Individualism in America

In The New York Times today, David Brooks writes:

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

As this relates to my forthcoming book The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, Brooks managed to pique my interest. He is basing his conclusion on a study of word usage by George Mason University's Daniel Klein; another by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile; and a third by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir. Together, according to Brooks, they show that word use in books changes over time. In particular, he says that words associated with individualism have grown in usage while words associated with commonality have dropped.

These findings are interesting, certainly, but I am not sure they point irrevocably to his conclusions. Brooks himself agrees (sort of):

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

What Brooks doesn't understand--and this is one of the central tenets of my book--is that we haven't one culture in America. Yes, shifts in language can reflect shifts in culture... but they can also reflect changes in the relative strengths of cultures sharing the same language. I would argue that is what we are seeing.

There have been two major white American cultures in North America since the middle of the 18th century. They both grow from cultures on the British Isles, the one from English roots, the other from Scots-Irish (coming to America through Ulster Plantation from the borderland between Scotland and England). This last group was the biggest white immigrant body of the 18th century. Coming from one of the poorest areas of Europe at the time, they were not welcome among the coastal colonies and made their way to the backwoods of the time, the wild west of the foothills of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Pushing and pushed further west during the 19th century, they were often the first white settlers as the new nation established itself across the continent.

These people did not write books. Coming from poverty in a land that had seen no more than 50 years of peace at a time for a millennium, they were not idealistic. Their hopes lay in their families and in their friends, not in any great vision for mankind.

Some of them could read, but mostly they read the Bible. Some of them could write, but that was not yet considered a necessity. What was published in book form in America came from the other culture, not this one, from a culture growing, in part, from Puritans and Quakers who had come to the New World with specific communal goals in mind. Their ideals and visions were quite distinct from those of the Scots-Irish Borderers.

Over the last century, the power of the Borderers has grown. They are better educated now (in their own light) than they ever were and are competing with the established "East Coast Liberals" for dominance in the American conversation. They now have their own publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines, their voices finally being heard in print loudly enough for the rest of the country to pay attention (even if the rest doesn't like it).

"Individualism" itself is a relatively new word, one of its first major uses in print coming in the 1830s, in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It has had two uses in America since, one for each culture. To that stemming from New England, "individualism" arises from a communal base, is part of the success of community and democracy. To the Borderers, "individualism" is closely tied to friends and family and creates a divide between the self and authority.

It should be no surprise that the use of words associated with "individualism" have shown an increase as Borderer culture has, as well. On the other hand, I suspect that use of terms associated with "community" have not decreased among writers in the other culture. The perceived decrease is only relative, resulting not from a decline in numbers but in the huge increase of output by Borderers.

Anyway, I am glad Brooks is addressing this, for we may finally be able to really understand that our current political split has a cultural base going back centuries.

My book will be out at the end of August.

Cold Dead Collateral Damage

The video Fox News currently loves to hate, Jim Carrey's "Cold Dead Hands," is certainly funny... and right to the point. We have made gun rights into an insane, almost monomaniacal fetish. The skit is certainly worth watching--with one caveat (see below):

Cold Dead Hand with Jim Carrey from Jim Carrey

Perhaps I'm a little too sensitive. If so, please forgive me: The book I recently completed (and that will appear from Praeger in August), The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, concerns the backgrounds of the cultural split reflected in our current red-state/blue-state divide. In it, I point out that there is only one stereotype completely available to anyone in America. We can't make fun of most groups through stock imagines without garnering disapprobation. But we can use the image of the hillbilly or redneck without anyone complaining (except me, perhaps, and a few others--but none of us is ever really heard).

Carrey may be right on target in the point he's making--and I am sure he is. But he is not going to convince people on the other side of the cultural divide to change their minds in this way--no more than he could convince African-Americans of anything by appearing in blackface. He zeros in so very well, but he's mean-spirited and insensitive. He's funny, and that may be his only intention (though his later comments don't make it appear so), but humor of this sort becomes something more than humor, becoming another bullet in the dying body of American consensus.

