I wanted to like Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do.
But I got tripped up by the circular logic evident in the first few chapters, and I never quite untripped myself.
To say that there were methodological flaws in the study would be unjust--I didn't really glean enough information about the details of the study from the book. Bain spoke in generalities, broad brush-strokes throughout. It seems possible, though, that the selection critera pre-determined the findings of the study. From the first few chapters, I got the sneaking suspicion that they selected professors that used language about learning that they liked, and then discovered that those professors . . . used language about learning they liked.
That suspicion tainted, somewhat, the rest of my reading.
But somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped thinking of it as a study of college-level pedagogy, and started thinking of it as an apologia for liberal arts education. In the end, it was a collection of (modestly) inspiring ideas about education as something more than degree-granting and -getting, more than job training and income boosting, more than gate-keeping and hoop-jumping.
It was, in short, a reminder that education is about forming adults, a project that is only partially complete if we content ourselves with transmitting knowledge (even important knowledge). That's why I got into teaching--to change lives, not to administer entrance and exit exams.
One of the things I found myself doing as I read was jotting down and sorting through pedagogical ideas that I had already come up with but hadn't yet put to paper, or hadn't yet figured out how to build into course design. There weren't too terribly many good, specific tactics or tools described in the book itself (again, too many generalities and big-picture thinking), but I did feel encouraged in some observations I've made over the last few years. Often, that encouragement came in spite of what Bain was actually encouraging rather than as a result of it.
For example, in the midst of my annoyance at his encomiums to activities I've always found somewhat trendy or childish ("think-pair-square-share" and "the McEvoy minute") and often unsuccessful, I began to realize that he had put words to a genuine problem I'd been noticing in my classes: passive learning early in a course or a class period becomes habitual. It has been my practice to try to give students something to discuss, and then ask them to discuss it. I build this pattern into individual class periods and into course structures as a whole. My starting point has always been that my students really don't know anything, and most of them don't care that they don't know anything. And so I have to introduce thoughts for them to think so that they can start learning how to think.
But they've been conditioned by a lifetime (to them) of passivity and edutainment, and they don't know how to contribute to their own education. This is not how I approached my theological studies. I would have four days of brilliant lecture classes, and by Friday, when all the TAs held discussion groups, I was bursting with things to talk about. This is not how my undergrads experience their own education. I've been starting to realize that I have to get them talking early, if I ever want them to talk at all. Early in the course, early in the class period, early in our relationship, early in any office visit--they have to get used to talking so that they can do it.
I'm not sure Bain's book really gave me workable strategies to do that, but he has strengthened my resolve to look for ways that will work for me.
Or with regard to motivation, I found his language about "giving students a choice" and "refusing to exercise control over the students' learning" disingenuous. He made the observation that grades represent both feedback to the student and "objective" evaluation to society-at-large (those who want to know whether or not the nursing student learned anatomy, for example), but then followed it with the idea that the latter should be all but dropped. That seems problematic at best, at the college level. (I wish I could absolutely require such an approach at the elementary school level, and I think secondary schools could certainly move more in that direction.)
Still, I found myself brainstorming ways to build some kind of choice or ownership over the material, particularly in upper-level courses. Might ethics students choose a "focal" issue to return to over and over during the course of the semester? Could some of the readings in a Bible class be selected by students?
Finally, his language of "authenticity" profoundly annoyed me. By this he meant that coursework should look like "real life," that projects should be constructed along "real world" lines wherever possible, and that connections with how the student might use the course's skills and content in "the real world" should be prevalent. I found myself kicking against all but the last point.
I kept mentally returning to sports and music metaphors: there's nothing "authentic" about scales and practice drills. Scales and etudes and fingering drills and breathing drills are not musical. But musicianship absolutely requires them. Fartleks and shark-fin drills and suicide drills look nothing like race-day running or swimming or like a basketball game. But you won't be successful during the match/meet/game unless you've done the artificial drills. The drills produce transferable skills.
But it's true that students sometimes need help with the transfer process. So musicians have student recitals before they have performances at the Met. And the varsity basketball team plays scrimmages against the JV team before their matches, and high school basketball (still, so far) comes before a career in the NBA.
It's been fairly easy for me to make connections between my area of study and "the real world," and I do drop these connections into my everyday contact with students.
"Hey, some day, the town you're living in is going to pass some idiot regulation, and you're going to want to be able to make a persuasive speech to the town council why it's unjust or imprudent."
"Hey, some day, some issue that's important to you will hit the newspapers (if we still have such things), and you're going to want your voice to be heard, and you're going to want to be able to write a letter to the editor (or a HuffPo blog post) that gets accepted and that makes people think."
"Hey, some day, one of your friends is going to ask you to drive him to a bank, and he's going to come running out, waving a gun and shouting 'DRIVE, DRIVE, DRIVE!!!!' and you're going to want to have some practice at saying no, so that's why you should never say yes when your friend asks to copy your homework."
But I haven't done much work at building those connections into my assignments. I've been all scales and etudes and no recitals. Instead of telling them that they should master this or that material or technique so that some day they could write a good letter to the editor, why don't I assign a letter to the editor?
So, I was inspired and encouraged by this book, even when I found myself disagreeing with it or annoyed by its trendy, jargony tone. It fed my own brainstorming about pedagogy, even when its few specific suggestions were unpalatable or inapplicable to me.
I do recommend it, even if I didn't really love it. Because I do really love teaching, and a conversation with someone who feels the same is always worthwhile.
Showing posts with label bookreviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookreviews. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Common Sense Methodists?!?!
Convinced as I have been--and, it must be admitted, remain--that the Methodist church's adoption of sacramental grape juice in place of wine was a grievous error, thanks to Jennifer Woodruff Tait's fine new book, The Poisoned Chalice, I promise never again to consider it a nonsensical or untheological one.
This is a good history of the movement that resulted in the substitution of grape juice for wine in the churches that were to become The United Methodist Church, giving due credit to people whom it is easier to caricaturize, especially for those of us that disagree with them. Woodruff Tait debunks the myth (common among us sacramental oenophiles) that the movement was driven largely by relatively shallow social and cultural concerns rather than substantive moral, theological, or symbological ones.
That is not to say that the moral and mystagogical theology expressed by the grape juice devotees is persuasive or impressive in any way. But Woodruff Tait manages the historian's delicate job of portraying the occasionally ridiculous comprehensibly, at times sympathetically, and without overt mockery. (One sometimes catches a playful smile barely hidden behind the hand, but it is never a smirk.)
More importantly, Woodruff Tait isolates and draws out the many interwoven threads that manifested themselves in the movement towards sacramental grape juice--the interaction between theology and science, rationality and sobriety, hygiene and social utility. The confluence of concerns is rich and sometimes surprising, and Woodruff Tait's deft handling of the material makes it somewhat less incomprehensible than it might otherwise be.
She relates this cultural constructs accessibly and engagingly, and the book would be easily and profitably read by anyone interested in any one of the many concerns it engages.
If one had to name a complaint (and one has to, in order to have one's reviews taken seriously), it might be that there seem a relatively few primary texts being worked with here. Each chapter covers a different facet of the same few texts, intelligibly and persuasively, but one occasionally wonders whether a broader selection of writings from the period would tell the same story. (Surely if one broadened the sample a bit, one would find those nonsensical and untheological voices arguing from sheer stupidity--Fred Phelps is but the most modern incarnation of an old phenomenon.) Still, a scholar does have to work within limits in order to learn or to say anything meaningful, and this hardly seems a complaint worth making.
As I read, I could not help but think of companion readings (not to supply the book's deficits, but because good reading always invites company). Those who are primarily interested in the history of the period should read this alongside Christine Rosen's Preaching Eugenics (especially if the author's references to the eugenic concerns of theologians and pastors seem too fantastical). Intellectual historians might profitably follow this with Amy Laura Hall's Conceiving Parenthood, for the sequel to American Protestantism's love affair with scientific hygiene and purity.
Theologians and ethicists might read this with Thomas, with whom a comparison is never unprofitable (indeed--those familiar with the Summa might have recognized the concern for the effects of alcohol on reason as one of Thomas’s concerns and, perhaps, chuckled at the picture of rabidly Protestant ministers unknowingly propagating Thomistic moral theology) or, for contemporary issues with perhaps a similar constellation of concerns (scientific orthodoxy, social justice and the common good, purity, the effects of technological innovation), Rayna Rapp’s Testing Women, Testing the Fetus or Maura Ryan’s Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction.
This is a good history of the movement that resulted in the substitution of grape juice for wine in the churches that were to become The United Methodist Church, giving due credit to people whom it is easier to caricaturize, especially for those of us that disagree with them. Woodruff Tait debunks the myth (common among us sacramental oenophiles) that the movement was driven largely by relatively shallow social and cultural concerns rather than substantive moral, theological, or symbological ones.
That is not to say that the moral and mystagogical theology expressed by the grape juice devotees is persuasive or impressive in any way. But Woodruff Tait manages the historian's delicate job of portraying the occasionally ridiculous comprehensibly, at times sympathetically, and without overt mockery. (One sometimes catches a playful smile barely hidden behind the hand, but it is never a smirk.)
More importantly, Woodruff Tait isolates and draws out the many interwoven threads that manifested themselves in the movement towards sacramental grape juice--the interaction between theology and science, rationality and sobriety, hygiene and social utility. The confluence of concerns is rich and sometimes surprising, and Woodruff Tait's deft handling of the material makes it somewhat less incomprehensible than it might otherwise be.
She relates this cultural constructs accessibly and engagingly, and the book would be easily and profitably read by anyone interested in any one of the many concerns it engages.
If one had to name a complaint (and one has to, in order to have one's reviews taken seriously), it might be that there seem a relatively few primary texts being worked with here. Each chapter covers a different facet of the same few texts, intelligibly and persuasively, but one occasionally wonders whether a broader selection of writings from the period would tell the same story. (Surely if one broadened the sample a bit, one would find those nonsensical and untheological voices arguing from sheer stupidity--Fred Phelps is but the most modern incarnation of an old phenomenon.) Still, a scholar does have to work within limits in order to learn or to say anything meaningful, and this hardly seems a complaint worth making.
As I read, I could not help but think of companion readings (not to supply the book's deficits, but because good reading always invites company). Those who are primarily interested in the history of the period should read this alongside Christine Rosen's Preaching Eugenics (especially if the author's references to the eugenic concerns of theologians and pastors seem too fantastical). Intellectual historians might profitably follow this with Amy Laura Hall's Conceiving Parenthood, for the sequel to American Protestantism's love affair with scientific hygiene and purity.
Theologians and ethicists might read this with Thomas, with whom a comparison is never unprofitable (indeed--those familiar with the Summa might have recognized the concern for the effects of alcohol on reason as one of Thomas’s concerns and, perhaps, chuckled at the picture of rabidly Protestant ministers unknowingly propagating Thomistic moral theology) or, for contemporary issues with perhaps a similar constellation of concerns (scientific orthodoxy, social justice and the common good, purity, the effects of technological innovation), Rayna Rapp’s Testing Women, Testing the Fetus or Maura Ryan’s Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Good Introduction
This entry is a review of Catholic and Christian: An Explanation of Commonly Misunderstood Catholic Beliefs, by Alan Schreck
Written with a frankly apologetic aim that is laudable for its consistency, honesty, and gentleness, this primer on Catholic belief and practice is readable, friendly, and well-organized. Schreck has an eye on Protestant critiques of Catholicism and answers those critiques in an ecumenical and conciliatory manner—sometimes correcting misapprehensions, sometimes explaining in language that might be appealing to Protestants, yet never apologizing for Catholic distinctives. He is careful, for example, to appeal to scripture to argue against sola scriptura and for the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in directing the Church.
At times, this ecumenical spirit (as well as, no doubt, his attention to accessibility) leads him to make claims that are less than intellectually satisfying. When he insists in the section on prayer to the saints, for example, that “All Christian prayer . . . is directed to the Father through Jesus Christ, who is the ‘one mediator between God and man’ (1 Tm 2:5)” (158-159), one desperately longs for the “ultimately” that one knows should be in there. It is patently true that prayers and petitions are addressed to the saints and to Mary, and to say that “all prayer” is “directed to the Father” cannot satisfy the Protestant who knows that he objects to the practice nor the Catholic who makes petitions to her beloved patron saint. Similarly, the affirmation that Mary was saved from sin through no merit of her own, just like all humans must be, with the only exceptional part being that her salvation was wrought before her birth, will not cause Protestants to recoil any less from the declaration that Jesus was not the only human to have lived a sinless life.
(The only time I was myself a bit . . . snarly . . . was when he denied the existence of Junia and trivialized "deaconesses" with the distance quotes.)
But Schreck’s project is not to bring all Protestants to full communion with the Catholic Church—it is but to explain Roman Catholic belief and practice accurately and appealingly, and this he does very well.
As an ethicist, I cannot fail to be disappointed in the absence of a chapter dealing with Catholic ethics. While the attentive reader can collect scattered references to the sources, aims, and logic of Catholic moral theology into a reasonable understanding of how it works, there are few references to specific teachings, principles, or emphases. It should not be difficult to construct such a chapter, and John Paul II’s ethical writings would be a crucial resource for this project, given his ability to balance authority and accessibility in his writing.
This was a required text for the class I am teaching this semester (that is, I was required to require it), but I am quite happy with it nonetheless. It is accessible and sound, and I would recommend it outside the classroom to anyone (Catholic or Protestant) who is not well-versed in the Catholic faith but wants to be.
Written with a frankly apologetic aim that is laudable for its consistency, honesty, and gentleness, this primer on Catholic belief and practice is readable, friendly, and well-organized. Schreck has an eye on Protestant critiques of Catholicism and answers those critiques in an ecumenical and conciliatory manner—sometimes correcting misapprehensions, sometimes explaining in language that might be appealing to Protestants, yet never apologizing for Catholic distinctives. He is careful, for example, to appeal to scripture to argue against sola scriptura and for the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in directing the Church.
At times, this ecumenical spirit (as well as, no doubt, his attention to accessibility) leads him to make claims that are less than intellectually satisfying. When he insists in the section on prayer to the saints, for example, that “All Christian prayer . . . is directed to the Father through Jesus Christ, who is the ‘one mediator between God and man’ (1 Tm 2:5)” (158-159), one desperately longs for the “ultimately” that one knows should be in there. It is patently true that prayers and petitions are addressed to the saints and to Mary, and to say that “all prayer” is “directed to the Father” cannot satisfy the Protestant who knows that he objects to the practice nor the Catholic who makes petitions to her beloved patron saint. Similarly, the affirmation that Mary was saved from sin through no merit of her own, just like all humans must be, with the only exceptional part being that her salvation was wrought before her birth, will not cause Protestants to recoil any less from the declaration that Jesus was not the only human to have lived a sinless life.
(The only time I was myself a bit . . . snarly . . . was when he denied the existence of Junia and trivialized "deaconesses" with the distance quotes.)
But Schreck’s project is not to bring all Protestants to full communion with the Catholic Church—it is but to explain Roman Catholic belief and practice accurately and appealingly, and this he does very well.
As an ethicist, I cannot fail to be disappointed in the absence of a chapter dealing with Catholic ethics. While the attentive reader can collect scattered references to the sources, aims, and logic of Catholic moral theology into a reasonable understanding of how it works, there are few references to specific teachings, principles, or emphases. It should not be difficult to construct such a chapter, and John Paul II’s ethical writings would be a crucial resource for this project, given his ability to balance authority and accessibility in his writing.
This was a required text for the class I am teaching this semester (that is, I was required to require it), but I am quite happy with it nonetheless. It is accessible and sound, and I would recommend it outside the classroom to anyone (Catholic or Protestant) who is not well-versed in the Catholic faith but wants to be.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Anorexia and Autonomy
Rudolph Bell's book Holy Anorexia is an important example of the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary study in religion.
His study probes the theological, historical, and psychological meaning of extreme fasting behaviors in medieval women whose asceticism was usually seen as evidence of holiness. Avoiding the facile ascription of mental illness to these women ("Oh, they must've been, like, anorexic or something!"), he nonetheless takes his cue from current psychiatric evaluations and treatments of (modern) anorexia nervosa.
Anorectic behavior comes about in response to an intricate yet convoluted web of signals a modern girl (anorexia generally arises in females and during adolescence) receives in regard to her appearance. Thinness (and physical beauty more broadly) is one of a few traits consistently approved and rewarded in young females, yet the steps that a girl might take to achieve those rewards may prompt correction, disapproval, or intervention from parents or such other authorities as educators or medical caregivers. The twin incentives of societal approval and parental opposition feed the anorexic girl’s choice to control her own body through self-starvation—all the more so as her successes in weight loss and self-assertion mount.
Analogously, a medieval woman had fewer avenues of expressing or embodying holiness than were available to men, and the ascetic practices which might identify a woman as holy could just as easily have been viewed as evidence of heresy or demon possession as of beatitude. The “holy anorexic” is confirmed in her path of self-starvation both by the ascription of holiness conferred on account of her suffering and by the suspicion aroused by her extreme practices of asceticism, especially where that suspicion is allayed or countered through divine intervention.
The struggle for autonomy looms large in Bell’s renarration of these saints’ vitae. While his efforts to offer a psychoanalytic reading of these women are unimpressive—particularly in the absence of any serious or consistent engagement with the problem of collaborative authorship present in virtually all of these texts—his identification of the persistence of themes of self-assertion in the face of parental, religious, or social conflict is helpful.
When one is obliged to suffer the removal of one’s autonomy—whether in the form of a forced marriage, opposition to taking religious orders, or physical or sexual abuse—choosing another form of suffering—starvation, disfigurement, isolation—functions as a reassertion of one’s autonomy. The relationship between suffering and consent is inverted, transforming utterly the meaning and experience of them both. In the first case, the injury is all but identical with the removal of choice; in the second, the retrieval of autonomy is identical with the (chosen) injury. That the chosen suffering is further rewarded by its association with otherworldliness, whether of the divine or demonic sort, only amplifies the sense of transformation.
Despite his misstep in attempting to psychoanalyze historical figures with fragmentary, consciously scripted, and/or heavily edited literary works as his only evidence, Bell's work is enormously important for his having probed this intersection of autonomy and suffering. Many modern discussions of suffering (and its relief) are dependent on inchoate assumptions about exactly this relationship, and any work that prompts a more intentional examination of the topic is worth a read.
His study probes the theological, historical, and psychological meaning of extreme fasting behaviors in medieval women whose asceticism was usually seen as evidence of holiness. Avoiding the facile ascription of mental illness to these women ("Oh, they must've been, like, anorexic or something!"), he nonetheless takes his cue from current psychiatric evaluations and treatments of (modern) anorexia nervosa.
Anorectic behavior comes about in response to an intricate yet convoluted web of signals a modern girl (anorexia generally arises in females and during adolescence) receives in regard to her appearance. Thinness (and physical beauty more broadly) is one of a few traits consistently approved and rewarded in young females, yet the steps that a girl might take to achieve those rewards may prompt correction, disapproval, or intervention from parents or such other authorities as educators or medical caregivers. The twin incentives of societal approval and parental opposition feed the anorexic girl’s choice to control her own body through self-starvation—all the more so as her successes in weight loss and self-assertion mount.
Analogously, a medieval woman had fewer avenues of expressing or embodying holiness than were available to men, and the ascetic practices which might identify a woman as holy could just as easily have been viewed as evidence of heresy or demon possession as of beatitude. The “holy anorexic” is confirmed in her path of self-starvation both by the ascription of holiness conferred on account of her suffering and by the suspicion aroused by her extreme practices of asceticism, especially where that suspicion is allayed or countered through divine intervention.
The struggle for autonomy looms large in Bell’s renarration of these saints’ vitae. While his efforts to offer a psychoanalytic reading of these women are unimpressive—particularly in the absence of any serious or consistent engagement with the problem of collaborative authorship present in virtually all of these texts—his identification of the persistence of themes of self-assertion in the face of parental, religious, or social conflict is helpful.
When one is obliged to suffer the removal of one’s autonomy—whether in the form of a forced marriage, opposition to taking religious orders, or physical or sexual abuse—choosing another form of suffering—starvation, disfigurement, isolation—functions as a reassertion of one’s autonomy. The relationship between suffering and consent is inverted, transforming utterly the meaning and experience of them both. In the first case, the injury is all but identical with the removal of choice; in the second, the retrieval of autonomy is identical with the (chosen) injury. That the chosen suffering is further rewarded by its association with otherworldliness, whether of the divine or demonic sort, only amplifies the sense of transformation.
Despite his misstep in attempting to psychoanalyze historical figures with fragmentary, consciously scripted, and/or heavily edited literary works as his only evidence, Bell's work is enormously important for his having probed this intersection of autonomy and suffering. Many modern discussions of suffering (and its relief) are dependent on inchoate assumptions about exactly this relationship, and any work that prompts a more intentional examination of the topic is worth a read.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
No Longer Forthcoming!
I'm happy to report that a book review that I wrote three years ago is finally being published!
Scottish Journal of Theology 64.2
I was starting to worry that this was some new kind of passive-aggressive rejection: an acceptance letter followed by . . . . nothing.
These are, however, Presbyterians and not Methodists. They got to it decently and in good order.
Scottish Journal of Theology 64.2
I was starting to worry that this was some new kind of passive-aggressive rejection: an acceptance letter followed by . . . . nothing.
These are, however, Presbyterians and not Methodists. They got to it decently and in good order.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Books in Review
I don't recall whether or not I had a specific textbook on the Historical Jesus Problem in Intro to the New Testament. I remember the professor's lecture on it (very clearly), and I remember some books I read on the topic in subsequent years.
But I can't remember whether we had a book in NT 18 that explained the debate.
If not, that's likely because Mark Allan Powell's Jesus As a Figure in History wasn't published yet.
This is a surprisingly good textbook for introducing seminary students, religion majors, and beginning biblical students to the field of Historical Jesus research. Powell is detailed, clear, thorough, and--what was perhaps the most surprising--unfailingly generous in his descriptions of scholars and their methods. It would be a useful addition to any introductory New Testament syllabus.
But I can't remember whether we had a book in NT 18 that explained the debate.
If not, that's likely because Mark Allan Powell's Jesus As a Figure in History wasn't published yet.
This is a surprisingly good textbook for introducing seminary students, religion majors, and beginning biblical students to the field of Historical Jesus research. Powell is detailed, clear, thorough, and--what was perhaps the most surprising--unfailingly generous in his descriptions of scholars and their methods. It would be a useful addition to any introductory New Testament syllabus.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Books in Review
Joseph Amato's Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering has been a frustrating book to read.
It was frustrating primarily because I was desperately interested in an excellent treatment of his thesis: that the modern conception of and pursuit of justice is impoverished by its dependence on an inadequate understanding of the relationship between suffering and justice. Amato's treatment certainly raised issues, but without the sort of care and discretion that one must adopt when preparing to slaughter sacred cows.
Amato rightly (I believe) diagnoses certain problems with socio-political discourse in the US. The public discussion of justice, where it occurs, has become "a game of pick your victim," as Eugene Weber says in the intro to the book. Injustice and suffering--whether historical or actual, present or potential, rightly or wrongly perceived--are understood to create a debt which the public must honor. Indeed, virtually any kind of suffering is at least potentially the business of the state, whether as arbiter of competing claims to remediation (as in tort law), the administrator of whatever recompense is owed (as in welfare or medicaid), or the party ultimately responsible for inflicting suffering (as in our history of racial injustice).
Amato traces, with varying precision and insight, the historical development of this way of approaching the relationship between suffering and justice. At times, the story he is trying to tell gets lost in the details, but his point is primarily genealogical. It is not "natural" or inevitable to respond to reports of suffering the way we tend to do in the US today. We are the heirs of a philosophical sea-change that began, really, with Bacon, but since Amato is not particularly interested in medicine, he names other Enlightenment figures as the primary actors. Bentham is the obvious front-man: his articulation of utilitarian rationalism changed the way even non-utilitarians approach discussions of justice and suffering.
Unfortunately, when Amato moves from the historical to the contemporary, his argumentation fails. Or, rather, he fails to draw on the data in a way that would convince any that don't already agree with him. He relies on generalities and broadsides, abandoning his earlier practice of relying on texts.
(Reading society, as he purports to do in his final chapters, is both easier and more difficult than reading texts. One has fewer restraints on the interpretations one may advance; on the other hand, one's opponents are similarly unconstrained.)
Yet the questions he raises, particularly in chapter 8, are spot on. The relationship between suffering and recompense, dessert and justice, remuneration and retribution, is one that begs to be investigated. Public policy tends to act on too hazy an understanding of how suffering and justice are related generally and in a particular policy or law. How, for example, is Affirmative Action related to Jim Crow or slavery? More generally, what is the relationship between a people's historic suffering and an individual's demand for justice? What is justice, when the injustice has been so vast as to be irremediable and unforgivable?
These questions are urgent and immediate. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone given to rely on the modern understanding of suffering--that it gives me a claim to innocence, a moral vantage from which to demand something, a right to force others to attend to my perceived needs--is going to find Amato's book anything like persuasive.
It was frustrating primarily because I was desperately interested in an excellent treatment of his thesis: that the modern conception of and pursuit of justice is impoverished by its dependence on an inadequate understanding of the relationship between suffering and justice. Amato's treatment certainly raised issues, but without the sort of care and discretion that one must adopt when preparing to slaughter sacred cows.
Amato rightly (I believe) diagnoses certain problems with socio-political discourse in the US. The public discussion of justice, where it occurs, has become "a game of pick your victim," as Eugene Weber says in the intro to the book. Injustice and suffering--whether historical or actual, present or potential, rightly or wrongly perceived--are understood to create a debt which the public must honor. Indeed, virtually any kind of suffering is at least potentially the business of the state, whether as arbiter of competing claims to remediation (as in tort law), the administrator of whatever recompense is owed (as in welfare or medicaid), or the party ultimately responsible for inflicting suffering (as in our history of racial injustice).
Amato traces, with varying precision and insight, the historical development of this way of approaching the relationship between suffering and justice. At times, the story he is trying to tell gets lost in the details, but his point is primarily genealogical. It is not "natural" or inevitable to respond to reports of suffering the way we tend to do in the US today. We are the heirs of a philosophical sea-change that began, really, with Bacon, but since Amato is not particularly interested in medicine, he names other Enlightenment figures as the primary actors. Bentham is the obvious front-man: his articulation of utilitarian rationalism changed the way even non-utilitarians approach discussions of justice and suffering.
Unfortunately, when Amato moves from the historical to the contemporary, his argumentation fails. Or, rather, he fails to draw on the data in a way that would convince any that don't already agree with him. He relies on generalities and broadsides, abandoning his earlier practice of relying on texts.
(Reading society, as he purports to do in his final chapters, is both easier and more difficult than reading texts. One has fewer restraints on the interpretations one may advance; on the other hand, one's opponents are similarly unconstrained.)
Yet the questions he raises, particularly in chapter 8, are spot on. The relationship between suffering and recompense, dessert and justice, remuneration and retribution, is one that begs to be investigated. Public policy tends to act on too hazy an understanding of how suffering and justice are related generally and in a particular policy or law. How, for example, is Affirmative Action related to Jim Crow or slavery? More generally, what is the relationship between a people's historic suffering and an individual's demand for justice? What is justice, when the injustice has been so vast as to be irremediable and unforgivable?
These questions are urgent and immediate. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone given to rely on the modern understanding of suffering--that it gives me a claim to innocence, a moral vantage from which to demand something, a right to force others to attend to my perceived needs--is going to find Amato's book anything like persuasive.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Books in Review
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, by Elaine Scarry, begins with an absolutely brilliant account of the interior structure of torture--how it accomplishes what it intends, what it, in fact, intends quite apart from what it purports to intend, how embodiment is configured in the interaction between torturer and victim.
That we are now having something of a national . . . well, debate is too strong a word, isn't it? . . . thought exercise maybe? (of course, it's only a thought exercise for us) on the subject of torture only makes Scarry's chapter seem eerily prescient (the book was published in the mid-nineties).
She then moves to an equally important reading of the structure of war. Following Carl von Clausewitz, she makes the simple (but hardly simplistic) statement that war is an injuring contest whose physical consequences are held to certify the right of the "winner" to author reality for both parties. Each aspect of that statement (injuring, contest, consequences, winning, authoring reality) receives thorough attention, especially to the ways in which the statement's accuracy is masked (whether intentionally or incidentally) in speech about war (histories, media reports, propaganda, personal accounts).
My respect for Scarry's accomplishment in these two chapters is only partially mitigated by the three chapters that follow. The conceptual lenses by which she is able to read war and torture (and later, capitalism) so keenly are themselves less persuasively described.
For Scarry, bodily pain is the ground of creation/civilization and disembodiment is its product. One makes--coats, bread, speech, ideas--in order to alleviate an uncomfortable awareness of one's body (hunger, vulnerability to injury). The made thing, as long as it perdures, gives benefits the force of which is to remake the body of the maker (resistance to cold, increased mobility, ability to communicate with those outside the range of one's physical capacity) in a manner that disguises the limits imposed by human embodiment.
While this analysis has much to recommend it, Scarry's account of pain and creation are too narrow. Pain is not the only experience in which we become attuned to the fact of our having a body; pleasure serves that function, too. (Thomas's account of pain is much more convincing--it is one of the passions, not the paradigmatic fact of human existence.)
And pain is not the only creative prompt. This is, of course, a theological as well as an experiential claim. (Scarry addresses this objection, incidentally, by claiming that apparently gratuitous acts of creativity are only possible in the presence of a cultural abundance itself produced by pain, a claim which has merit but is not sufficient to explain the phenomenon of creativity.) If we are the children of a God who creates out of peace, out of completeness, without external compulsion, then our creativity likewise may not always require the goad of suffering. (I am obviously borrowing from David Hart's book here.)
I must also find fault with her reading of the Old Testament as compared to the New--like all post-Christian liberals, she depends on a trite and anti-Judaic reading of both texts. The "Christianity is an evolutionary improvement on Judaism" motif is too tiresome for words, and the variation played here is neither subtle nor plausible. The Old Testament god functions in the role of torturer; the violence and cruelty of religion is mitigated by the embodiment of god narrated in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. If god has a body, the concept of god is destabilized in humanity-affirming ways. We make room for peace and democracy and (a Marxist version of) the American way.
I have other, more minor, quibbles with Scarry's work, but these will suffice. In truth, however, none of these quibbles can undermine my respect for what she has accomplished in her first two chapters. Would that I could make these two chapters required reading for participation in civic life!
That we are now having something of a national . . . well, debate is too strong a word, isn't it? . . . thought exercise maybe? (of course, it's only a thought exercise for us) on the subject of torture only makes Scarry's chapter seem eerily prescient (the book was published in the mid-nineties).
She then moves to an equally important reading of the structure of war. Following Carl von Clausewitz, she makes the simple (but hardly simplistic) statement that war is an injuring contest whose physical consequences are held to certify the right of the "winner" to author reality for both parties. Each aspect of that statement (injuring, contest, consequences, winning, authoring reality) receives thorough attention, especially to the ways in which the statement's accuracy is masked (whether intentionally or incidentally) in speech about war (histories, media reports, propaganda, personal accounts).
My respect for Scarry's accomplishment in these two chapters is only partially mitigated by the three chapters that follow. The conceptual lenses by which she is able to read war and torture (and later, capitalism) so keenly are themselves less persuasively described.
For Scarry, bodily pain is the ground of creation/civilization and disembodiment is its product. One makes--coats, bread, speech, ideas--in order to alleviate an uncomfortable awareness of one's body (hunger, vulnerability to injury). The made thing, as long as it perdures, gives benefits the force of which is to remake the body of the maker (resistance to cold, increased mobility, ability to communicate with those outside the range of one's physical capacity) in a manner that disguises the limits imposed by human embodiment.
While this analysis has much to recommend it, Scarry's account of pain and creation are too narrow. Pain is not the only experience in which we become attuned to the fact of our having a body; pleasure serves that function, too. (Thomas's account of pain is much more convincing--it is one of the passions, not the paradigmatic fact of human existence.)
