Wheat from the Chaff

A Review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

I have a rather ambiguous opinion of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. On one hand, it’s a beautifully phrased novel, full of powerful images and rich language. On the other hand, the plot is rather pedestrian, and the author’s defiance of writing conventions is tiresome.

There’s no doubt that McCarthy is a gifted writer. Many passages are profoundly beautiful and show McCarthy’s daunting command of language. He is a fabulous painter of words, utilizing an often inventive terminology. For example, the boy is described in an impressively figurative manner: “Knobby spine-bones. The razarous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin” (p. 218). Quite often, individual words surprise and enrich: “rasping”, “viscera”, “dentil”, “macadam”, and so on. In an age of anti-intellectualism, where so-called “big words” expose a person to abuse like glasses do in a Khmer Rouge nightmare, McCarthy’s breadth of vocabulary is impressive, perhaps even inspiring. Finally, the relationship between man and boy seems genuine and real, and moves beyond the easy nihilism for which McCarthy is often accused.

Nevertheless, there many disappointing parts to the novel. The plot is predictable and surprisingly linear: look down at a town or house; search town or house for food; discover amazingly well-preserved food stores just in time to avoid starvation; avoid grisly cannibals when necessary; climb to the top of the next hill and consider the depravity of man (or at least flat caricatures of depraved beasts); repeat sequence at least four times. The plot seems awfully amenable to a screen play, almost as if The Road was written as a novelization of a movie. McCarthy’s well-known aversion to grammar rules also grates, and I personally think it overwhelms the linguistic and emotional side of the book. I don’t really care about the lack of apostrophes or quotation marks; I get the rather bludgeoned symbolism about the artificiality and fragility of society. But the apparently random use of sentence fragments becomes incredibly annoying. I spent much of my time filling in the subject or the predicate, or both. Such undue effort led me to skip-read much of the novel, only occasionally slowing down to savour an occasional passage. Are such rules of writing really so imposing? McCarthy seems to be saying yes, but it’s a bit like arguing the colour scheme of traffic lights is fascist, when such conventionality is really about moving on to more important things. In the end, the fragments and other broken rules seem like gimmicks, and convince me that McCarthy should have spent more time on plot development rather than the arbitrary rules of grammar.

So The Road leaves me perplexed; maybe it’s his Pulitzer Prize for the novel, and maybe it’s because other people lavish such praise on his book. If Oprah loves the novel, it must be good, no? Yet for me, it has the whiff of pretentiousness. McCarthy is a great writer, no doubt, but beating up sentences and punctuation does not replace good old fashioned story telling.

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation* argues that modern western society (and particularly American society) is moving from a relatively literate print-based culture to a post-literate technology culture. Bauerlein's specific focus is on the new realm of social technologies ("e-mails, text messages, blog-postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos and songs" (p. x)) that he believes overwhelm the process of maturation, attenuate cultural boundaries, and threaten the "intellectual development" of young people: “Instead of opening young Americans mind to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them” (p. 10). The Dumbest Generation is an enjoyable pro-reading, anti-technology jeremiad in the tradition of Neil Postman (to whom Bauerlein pays homage), but it's not without its limitations.

Drawing on research from a number of government sources and reputable cultural institutions, Bauerlein argues that young people in America are increasingly moving away from book reading, particularly fiction and literature. One of the best empirical studies he relies upon is a large-scale reading survey from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts that measured leisure reading rates in 1982, 1992 and 2002. The rate (based on reading a single book outside of school or work) shows a precipitous drop of 17% in 18-24 year-olds (from 59.8% to 42.8%) between 1982 and 2002. This is certainly troubling, but Bauerlain glosses over the fact that leisure reading for 25-34 year-olds also declined (from 62.1% to 47.7%), as it did for 35-44 year-olds (from 59.7% to 46.6%). Moreover, this decline in leisure reading occurred before the wholesale adoption of the social computing technologies that Bauerlein believes is at the core of today's "dumbest generation". [Indeed, one of the newest and biggest social networking fads, Facebook, is barely mentioned, whereas another fad that has already receded, MySpace, features prominently in Bauerlein's analysis.] Therefore, it appears to me that he is identifying a larger problem, one to which modern technology may contribute, but which is nevertheless deeper and longer-standing than Bauerlein contends.

I can offer no objective, measurable reasons for this post-literate society, except to say that this trend is certainly reinforced and confirmed by what I have witnessed in my 16 years as a high-school and college teacher. I see a spreading anti-intellectualism, one that is marked by young people who are often aware that they read less, and yet are indifferent or belligerently proud. (Bauerlein calls such young people bibliophobes.) Perhaps the reason lies in TV and video games, older electronics that pre-date social networking technologies, but which work in the same disastrous way: intellectually fallow screen time that crowds out reading time. [I am reminded of Postman's provocative discussion of TV's inducement of stupor-like alpha waves.] Working hand-in-hand are other potential causes: educated people having fewer kids (relatively and absolutely), a pop-culture explosion that emphasizes fun rather than satisfaction, and economic changes that remove both parents from the home (and thus create a vacuum that is easily filled by screen-based technologies).

