Joshua Converse's Blog

I want to just say a few things about the pleasures of reading, not as an obligation, but rather for pleasure in the midst of a busy, distracted, worried, stressed, and saturated life. I suspect those adjectives describe many lives during this turbulent year, A.D. 2020.

There is a stillness in reading, even when the story, character, or idea one reads is exciting. One turns down the voices that assail all day; the parent voice that worries what the kids are into while your back is turned (interruptions are fewer and this feeling is more prudently ignored when they are in bed) dissipates. The outrages of the news recede (unless you’re reading matters concerned in some way with the news of the day) and one can go inward. By “inward” I mean you don’t need a screen to have an experience, don’t need a pundit, another voice, a commercial sales job; what happens inside you happens according to what your own mind produces on the basis of words on a page. Your meditations with a book are guided, but they are your own.

Reading for pleasure is a way to turning aside the world in an escapist sense. Of going somewhere else and coming back changed. Indeed, escapism means even the possibility of momentarily slipping your skin and being someone else entirely. There’s a tremendous power in being able to leave oneself, one’s life, one’s own ideas and to inhabit another world, another mind, and another way of being in the world for a time, and then to be able to return changed to the life you were living. It means seeing yourself and your problems and your hopes and your joys in new ways, ways that will continue to shift as you continue to read and think and grow, but always with a wider perspective the more voices and ideas you can drink in and consider and synthesize into something that is totally yourself and unique.

Increasingly, I am convinced that reading for pleasure is a balm for the frenetic stream of outrage, drivel, and fear generated or transmitted by other media. It is in books we can find sanctuary, and wisdom, as individuals and as a culture. In turning away from the screen and toward the written page, we may turn also from the madness roiling our world.

I have addressed the lie that college necessarily equals a job before, but it bears repeating. Obviously there are factors that will determine whether graduating students get 1. work 2. in the field they studied 3. that becomes a career. These factors are generally outside the control of the university, and among them are these: the nature of the degree, the number of people that have that degree, the state of the industry/market, the general state of the economy, the geographic location of the student and their willingness/ability to move, and of course, the individual’s intelligence, aptitude, personality etc. For example, there is a degree in the United States called “Medical Billing.” If the the American government were to create a single-payer health care system or “universal health care” those degrees would in large part become effectively meaningless as the entire system they studied would no longer exist. The government can spawn and alter industries with great rapidity (the car smogging industry in California comes to mind). Technology can also totally alter markets and render swaths of jobs redundant or obsolete (and we know that AI and automation is already remaking the world in ways that are going to eliminate or slim down many industries). So, government fiat and technological advance can render specialties of study meaningless in vocational terms; college can’t guarantee a career or even a job, although this is the number one platitude offered by parents, school administrators, and educators when the wherefores of higher education come up in conversation.

There was a time when one might have heard teachers argue that higher learning, particularly in the Humanities, would lead to greater empathy and (as the name implies) humanity. I don’t think you can study the history of the 20th century and come away with the idea that even highly educated people are any more moral for their studies. Consider the example of Germany; it was one of the most culturally rich, well-educated, academically rich countries in the history of the world at the close of the 19th century. As a nation, Germany had an incredibly dense and thriving intellectual life, but within a generation, its people were capable of carrying out the Holocaust, or turning a blind eye to it. So, I don’t think you can argue that educated people on the whole, or even people who study the Humanities, are necessarily more humane, although there are studies that suggest reading fiction and empathy are related in some ways. Education can, but doesn’t always make for a better human with a better soul.

I think the only thing that colleges can outright guarantee are opportunities. Come into a classroom and you have the opportunity to listen, to discuss, to consider, to read, to write, to reflect, to grow. Many students do not take advantage of those opportunities, and they may (or may not) emerge from college with a degree or certificate but according to the authors of Academically Adrift, Josipa Roska and Richard Arum, 36% American college students graduate with “no significant learning.” I can put a great book into a student’s hand, but I can’t make him read it. If he reads it once, he will notice things, if he reads it twice, he’ll notice more. The more time a student spends with texts of quality, the more he is likely to discover in them, but his teachers can’t make him spend the time. What students have in college are opportunities; opportunities to encounter ideas and grapple with them, opportunities to see new perspectives and make decisions about what kind of person and life and world to make of and for themselves.

Therefore, I think it is incumbent on colleges and universities to be as robustly packed with intellectually diverse opportunities, ideas, viewpoints, and experiences as possible. What students choose to do with their opportunities is their own lookout; our job, in my view, our whole job is to expose them to as much as possible every second they are in class or on campus, and let them decide what to internalize. This exposure is the only thing we can control or guarantee. The lie of “learning outcomes,” that we can predict what a student will know at the end of a given course, is that all learning is measurable and immediate. It isn’t. I can’t guarantee what a student will decide is important enough to remember in the long term. I can guarantee that I will expose him to the things in the study of English that I think are important. That’s it. End of list.

This notion of maximum opportunity as the focus of higher education is the exact opposite of the principles behind “Guided Pathways,” which seeks to narrow the field of what a student might study to what will net “in-demand jobs” and push students through their studies at an accelerated rate. Dance, Photography, Drama, Literature, and Philosophy offerings are shrinking, student choices are narrowing because of a concerted effort by legislators and administrators to make the messy endeavor of discovering oneself (and the world) appear pleasing on a spreadsheet. Meanwhile on campuses all over America, the opportunities to attend or participate in plays, to wrestle with morality and the existence of God alongside Kant and Nietzsche, to read Mary Shelley and Herman Melville and John Milton and ask what it means to be human and where the boundaries of humanity are, to choose from a Babel of language courses and explore myriad cultures, are fewer and fewer year by year at the community college level. Instead, we are to teach them to write for business, as one of my colleagues suggested recently. I have been directed by my superiors not to assign novels, not to assign any fiction whatever in Composition classes. “They don’t need it.” I have been told not to teach logical fallacies. I have seen Theater budgets slashed 85% and people laid off, World Language Labs closed down, Tutoring centers diminished to uselessness, and Shakespeare offered once every two years, even as administrators hire more administrators and plead poor when they cancel classes. It’s a bad joke when administrators and educators enacting these policies claim that “students come first.” What they are doing is actively robbing students of opportunities they might otherwise have had and that might have changed or enriched their lives immeasurably. Who are these course-winnowing “educators” to decide what art, music, poetry, or ideas a student “doesn’t need” in his life? The arrogance of it staggers me.

I think an opportunities-based philosophy for Higher Education is more intellectually honest than the propaganda engine of jobs, jobs, jobs that seeks to turn Higher Education into a sausage factory that manufactures obedient employees. Dylan Thomas comes back to me every time I think on these things.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light…”

This is a very short piece of flash fiction I wrote based on an exchange I witnessed. Let me know what you think.

Here’s a spooky story as we head into the Fall. This was first published in Scheherazade Magazine and is now available as an ebook through Kindle.

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I try to stay away from politics on this blog, but here is a wish list of reforms (that assuredly won’t happen) that I think would drastically improve the political landscape of the nation:

1) The two parties should collapse under their own weight and disappear. Parties and party platforms should go out of style and individual elected officials have to forge compromises to pass substantive policy on a case-by-case basis.

2) Elected office will be like Jury Duty–people who meet certain minimum requirements for age, experience, education, etc. will be called up and asked to serve (willingness is important, of course) for a period of not more than two years, to be compensated at the rate of their current employment and/or a minimum of 40k a year.  Should they need to relocate, they will live in Officer’s Housing on the nearest adjacent military post.

3) Political candidates enter into a special status, much like the Uniform Code of Military Justice, wherein they are volunteering to waive certain rights: they must make their tax and other financial records public before and during their term of office. They may not accept campaign donations, purchase advertising, or otherwise try to buy an elected office with any form of war chest. Instead, they will be interviewed by a panel of journalists and citizens as to their political philosophy and ideas and transcripts of those interviews will be disseminated at government expense in an election pamphlet. Looks, delivery, charm, and taste will be irrelevant; ideas will have primacy.

4) Debates will be quite long, substantive, rigorous, specific, and will strictly adhere to the rules of logic and classical debate. No mudslinging. No fallacies. No lies. Failure to adhere to these rules can result in disqualification for office.