And that's too bad.

On the Waters of Oblivion

Just about as far as one can get from the trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Park Slope is Gerritsen Beach, a small neighborhood of cheek-by-jowl houses with small yards and great access to the water. Few have heard of it; fewer are paying attention to it now.

A week ago today, when the storm surge came, the residents were hunkered down like the rest of us whose homes are in Zone B (and so, had not been told to evacuate like Zone A), awaiting the blow. For them, it came (we were spared, in nearby Marine Park). Water rose with startling rapidity, leaving basements submerged, first floors waist deep, and cars pushed hither and yon.

We walked over there yesterday, after depositing the bottled water and batteries we hadn't needed in the storm (along with paper plates, plastic cutlery, can openers, toilet paper and paper towels--all things in desperate need, along with warm clothing) with our neighborhood youth soccer group (AYSO 266--good for you!). If you also want to help, here is a bit of information on how to do so.

After checking on the pet-supply store we use (it is down a few steps from the street, so must have been completely flooded--there was no one there, but people had clearly been cleaning it out, for a few ruined displays and bits of merchandise were stacked on the street--it is called Bargain Bow Wow), we helped sort clothes for an hour or so at a distribution point, then went down to the Resurrection Church to see what we could do there--not much, it turned out, but we will try to help once more. The real need is for power and shelter. Then food and clothing.

It's getting cold. There's no power, as of yet, and not even gasoline for generators. One woman, in tears at the distribution point, was picking up a little food and a couple of sweaters. She told me she was used to giving, not getting.

People's yards were filled with belongings set out to dry, and the sidewalks were high with material that had to be discarded. Cars with windows misted from the moisture still in the seats and carpets and looking like they'd been parked by drunks attested to the power of the water.

If things don't change soon, if real help does not arrive, I don't know what the people will do (here's a link to a Times article on all of the people in all of the neighborhoods in similar circumstances).

As we walked through Gerritsen Beach, lines from Bob Dylan's "Too Much of Nothing" kept coming to my mind:

When there's too much of nothing
It can cause a man to weep
He can walk the streets and boast
Of what he'd like to keep
But it's all been done before
It's all been written in the book
And where there's too much of nothing
Nobody should look.

But we all can help or, at least,  keep attention on the needs of these and all of the other people whose homes are unlivable because of Sandy, not just in Gerritsen Beach, but in the rest of New York City, all along Long Island, on Staten Island particularly and, of course, in New Jersey.

The New York City Marathon: Why So Many Were Glad to See It Gone

Students in one of my developmental-writing classes last year were in there--or some of them were--because they had failed to write a competent essay based on a reading relating to the New York City Marathon. I was interested, of course, in what had happened, and talked with them about the experience... which led to discussion of attitudes about the marathon.

I quickly discovered that my students--mostly urban youths from poor and/or immigrant backgrounds--knew little about the marathon and cared even less. What has been, for over 40 years, a mainstay of yuppie New York, is meaningless to millions of others in the city.

At most, it is an annoyance, making it more difficult to get around on marathon day.

Their feelings about the marathon, I decided, are quite a bit like those of the people in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Williamsburg toward the annual Caribbean Day parade on Labor Day. It's something for other people on a day when its better just to stay at home.

Few of my students or their families have the time for a sport like running, a sport that demands long hours and a years-long regimen. A little basketball can be snuck in here and there; the same's not true for an endurance sport like marathoning. Most of my students, and most of their families, see joggers as creatures from an intruding middle class, if they see them at all. The runners that they do know are running for another purpose, as football players or even cricketers. The sport as a sport in and of itself has never caught their imagination, not as a group.

The same is true of the people of the rather working-class neighborhood where I live, Marine Park. It's quite like Breezy Point (most of us in this neighborhood, including me, know people who lost their homes in the massive fire there) or Gerritsen Beach (where many of us, including me, end up with some frequency) or any other of the neighborhoods near the water on the southern edge of Brooklyn, Queens, and even Long Island--areas extremely hard hit by the storm (Marine Park was extremely lucky: we had three days without power on my street--on a few it is still off and on others it was only out for hours, trees are down and a few cars and houses damaged, but the water didn't reach us).

Even at the best of times, the New York Marathon is little more than a blip on the screen here. There are few people to be seen jogging in the neighborhood and fewer still who take the time even to watch the runners. It's not like Cobble Hill, where once I had a store, where runners dodge around pedestrians and dog walkers each morning and evening, a major part of street traffic.

My point is that most of the people who work for New York media, or in New York government, come from a class and from neighborhoods where the marathon (like running for sport) is a big thing. But it is not a big thing everywhere. In fact, to most New Yorkers outside of the southern half of Manhattan and the yuppie areas of Brooklyn, the marathon never has meant much. It gets media attention not because of widespread support but because of support in the very neighborhoods the members of the media live.

The marathon gets widespread support at top levels of city government not because the people love it so, but because it is an international event, drawing spectators as well as runners from around the world. It brings in money.

But that money, too, is narrowly focused--at least as far as most New Yorkers can trace it. It goes to hotels and bars in midtown and on the East Side of Manhattan. It does very little for the rest of us.

So, it was no surprise to me that, this morning, when we were walking our dogs in the park that gives Marine Park its name, we talked to only one person who thought it had been a bad idea to cancel the marathon--and he thought so because there had been no outcry against the Giants game over in New Jersey--hit harder even than Staten Island and South Brooklyn.

But, and I hate to tell you this, Mayor Bloomberg, football is a great deal more important where I live (and to my students) than is your marathon. All of those students of mine could have written passing essays, I am sure, if they had been asked to write about football.

The point? Bloomberg's failure, in first deciding to hold the marathon, lay in an inability to recognize that what may have seemed important to him might not seem so to many others.

Though I haven't much time for Charles Murray or his book Coming Apart, he does make one very important point: the members of the "new" upper class need to get out more, to see how the other 99% live and what their needs and interests are.

Then they won't make such stupid mistakes.

Clean-Up and Responsibility

When I was 16, I had a summer job waiting tables in a fancy hotel. One day, the waiter with the greatest seniority dropped a tray in the middle of the dining room. I ran over and started to help clean up. He stepped over to the manager, who can come into the room, alerted by the smashing crockery, and whispered something.

Of course, I was blamed for the accident, though I didn't discover that until later. And all I had tried to do was help out.

Barack Obama is still being blamed by Republicans for their own mess with the economy in much the same way. Even when this is pointed out, they still blame him--for not cleaning up fast enough.

The same may prove to be true for Sandy. Though it wasn't the Republicans who caused the storm, they (except for Governor Christie) are already casting around for some way to use it against Obama. Over the next few days (until Tuesday night, at the very least), we'll certainly see criticism of Obama for shortages of gasoline, for lack of electricity... for anything else that goes wrong as he tries to lead a response to a situation that is beyond the control of any of us or all of us.

West Africa's Illusory Development

Twenty-two  years ago, I sat on a bench in Lomé, Togo watching a stream of people running in anger toward the central marketplace. Moments later, black smoke was billowing from the market. Soon, the panicked crowd was moving in the other direction as police reacted to the rioting. The government of Gnassingbé Eyadéma, controlled by his Kabye ethnic group, was tottering. I thought it would fall. It did not.

Today, in The New York Times, I read:

Where legitimacy has been questioned from the outset, leaders can expect trouble. That series of events has been playing out for weeks in the small coastal nation of Togo, where antigovernment demonstrators have repeatedly filled the streets of the capital, Lomé. The police fired tear gas at hundreds of them last week, just as they had the week before.[...]

The country has been run by the same family for more than 40 years. When the dictator Gen. Gnassingbé Eyadéma died after 38 years in power in 2005, the military put his son Faure Gnassingbé in power. Not surprisingly, he won a dubious election later that year — a victory accompanied by the deaths of nearly 800 protesters and the flight across borders of thousands more, according to Togolese human rights groups — and again in 2010.

Things haven't changed much. The illegitimate government of then is the illegitimate government of now.

And the talk of an African "miracle" then is the talk of an African "miracle" now.

I remember listening to American ambassador Rush Taylor talk of Togo as the next "tiger," referring to the Asian nations whose economic growth was a major story of the time, the late 1980s. AfricanEconomicOutlook.org is almost as optimistic today, projecting 4.2% growth this year and slightly higher, next. The organization writes:

Reforms are under way to improve the business climate and parliament approved a new investment law in January 2012. These changes, backed by the country’s development partners, will continue in 2012. A milestone in the fight against corruption was creation of a court of accounts and general finance inspectorate. A three-year programme to modernise the state bureaucracy through “e-government” began in 2012.[...]

Many opposition parties staged protests in 2011 and student strikes, sometimes violent, occurred in the capital, Lomé. The government reacted calmly and sought reconciliation and direct talks with the protesters.

This is nonsense, as the current rioting shows. And almost all of our talk about West Africa has been nonsense since long before I sat on that bench drinking coffee from a street vendor and watching a riot.

As the Times article points out, there is upheaval in West Africa far beyond Togo. In Guinea, in Gabon, in Ivory Coast rioting is going on almost as we speak. And Mali, which so recently seemed a bastion of stability and even democracy, is degenerating into a civil war that may end up in Somalia-like chaos. Nigeria contains constant strife brought on by religious, economic, and ethnic problems.

What goes on? Why do things not change? Why are the people at the bottom so continually poor while the rich make great claims of progress?

There are myriad reasons, of course, but a major one is that these are not nations, but are states created by colonial masters with no consideration of the peoples to be governed. With no national cohesion, no sense of identity or commonality, the only way these states can be controlled is through force. There have been exceptions, but the exceptions have not held. Look at Liberia, look at Mali. Today, Senegal and Ghana seem to be doing well. Tomorrow? Who knows?

According to AfricanEconomicOutlook.org, over 20% of urban Togolese youth are unemployed. I'd bet the real number is much higher than that. And I'd also bet that rural employment is primarily in subsistence agriculture of the most back-breaking kind. Is it any wonder so many want to leave, to get to the United States or to Europe? Is it any wonder that frustrations explode into rioting?

Let's stop the applause for African states whose only means of survival is draconian abuse of their own populations and corruption that keeps the petty bureaucrats and low-level police and military in line. The growth and progress we see will always be illusory and temporary until there is systemic change that wipes away the legacy of colonialism--that breaks down the "states" that England and France established and replaces them, somehow, with real nations of African design.

If this does not happen, someone who observed the rioting in Lomé this year will surely be writing, 22 years from now, exactly what I am writing now... for the same thing will be occurring.

Collapsing "Corporate" Education

Cross-posted from the Academe blog:

The other day, I wrote on this blog:

With the big money leaving the equation, maybe we can get back to the education we were trying to develop in the first place, education that, in many cases, is still quite the best in the world. It is best because the residue of the truth–that education depends on people and their interaction and not on machines or money–still remains.

Today, I read this:

Since the end of World War II two business models have defined the operations of American higher education.  The first was the Dewey model that lasted until the 1970s. The second, a corporate model, flourished until the economic crash in 2008.  What the new business model for higher education will be is uncertain, but from the ashes of the status quo we see emerging one that returns to an era before World War II when only the affluent could afford college and access was limited to the privileged few.

It seems that more than a few of us are recognizing that the "corporate model" of higher education is in the early stages (or later) of collapse. The question is, what are we going to do about it.