So social technologies cannot be seen as the sole reason for concern. And, without up-to-date data that can parse the multiple challenges facing a literate culture, Bauerlein's book must therefore rest on anecdotes, persuasive arguments, and reasoning to convince us that social technologies - sometimes called Web 2.0 - are helping to lead us down a dangerous path. At this level, to be sure, I do think Bauerlein succeeds.

Bauerlein starts with a pretty familiar defence of print-based culture. Modern technologies crowd out and simply overwhelm the old methods of socialization and transmitting knowledge. At a basic level, the lack of reading is self-reinforcing: "as the occasions of reading diminish, reading becomes a harder task. The more you don’t read, the more you can’t read" (p. 59).The consequence of this is a society (or at least large portions of it) incapable of benefiting from those skills peculiar to reading. For example, habitual "readers acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, and an ear for style, over time recognizing the aesthetic vision of adolescent fare as, precisely, adolescent" (p. 58). To the extent the "linear, hierarchal sequential thinking solicited by books has a shaky hold on the youthful mind, and as teens and young adults read linear texts in a linear fashion less and less, the less they engage in sustained linear thinking" (p. 141). Logic and argumentation crumble: the "reading" in a Web 2.0 world is fragmentary at best. Even in the online world, in studies of teens done by the Neilson Norman Group, adolescents display "[r]eading skills, research procedures, and patience levels insufficient to navigate the Web effectively" (p. 146). Knowledge itself ultimately suffers, and Bauerlein marshals scores of studies to show that young people are indeed suffering from a decline in cultural literacy, basic numeracy and functional scientific knowledge.

One of his most interesting arguments is that modern adult society is doing a poorer and poorer job of moving young people beyond adolescence. Social technologies intensify and extend adolescence, and contribute to an increasingly narcissistic youth culture:

“Maturity comes in part, through vertical modeling, relations with older people such as teachers, employers, ministers, aunts and uncles and older siblings, along with parents, who impart adult outlooks and interests.... The Web (along with cell phones, teen sitcoms, and pop music), though, encourages more horizontal modeling, more mimicry of people the same age, and intensification of peer consciousness" (p. 136).

This horizontal modeling appears to remain for longer periods of time, according to Bauerlein, and helps closet the average teenager from any new or challenging experiences. This is where "dumbness" starts to find fertile ground:

For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity.... Adolescents don't [understand this process like adults do], and digital connections save them the labor of self-improvement" (p. 138).

Bauerlein's last major point is that educators have become increasingly complicit in pandering to these social technologies. Given their own progressive proclivities or ignorance, educators and academic researchers appear incapable of resisting the bandwagon. They do not ask, generally speaking, if adolescent enthusiasm necessarily leads to pedagogically desirable results:

‘Knowledge is never more than one generation away from oblivion.’ If the guardians of tradition [ie. educators] claim that the young, though ignorant, have a special perspective on the past, or if teachers prize the impulses of tenth‐graders more than the thoughts of the wise and the works of the masters, learning loses its point. The thread of intellectual inheritance snaps” (p. 186).

I am reminded of Sydney J. Harris' dictum that the "whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." Put another way, we as educators owe it to our students to teach them what is irrelevant to narrow little lives dominated by social minutiae. We need to screw our courage to the sticking place and fight for what broadens their horizons, rather than what is trendy and innovative - yet intellectually arid.

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* Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation (Tarcher/Penguin, Toronto), 2009.

An Exchange on Multiculturalism

I pulled myself into a discussion of multiculturalism and had a surprisingly civil discussion with another respondent. I say "surprising" because it was in the online discussion forum for Maclean's magazine, a place I normally avoid. [The extremism of the current editorial board has really taken its toll on a once venerable institution.] I suppose I was fascinated with this person's belief that multiculturalism (and especially his rather relativistic notion of it) is the dominant political value in Canadian politics, an increasingly common belief that nevertheless goes against any serious reading of Canadian politics and history.

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[The other person] ... Canada is more influenced by America than any non-Christian groups. Shall we start expelling them?

And just look at what the Internet has done to free expression and the invasion of foreign ideas. I don't think people realize that Muslim's use the Internet. Is it time to start filtering foreign websites?

Are Francophones to be skimmed off? Atheists and agnostics too? Increasing godless Ontario?

As Canadians we can only define our culture by what it is not. We are a country of immigrants that has changed significantly decade-over-decade, generation-over-generation and if you think asking immigrants to accept our culture will stem the tides of change, you are being very naive.

[My first response] I couldn't disagree more. