I was accused of being by one of my thesis examiners), but I believe that the solution lies in an equal attention to mind, body and soul. Capitalism doesn�t have to exist in an intellectual and aesthetic vacuum. I freely admit that new methods of communication and entertainment can have value; I just don�t think they should be replacing the older methods. Such a replacement limits access to the valuable older works (be they film, text, or musical), thereby cutting off generations from their heritage. Everyone should have access to the works of the world, modern and ancient, whether they want it or not. The option should exist.

See what happens? Give me free time and I get restless and start rabble-rousing, exhorting people to think. Next thing you know, I�ll vanish � for my own good, of course, and to keep the rest of you nice and safe�

A Positive EI Experience?

Well. That was anti-climactic.

I just came back from the EI office. Having heard horror stories, I was expecting a dark, crowded, dour office with hard wooden chairs and evil civil servants looking down their noses at me because I was no longer one of society’s beneficial contributors. Evidently, I read too much Dickens (or Lemony Snicket). Instead, I walked into a bright, open office, waited in a line of four people to get to the front desk, told the nice gentleman who served me in the language of my choice that I had applied on-line but was here to drop off my Record of Employment, where did I need to go? He smiled at me and said I didn’t need to go anywhere or see anyone, because he could take it. Seeing by the print-outs in my hand that I had obtained a confirmation number from the on-line application (I’m so prepared), he told me that I’d be receiving further instructions in the mail. I blinked, and said, “That’s all?” “Yes, he said, smiling again and holding out his hand for my ROE. “Can I just make a copy of this, then?” I said, still stunned. He even directed me to a (free) photocopier, then gestured me out of line again when I returned to take the ROE with another friendly smile.

And I walked out five minutes after I’d walked in. It would have been sooner if I’d thought ahead and had already made the copy of my ROE. My husband couldn’t stop shaking his head with a grin; he claims that the ease of the whole exercise further underscores the fact that this was the right decision.

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Cheers to Rob, who in this time of many persons being laid off, got a job yesterday. And it’s even kind of associated with what he trained to do. Hurrah!