5) Political office-holders may meet with lobbyists only in open, public, televised forums. No junkets. No “special trips” to Bangkok. No quid pro quo.

6) Bills may not have riders. The law will be written in the simplest possible language and the writers of law will, without fail, eliminate needless words OR the Bill will automatically be disqualified from being brought to the floor until it is rendered as clear and brief as humanly possible. All Bills must be read  by every member of Congress before they are voted on. Period. If they haven’t read it, or had time to read it, then there is no vote.

7) Any office-holder found to have willfully lied to his constituents or colleagues about a professional/political matter will have his wages garnished for the first infraction, and will be dismissed from office after the second.

8) All bureaucratic agencies, including Intelligence Agencies, will undergo a bi-annual independent review for necessity, effectiveness, thrift, transparency (such as is possible, in the case of Intel), ethically sound practices, and compliance with the law. Any agency that receives a substandard rating has until the next review to get its house in order or it will be defunded, or, if vital to National Security, will undergo drastic management changes.

9) Civics and legal literacy classes will be instituted at all public institutions of education. Students should be exposed to major figures in political thought, major movements in the political history of the country and the world. They should be intimately familiar with the workings of their government and how they may wield influence over it.

10) All current laws including the tax code will be audited by Congress, (which will meet daily and take no days off except weekends and national holidays) for clarity, conciseness, necessity, and specificity. Riders and other special additions to any law will be separated from the bills they rode on and and re-evaluated on their own merits. This will be the work of decades, but our legislative system and therefore judicial systems will be more transparent and more easily understood by the populace for it.

11) Executive power will be curtailed massively; it will not be legal for a President to fail to enforce laws he/she does not like. He/she will enforce all laws as they are written. Executive Orders and the like will not be used as an end run around an uncooperative Congress. Presidents will not be allowed to make war without Congressional approval, up to and including assassinations by drone or deploying Special Forces into countries to conduct guerrilla operations.

With these measures, there is no professional political class and no lifetime bureaucratic elite. There is no lobby buying up politicians. There is no way to funnel money to office-holders in exchange for considerations. There is no showbiz-style campaigning, no mudslinging, no ridiculous ads. Congress can’t torture language and engage legal teams to torture language so as to obfuscate their doings. Party platforms do not exist; the question is always case-by-case as to what a law should/should not be and do. The people in power are there for only a short time, and they did not seek a life in politics, per se (and I distrust anyone who wants power, really).

It would be nice. And it would solve a lot of problems. But it ain’t gonna happen.

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Years ago I wrote this story, which I called “Burial At Sea,” about a camping trip I went on with my old man. It’s true, so far as I remember it, but I’ve hesitated in publishing it again in ebook form. It is included in my collection of short stories, Time in the Dark. One of the reasons I’ve hesitated is because my family’s unhappiest days are bound up with our time living in Las Vegas, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say most of that can be laid at the old man’s door. Another reason is that I seldom write about myself, and frankly it makes me uncomfortable to do so. I’d rather talk ideas, most days. But for what it’s worth, here’s a piece of history and it’s true, and maybe it’s rosed over in places with a boy’s love of a man he hoped would be a good father, and who never learned that trick. The damage for my mother, and my siblings ,and for me has been considerable, and we are all still dealing with the fallout.

Today is his birthday. It’s the second one he’s spent in prison for a murder that goes back to those Vegas days. He will be there for life. This is his gift from me.

Happy Birthday, Pop.

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 Out of grad school,  I began with many expectations around teaching that were unrealistic. I thought my students would begin college with a fundamental desire to learn, investigate, and grow. Instead, many have a keen desire that I rubber stamp a passing grade so they can get credentialing paper. In fairness, some of my students are curious-minded, inquisitive, and excited to explore, but many are not. That surprises me whenever I encounter it. It would be easy to get angry, and sometimes I do when I suspect laziness in a student, but mostly I try to realize that I can’t expect people with different lives and experiences to think or behave like I do. I was extremely linguistically-inclined at a very young age. I read my first novel at six years old. My family believed in learning (if not formal education) as a default state of being– there were always new things to see and do and know. The students who come through my doors sometimes have never read a book, or at least never read one for pleasure. Their families are sometimes wholly uneducated, and sometimes totally apathetic about education. Raised in that, or given a natural predisposition for other skills, I would be much the same as some of the students who enroll grudgingly in an English course only because they need it to proceed. But then, if they’re not particularly intellectually curious nor personally disposed to read and write, why are they in college?

  Well, I think it’s because colleges spend millions a year on propaganda that promises a good job and financial well-being on the other side of their fun, low-impact, stress-free courses of study, but remain mum on the possibility that education is a reward unto itself. By “reward,” I don’t mean some trivial esoteric reward for academics to play with their inner selves and theorize and navel-gaze, but rather a practical and pragmatic set of skills for resisting bullshit, tools for seeking the most accurate possible mental map of reality, and important coping mechanisms for the inevitable tragedies that come into every life. Those skills and tools amount to a net gain whether you’re a ditch-digger or a neurosurgeon. Academic inquiry is an opportunity to grow outside oneself in useful ways. That is not to say college is the only way to become an educated person, but it’s a good road (or it would be if higher education were not indoctrinating students with a particular identity politics/leftist/Marxist worldview, but I digress). My point is, students are being told by colleges to get the paper for jobs and careers alone (whether those will materialize in truth is sometimes a dubious proposition), and so young people think they need to go through the motions, and they expect frictionlessness– as a result their expectations are upset when they come into my classroom and find that their way of looking at the world is being challenged by new habits of mind (because a critical review of unexamined assumptions is the meta-message of every assignment I dispense).  It’s not a popular thing for a college teacher to say, but college isn’t necessarily for everyone.

 Just as I feel the impulse to anger when my expectations are upset, so do some of my students sometimes get angry when they learn that their grade is a matter of grappling with, reading about, and writing about troubling ideas. As a result, my attrition rates are sometimes rather high. Students figure out quickly there are classes where they can coast and classes where they can’t, and some of them bail very quickly from the classes where they can’t coast. Their expectations are set up by a system that promises them it will be quick and easy to get paper, and by teachers who are pressured by administrators  to push students through so as to keep the money machine humming.

 What if the very institutions we’ve built to educate our young people indoctrinate them at worst and, in many cases, simply fail to educate them because American culture and campus culture in 2018 (and our biologically adapted cognitive biases) are at variance with the rigor required for logic, critical inquiry, free-thought, and reasonableness to take root among the populace on a large scale? It’s an unsettling thought, and I want to be optimistic about the possibility of teaching contemporary American college students  en masse to think carefully, question closely, consider deeply, and to generally resist intellectual coercion both externally and internally…

but I am full of doubts.

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Among my favorite poems is this one by Taylor Mali entitled “I’ll Fight You for the Library.” What I like most about Mali’s poem is how willing the speaker is to put his career on the headsman’s block to protect the primacy of student learning in the library (“the only place in the school WITH BOOKS!”) and within an educational institution wherein administrators seek to dominate physical and intellectual space. That Administrative class dominance has a ring of the familiar in most American educational institutions, and the mark of it is often a matter of fiscal “efficiency.” This has even led some to posit that physical libraries are obsolete.

For example, at one of the colleges where I work, the physical collection has diminished year by year. Even for the size of the college, it is among the most anemic book holdings I have ever encountered in a library. I went to high school in a relatively small town, and the holdings at my high school library were more substantial. The explanation? They’ve gone “digital.” They have “ebooks.” Ebooks, particularly of the academic sort, are not actually books; they are indexed content. Students do not read them the way physical books are traditionally read, i.e. in a cumulative way. Instead, they hit Ctrl+F, search for a term, copy it, and paste quotes into their papers. This is not really reading, as there is no prolonged meditation on a topic, nor meaningful time spent following the contour of the author’s thought. Another problem with ebooks, of course, is that you don’t own them. You own a subscription. The library pays a tidy sum every year so students can access ebooks which will appear on their devices for a few days and then disappear. They can only be printed in sections. Try to print the whole book and the system will shut you down.  In other words, the library does not really possess an ebook, and so when libraries trade a physical book for same digital title, they haven’t really done an equal exchange at all.

That’s part of why I’m so uncomfortable with the “free digital textbooks” fad. Students almost assuredly won’t read them cover to cover, as my grandmother was wont to do at the beginning of every semester in her school years.  They will mine them for quotes and answers, but retain very little because they’ll have spent so little time with them. Not only that, but digital technology fragments attention, disrupts focus, short term memory, and leads to what Nicholas Carr calls “power browsing” instead of reading. “Free digital textbooks” aren’t really free (someone pays, and in the case of California’s K-12 digital textbook initiatives that someone is the taxpayer), aren’t really books and they won’t be read like books. Not only that, but unlike a physical book, they are subject to change, editing, and outright retraction, according to whatever agenda comes to power.

Moreover,  computers and especially smartphones are devices of distraction by nature, but the purveyors of digital “textbooks” make their wares tablet and smartphone friendly. Books require concentration and time. Phones and tablets eat time and scatter focus. They’re actually the opposite of books in this way, and are largely poor tools for teaching a student anything you wish them to retain.

Another argument for digitizing academic collections and outsourcing physical textbooks to the cloud is the illusion of  “going green.”  Surely paper, which is an almost infinitely renewable resource, is more “green” than a server that must remain “on” and be powered from any number of energy sources, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year…forever.

  Finally,  of course, there are the Administrative darlings that digital “libraries” (which aren’t libraries) will “save money” (probably) and “increase efficiency,” (probably not) which brings me back to Mali’s poem. If the ebook can’t do the work of a physical book, can’t train habits of mind that encourage deliberation and close reading, and will result in a student becoming a fairly shallow thinker (but expert internet-user), then I think the cost is too high, whatever ebooks save in dollars. Student learning must be primary, not the administrator’s agenda. Whatever smooth, bright digital matriculation machinery Administrators try to erect to please their legislative masters who will, in turn, dispense lavish taxpayer funding, the students who pass through the lower intestine of higher education will emerge no smoother and brighter for their journey. Rather the opposite, I fear, considering the way colleges are failing.

 So, I am concerned that libraries are shrinking physical holdings. I am concerned that Open Source Educational Resources are billing themselves as “Libraries” when they are really jumped-up digital databases. A library is so much more than just a curated collection of holdings. When library services degrade, the culture isn’t far behind.  And who among us will, like Dr. Joseph D’Angelo in Mali’s “I’ll Fight You for the Library,” stand up to insist that libraries are crucial and nonnegotiable? Who in the community will demand that physical holdings remain physical, and grow? What teachers will insist on physical textbooks and proselytize reading for knowledge and pleasure in the digital age? What parents will take the devices of distraction from before their children’s eyes and put books in their hands? What administrators will eschew lavish sums whose strings necessarily undercut the very possibility of producing educated, thinking, well-read and well-prepared students? Who will risk their jobs to say the Digital Emperor wears no clothes?

Where have you gone, Dr. D’Angelo? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

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For about 18 months, I have been asking students in my Composition courses to fill out a short questionnaire on the first day of class. Among the questions I ask is this: “How often do you read for pleasure?” It is a strong predictor of how well they will do in the course. Many to most of my students answer that they do not read for pleasure and cannot remember the last book they read, or they cite a required text from high school English.  This is irrespective of location: I teach at a community college where some of the most affluent and educated members of society send their kids as a prelude to a more expensive (and far-flung) four year college, and I teach at a community college where the literacy rate is among the lowest in the nation. I ask the same question, and I tend to get the same answer. Books? Reading? Not so much. At least, not in the students I’m contacting, most of whom come from pretty varied backgrounds.

So, my job is to get their writing up to college level. Most of them begin at a skill level somewhere around 9th grade or lower. In 17 weeks, I can get the ones with grit and determination (the ones who do not flee) to write at least one reasonably good (supported, scholarly, evidence-based, coherent, logical, considered) essay at college level. To do this, I assign five essays over the course of the semester, although many of my colleagues think I am a masochist to inflict that much grading on myself. I make them read rather more than is currently fashionable (guidance at both of my schools is that fiction is out, novel-length works are out, and that articles on current events will do just fine. Here I posit that the discipline of English has lost faith in itself, but this is a digression). In any event, those students whose internal structures are sufficient to withstand the pressure that good writing and careful reading demand succeed in my classes and go on.  It is the work of a semester, and it is difficult. More than one student has informed me that he learned more in my classroom in one semester than he did in all of high school English. More than one student has told me their English teacher in high school gave up, and they sat in silence filling out worksheets or reading newspapers instead of learning how to read and write in preparation for college.

Students already enculturated to the digital, fragmented, icon and gif and photo-centric world of Internet interactions, already unused to the sustained meditation on a subject that is long form reading (and discouraged from such by the vagaries of fashion in the English Department), and whose basic education has fundamentally failed to prepare them for college are already operating at a deficit when it comes to writing well. By writing well, I mean simply that one is able to transmit one’s thoughts clearly in writing with minimal slippage between what is meant and what is understood. These students coming to me do not write well, and they have not read much good writing, nor is it a habit of mind for them to note language as readers and writers do.  This is not their fault. This is what they have grown up in.

All that just to say this: because of the deep deficits in student readiness where English skills are concerned, it often takes a full semester of regular attendance and attention for underprepared students (a majority) to produce an effective piece of writing. And yet, a summer session “class” of six weeks that confers the same number of credits and professes to do the same work is offered at nearly every college in the world.  Such courses cannot possibly do the same work. Six week courses cannot adequately equip most students to deploy a skill they are not habitually or culturally set up to intuitively grasp. I tell my students what they are getting is a “crash course.” I can’t have them write as much, nor read as much, nor do they have as much time to digest what they are learning, nor do they have as much opportunity to reflect on their mistakes so as to learn from them. Six weeks is not enough time for most of them to make much progress, in my experience.

This seems obvious to me, but colleges continue to offer summer courses and have been doing so for time out of mind. It brings in revenue. It helps with funding (FTES, CTE, etc.). It looks good on paper. It gets students through their studies and on to matriculation more quickly than would be the case otherwise. It’s a paycheck for me during the summer months. And yet, while all that is sure to make Administrators (and maybe faculty) happy and keep things humming along, I think the people who suffer most are students who are ill-prepared for the demands of serious study, and all too many fall away when they encounter academic rigor because they are not inured to it.

I think it is best done away with, or, failing that, lengthened to a quarter. That’s not perfect, but it’s a reasonable compromise.  As things stand, it feels like a scam to give students so little practice at something they need more practice in and tell them they’ve done the equivalent of a semester-length course. Rubbish. They haven’t, and that lack of practice will tell sooner or later, and may even lead to that student quitting when they find their skills aren’t up to snuff, or it may lead to grade inflation when teachers recognize they’ll have to fail nearly everyone (and gain the wrath of the Administration) or wink at student deficiencies.

Education is not something to rush through, checking boxes so you can say you “passed” to “get paper.” It is unacceptable to me that the prevailing attitude is “Cs get degrees.” It’s a serious business. Education is a forge where people can be tempered for the challenges, demands, and tragedies of their lives to come. Are we as educators preparing them? Or are we cashing in on a bubble doomed to pop?

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Today I read that Rudyard Kipling’s “If” was erased from a student center wall at Manchester University on the grounds that he was a racist, an imperialist, a colonial apologist, etc. etc. I’m not going to refute any of it.  Kipling was, no doubt, a man of his time and place. In the light of 2018 values, a poem like “White Man’s Burden” certainly qualifies (if taken unironically) as a credo of white (or British, or European) supremacy. My reading of that poem suggests the narrative voice has distinct dubiousness about Colonialism, asking rather more than implicitly whether occupying other lands and territories and trying to “civilize” them doesn’t make the colonizer as much a prisoner as the colonized. Orwell, who was critical of Kipling’s colonialism, rather dramatized this selfsame idea in his famous essay “Shooting an Elephant.” In any event,  Kipling was living and writing at a time when it was often said “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” That was the norm.  I won’t argue for Colonialism, or that he was right, nor sit in judgment of his choices; it was a different time, a different culture, and a different world. Whatever my opinions they are, at least partially, informed by my own time and place in history. That understanding appears to be absent in those who would pull down writers, soldiers, leaders, and works from the past that do not conform to current ideas. I think that pulling down artists and historical figures is a dangerous business because not all examples are or should be taken as positive examples (we don’t have monuments to the Holocaust to glorify the Holocaust, but to remember what happened and how), because anyone can be wrong about some things (or hold unpopular opinions) and right or incisive where other matters are concerned (the expectation that if we dislike something about someone we expect to dislike everything about them and vice versa is called “The Halo Effect” and it’s a cognitive bias) , and finally because art can be and should be separate from the artist (I don’t have to approve of or condone or even have an opinion on alleged Hemingway’s sexual history to recognize the beauty and human truth in The Old Man and the Sea, for example).

Even if the original intent of those who raised a particular monument, book, poem, or idea was the glorification of a leader or idea no longer regarded as worthy of praise (Robert E. Lee and Andrew Jackson come to mind) that initial intention by those earlier people need not trouble contemporary encounters with that monument: history and our understanding of it necessarily inflects our experiences. What was once a positive example may now carry negative connotations and be an instance of remembering history so as not to repeat it. Therein, however, lies the trouble; I think the people who want Lee’s statues pulled down, Kipling’s poems erased from public spaces, and who generally criticize the Western Canon for being full of “Dead White Males” aren’t merely interested in removing monuments and painting over poems and replacing old books with newer ones for the sake of protecting the public from what is semiotically complex, ambiguous, and uncomfortable, but rather that they want no interpretation of history but their own to dominate the public life. They want no one to glorify Lee or Jackson ever again for anything worthy they ever did– because they transgressed in unacceptable ways by the lights of 2018 morality. That impulse is profoundly moralistic and totalitarian. That you feel Lee was wrong because slavery is wrong is one position, but to feel everyone must agree with you that his fighting on the wrong side overrides anything we might learn from the man, or anything admirable about him, or even his worthiness to occupy a physical space in the culture is Orwellian in its authoritarian control of narrative.

One may look at Lee’s statue and see an example not to follow (one who chooses the side that defends slavery), and others may see one of the most honorable, most skilled generals America ever produced  whose principles would not allow him to raise his sword against the men of his own state at a time when one’s state was a mark of identity far more than being generally American was.  Both of those are reasonable positions rooted in history.  In fact, history and its interpretation is a complex business with very few outright black hats and white hats. That’s not to say slavery wasn’t evil, it was; but the tragedy of life is that sometimes good men do troubling, even morally repugnant things. Milan Kundera said “Man proceeds in a fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their far-away future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.” So it is. We can only judge to the extent that we imagine we would have done “better,” but this is a rigid and fairly self-deceiving kind of righteousness.

It is a pleasant fiction to think one would have gone against the mores of a particular society or group or historical context (the Aztecs and other ancient civilizations sacrificed children, the Elizabethans put bears in pits with dogs and watched them rip each other apart for fun, Romans watched gladiators murder one another for sport, Lt. Calley and his men executed women and children at My Lai, Germans joined up and fought for Hitler and his Nazis to return glory to the Fatherland, some Palestinian mothers strap bombs to their children) but it’s a rare person who will turn away from the casual cruelty of what is normal or even laudable at a particular time in a particular context. For instance, a day may come when mankind looks back with horror at the abortion rate , and yet a huge segment of the population will today defend the right for a woman to choose abortion; how will history judge them despite their considered opinions, their pragmatic arguments and their liberty-based intentions? It would be unfair, I think the reader will agree, to decide that the novels of Toni Morrison are worthy of erasure because she came down on the “wrong side” of a continuing discussion on issues (like abortion) that will one day have moved a century beyond her and may, like racism, come to center stage in the culture at that later time. Outlooks and ideas change; opinions once reasonable and mainstream become unfashionable or even repugnant. Culture alters itself with each successive generation, but to regard past generations as a pack of fools because they didn’t think the way “we” do is chronocentrism, and throws away very real wisdom in both positive and negative examples for the short and shallow victory of virtue-signalling to others one’s own righteous and correct opinions. It’s a quick win to showcase moral superiority over the ancients, and it requires little understanding of oneself or the world as it was. This is a shallow and superficial position, in my opinion, but alarmingly popular of late.