Personally, I hope that we can resurrect the Dewey model in some fashion but, like David Schultz, author of the above-quoted "The Rise and Demise of Neo-Liberal University: The Collapsing Business Plan of American Higher Education" in Logos (Spring/Summer 2012), I worry that the coming economic crisis in higher education will lead, instead, will lead to a two-tier system of elite colleges and universities serving the upper classes and a trade-school model for the rest. It doesn't need to, but it will--if we don't develop and demonstrate an alternative.

Schultz describes the corporate model as one where "decisions... are determined by a top-down pyramid style of authority." He points out that too few of the decision-makers, who have pushed aside traditional shared governance that included faculty, have backgrounds in education. Furthermore, he writes:

The new business model found its most powerful income stream in profession education. Professional education, such as in public or business administration, or law school, became the cash cow of colleges and universities.  This was especially true with MBA programs.  Universities, including traditional ones that once only offered undergraduate programs, saw that there was an appetite for MBA programs....  They were sold to applicants that the price would more than be made up in terms of future income earnings by graduates.

As I wrote in the post quoted at the start, this future earning is no longer assured--and the gamble of taking on debt against it is increasingly seen as a bad risk. This very fact endangers the whole structure.

According to Schultz, universities are now trying to offset this new problem by turning to online structures as new revenue streams. But that's not enough. Essentially:

The corporate business model functioned as education Ponzi scheme.  Higher education paid for programs by raked in dollars from rapidly expanding professional programs and selling degrees on the promise that the high tuition costs would be worth it to students.

Schultz ends where, essentially my own post does:

Likely business models for higher education are not good.  They threaten to erode the strengths that American higher education enjoyed for years, while at the same time not articulating a plan that is financially sustainable.

That is, the only way forward for American higher education is to move away from business models, replacing them with education models. Yes, funding procedures and processes will remain, but they cannot be the controlling forces for successful, sustainable education. Anything like what we have now, ultimately, will revert to another Ponzi scheme--and Ponzi schemes, by their very nature, always do collapse.

We in education, rather that sitting around wringing our hands and casting blame, need to start proposing new models for education and finding ways of trying them out. After all, we are the specialists.

Society, Education, and John Dewey

Cross-posted from the Academe blog:

Wesleyan University president Michael Roth wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times that appeared yesterday. Titled "Learning as Freedom," it brings us back to John Dewey and his vision:

Education should aim to enhance our capacities, Dewey argued, so that we are not reduced to mere tools.

Roth is responding to critics who see much of contemporary higher education as a waste of time

[T]he call for a more narrowly tailored education — especially for Americans with limited economic prospects — is not [new]. A century ago, organizations as varied as chambers of commerce and labor federations backed plans for a dual system of teaching, wherein some students would be trained for specific occupations, while others would get a broad education allowing them to continue their studies in college.

Dewey rejected this tiered approach to education for a democracy where all citizens should have the opportunity for education allowing them to fully participate. Dewey also saw a broad education as a necessary underpinning for specialization and as part-and-parcel of life within a society. That is, education should build from the social elements of the student's life in all their breadth, keeping away from specialization until certain social competencies have been achieved.
In "My Pedagogic Creed," he writes:

ARTICLE THREE. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF EDUCATION

I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.
I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.
I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.
I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
I believe that education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so-called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the centre of work by itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration.
I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.
I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning. I believe, however, that it cannot be so taken excepting as the child is also introduced directly into social life.
I believe accordingly that the primary basis of education is in the child's powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being.
I believe that the only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which makes civilization what it is.
I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the centre of correlation.
I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.
I believe that they are not special studies which are to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplishments. I believe rather that they represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is possible and desirable that the child's introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities.
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.
I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject- matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated.
I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.
I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect; an aspect of art and culture and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.
I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child.

When we make education simply training, we reduce the life of the student. Education builds on the life of the student and also builds that life. To make it narrower than that hurts both student and society.