And pain is not the only creative prompt. This is, of course, a theological as well as an experiential claim. (Scarry addresses this objection, incidentally, by claiming that apparently gratuitous acts of creativity are only possible in the presence of a cultural abundance itself produced by pain, a claim which has merit but is not sufficient to explain the phenomenon of creativity.) If we are the children of a God who creates out of peace, out of completeness, without external compulsion, then our creativity likewise may not always require the goad of suffering. (I am obviously borrowing from David Hart's book here.)
I must also find fault with her reading of the Old Testament as compared to the New--like all post-Christian liberals, she depends on a trite and anti-Judaic reading of both texts. The "Christianity is an evolutionary improvement on Judaism" motif is too tiresome for words, and the variation played here is neither subtle nor plausible. The Old Testament god functions in the role of torturer; the violence and cruelty of religion is mitigated by the embodiment of god narrated in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. If god has a body, the concept of god is destabilized in humanity-affirming ways. We make room for peace and democracy and (a Marxist version of) the American way.
I have other, more minor, quibbles with Scarry's work, but these will suffice. In truth, however, none of these quibbles can undermine my respect for what she has accomplished in her first two chapters. Would that I could make these two chapters required reading for participation in civic life!
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Books in Review
Hector Avalos, in Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, makes the case that a study of the health care milieu in which Christianity arose is necessary for understanding the attraction that Christianity might have had for, particularly, the chronically ill in the Greco-Roman world.
Avalos helpfully surveys Jewish and pagan sources for indications of the values and practices surrounding sick members of those societies, particularly with respect to chronic illness. The survey of pagan culture is particularly helpful (at least for this non-Classicist) in that it enumerates the different health care options available to inhabitants of the Roman world, as well as the likely cross-pollination between Jewish monotheism and Roman paganism.
I am not conversant enough with Classical sources to know whether his presentation of health and sickness in the Roman world is accurate, but I was disappointed with his survey of Judaism. He dealt almost exclusively with the canonical texts, and seemed to weigh the New Testament critiques of Pharisaism rather more heavily than may be warranted. He did not seem to make use of more modern (and more charitable) studies of Jewish culture in the Second Temple period.
Additionally, his reading of the canonical texts was deeply problematic. He seems to have found in the texts a deep concern for protecting the state (meaning, especially, the levitical priestly hierarchy) from the burden of the chronically ill and underproductive. He takes the strict regulations concerning purity and contamination to be less interested in regulating the spread of contagious illnesses than in isolating and stigmatizing those with chronic illnesses which left them unable to be economically productive. His evidence for this interest is scant--he makes the point that the gradated requirements for thanksgiving offerings after healing (as in Leviticus 14) acknowledge the possibility that chronic illness may render a person economically unproductive, but he implies that levitical regulations are intended to marginalize those persons who have become poor.
He seems to have missed the deep concern for the poor and economically unproductive evident throughout, especially, the priestly code. The passage in question, for example, could be read as a particular effort to include those who have become poor through chronic illness and to mitigate the effects of their disadvantaged position. Economic disadvantage and unproductivity, in other words, is not an impediment to participation in the liturgical life of the community. Chronic illness is, to be sure, but there is little to no evidence that the Jewish community isolated and stigmatized the economically unproductive on a regular basis. Contagion and purity concerns are a much more convincing read of the levitical regulations regarding blood and bodily fluids.
That said, his more basic point is quite sound: whether or not such was the intention of the levitical code, and whether or not the Second Temple Jewish community practiced the levitical code exactly as written, the effect of the canonical regulations concerning chronic illnesses was to create a sub-group of people who would be particularly interested in the healing ministries of Christian missionaries, as well as the theological commitment to non-isolation of "sinners" and lepers.
Both Judaism and paganism, by Avalos's read, created a demographic group of disaffected members of society that would be attracted to Christianity precisely because it rejected (at least in its canonical texts) the very practices that had isolated them from their own societies. This partly explains, Avalos contends, the tremendous growth in the first decades after the death of Christ.
Avalos helpfully surveys Jewish and pagan sources for indications of the values and practices surrounding sick members of those societies, particularly with respect to chronic illness. The survey of pagan culture is particularly helpful (at least for this non-Classicist) in that it enumerates the different health care options available to inhabitants of the Roman world, as well as the likely cross-pollination between Jewish monotheism and Roman paganism.
I am not conversant enough with Classical sources to know whether his presentation of health and sickness in the Roman world is accurate, but I was disappointed with his survey of Judaism. He dealt almost exclusively with the canonical texts, and seemed to weigh the New Testament critiques of Pharisaism rather more heavily than may be warranted. He did not seem to make use of more modern (and more charitable) studies of Jewish culture in the Second Temple period.
Additionally, his reading of the canonical texts was deeply problematic. He seems to have found in the texts a deep concern for protecting the state (meaning, especially, the levitical priestly hierarchy) from the burden of the chronically ill and underproductive. He takes the strict regulations concerning purity and contamination to be less interested in regulating the spread of contagious illnesses than in isolating and stigmatizing those with chronic illnesses which left them unable to be economically productive. His evidence for this interest is scant--he makes the point that the gradated requirements for thanksgiving offerings after healing (as in Leviticus 14) acknowledge the possibility that chronic illness may render a person economically unproductive, but he implies that levitical regulations are intended to marginalize those persons who have become poor.
He seems to have missed the deep concern for the poor and economically unproductive evident throughout, especially, the priestly code. The passage in question, for example, could be read as a particular effort to include those who have become poor through chronic illness and to mitigate the effects of their disadvantaged position. Economic disadvantage and unproductivity, in other words, is not an impediment to participation in the liturgical life of the community. Chronic illness is, to be sure, but there is little to no evidence that the Jewish community isolated and stigmatized the economically unproductive on a regular basis. Contagion and purity concerns are a much more convincing read of the levitical regulations regarding blood and bodily fluids.
That said, his more basic point is quite sound: whether or not such was the intention of the levitical code, and whether or not the Second Temple Jewish community practiced the levitical code exactly as written, the effect of the canonical regulations concerning chronic illnesses was to create a sub-group of people who would be particularly interested in the healing ministries of Christian missionaries, as well as the theological commitment to non-isolation of "sinners" and lepers.
Both Judaism and paganism, by Avalos's read, created a demographic group of disaffected members of society that would be attracted to Christianity precisely because it rejected (at least in its canonical texts) the very practices that had isolated them from their own societies. This partly explains, Avalos contends, the tremendous growth in the first decades after the death of Christ.
Friday, July 06, 2007
A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity
A Philosophical Disease is a Wittgensteinian critique of Western biomedical culture. Carl Elliott engages the intersection of language and our construction of reality, morality, and relationality.
For an example of how this sort of critique works, Elliott's discussion of the construction of gender is paradigmatic. There are a number of medical conditions--including birth defects, genetic abnormalities, and medical mishaps--which render a person's sexual identity . . . well, complicated.
In one part of the Dominican Republic, one such condition is sufficiently prevalent that there is a name for it: guevedoche. (Penis-at-twelve.) Individuals with this genetic condition are genotypically male, but appear female from birth through puberty. Most guevedoches, although they had been raised as females, make the transition to male societal roles after puberty--including marrying women and taking jobs usually given to men. It is not so much that this culture is blase about gender roles (quite the opposite); it is rather that their experience with a particular condition allows them to code for a third gender, as it were. They have the experience of it, they have a name for it, and they have cultural practices which surround it.
By contrast, the US has retained a more strict understanding of the world as divided into male and female. Thus, their cultural practices surrounding the same genetic condition--or conditions in which gender identity is similarly ambiguous--are different. They have a medical name for the condition (5-alpha-reductase deficiency), but not for persons afflicted with the condition. Indeed, the cultural experience of such conditions is so rare that medical practices surrounding these conditions tend to involve surgery to make the genitalia match the individual's perceived sexual identity. (That is, if the individual feels more "female," the genitalia are surgically altered to match that feeling.) American language and experience is almost exclusively bound by the male/female dyad, such that surgical intervention is required to make one's biology match the linguistic and philosophical convention.
Elliott similarly investigates the way language about identity intersects with psychiatry. These chapters were some of the most interesting, as that intersection has received far less attention than it should in the bioethics literature. How does severe depression affect competence to consent? Do emotional ties reduce or enhance rational decision-making? Why do we have an intuitive sense that a willingness to sacrifice oneself is morally praiseworthy, while a willingness to profit from someone's sacrifice is morally reprehensible?
This is, in addition, an eminently readable book. The motivated amateur could certainly tackle this book, although it is geared toward an academic audience. If your interest is in the culture of medicine--not just the hot topics in bioethics, but the culture in which these topics get discussed--this is a book worth reading.
For an example of how this sort of critique works, Elliott's discussion of the construction of gender is paradigmatic. There are a number of medical conditions--including birth defects, genetic abnormalities, and medical mishaps--which render a person's sexual identity . . . well, complicated.
In one part of the Dominican Republic, one such condition is sufficiently prevalent that there is a name for it: guevedoche. (Penis-at-twelve.) Individuals with this genetic condition are genotypically male, but appear female from birth through puberty. Most guevedoches, although they had been raised as females, make the transition to male societal roles after puberty--including marrying women and taking jobs usually given to men. It is not so much that this culture is blase about gender roles (quite the opposite); it is rather that their experience with a particular condition allows them to code for a third gender, as it were. They have the experience of it, they have a name for it, and they have cultural practices which surround it.
By contrast, the US has retained a more strict understanding of the world as divided into male and female. Thus, their cultural practices surrounding the same genetic condition--or conditions in which gender identity is similarly ambiguous--are different. They have a medical name for the condition (5-alpha-reductase deficiency), but not for persons afflicted with the condition. Indeed, the cultural experience of such conditions is so rare that medical practices surrounding these conditions tend to involve surgery to make the genitalia match the individual's perceived sexual identity. (That is, if the individual feels more "female," the genitalia are surgically altered to match that feeling.) American language and experience is almost exclusively bound by the male/female dyad, such that surgical intervention is required to make one's biology match the linguistic and philosophical convention.
Elliott similarly investigates the way language about identity intersects with psychiatry. These chapters were some of the most interesting, as that intersection has received far less attention than it should in the bioethics literature. How does severe depression affect competence to consent? Do emotional ties reduce or enhance rational decision-making? Why do we have an intuitive sense that a willingness to sacrifice oneself is morally praiseworthy, while a willingness to profit from someone's sacrifice is morally reprehensible?
This is, in addition, an eminently readable book. The motivated amateur could certainly tackle this book, although it is geared toward an academic audience. If your interest is in the culture of medicine--not just the hot topics in bioethics, but the culture in which these topics get discussed--this is a book worth reading.
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