It’s not out of place to consider some of the voices (primarily on the Left, primarily concerned with “Social Justice”) calling for statues and authors and poets and works of art to be pulled down or erased or recontextualized into a strictly and narrowly pejorative paradigm as somewhat Victorian. For example, Oscar Wilde is widely recognized today as one of the most superlative geniuses in the history of Letters in the English Language. His open homosexuality (and decision to force the issue at a time when such a thing was a crime in England) left him a pariah and a pauper in his own time who died in exile; all this almost entirely because of social stigma. The Victorian public could not or would not recognize his work as worthwhile any longer primarily because they felt his personal sexual/moral schema might be catching. It is the same now, and it is absurd.

Bad, unpopular, and ugly ideas aren’t inherently and directly contagious simply by dint of being expressed, and current mores aren’t universal. You are not going to become a rabid colonialist by reading “If.” You are not going to catch gayness from The Picture of Dorian Gray. You are not going to start a murderous race war after reading Helter Skelter and you’re not going to start killing Jews after you read Mien Kampf. Rather, you will encounter ideas, figures, and history from which you can be trusted to make informed decisions about the nature of good and evil by your own lights. That is, we can make determinations about what is laudable and execrable without acting by fiat or mob rule to impose that viewpoint on others. Rather, sound arguments rooted in deep historical knowledge and one’s own contribution to “The Great Conversation” will do more than censorship and virtue-signalling to move Western civilization toward an ever more humane system of interaction.

I recognize, of course, that the “social justice” argument for erasing “If” and putting up Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” in a public space is that historically white males have subverted the voices of marginalized groups (women, people of color, etc.) and this is a corrective to that historical injustice. That may be true in some sense, but the corrective is, to my mind, wrong-headed. We should be taking the best techniques and ideas of Western Civilization gratefully from those who spawned them (classic liberalism, governments that exist to protect the rights of people instead of people who exist to prop up the government and/ or upper classes, the scientific method, free speech,  the right to a trial wherein one is innocent until proven guilty, individual rights generally, academic freedom, a free press, etc.).  We can recognize the uneven, imperfect application of the highest ideals of justice, liberty, and equal treatment under law in our culture, and we might seek to improve upon those in ourselves, in our own lives, and in our communities. I can’t agree with or condone, however,  this “social justice” policy of pulling down monuments, erasing poems from college walls, and revising the Canon for reasons of whiteness or maleness. These are acts of rejection toward some of the good or notable or important aspects of our history because of some fatuous notion that perfect (and currently sanctioned) moral purity is possible in our forebears (or ourselves) and that impurity is appropriately met with wholesale rejection.

That attitude is uncharitable, it’s ungenerous, it’s unreasonable, it’s impossible to live up to, and ultimately I deem it fearful: Fearful that specific, transgressive forms of intolerance and cruelty currently regarded as the highest sins in our culture can be or may be transmitted (or condoned, or even conceived of) by and through contact with figures of the past who did not weigh our values on the same scales we do at this historic moment. That fear means many are frightened when a handful of vocal Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists march in our streets, as if that extremely marginal slice of the fringe will embolden and encourage bald racism across America and the world. Those tiki-torch-bearing extremists don’t frighten me and I don’t see racists under every rock, or in every American living room. The people in my community and my country, more often than not, are basically decent to each other. When disasters happen, white cops boat out black flood survivors and black firemen carry white casualties from of burning buildings and men help women and gay people help straight people and, when things get bad, we all pretty much do what we can to help each other. That’s the real America, as far as I can see. That’s the default in the collective human spirit. That’s human nature, just as sure as tribalism and bias are.

Censorship is always about fear. I refuse to be afraid, and I think more people should take the same stand. Let all people, the good and the bad, say what they like; let’s read widely and deeply from imperfect, messy, inconsistent, troubled, broken, wounded, and sometimes outright bad people; in other words, people like ourselves. Let there be monuments to our greatness and to our folly, to our high triumphs and deep shames, and let us look over them all often and with different eyes, and let us discuss them frequently and broadly and with open ears and open hearts. Let us, in short, sanitize nothing and examine everything for what it will profit us.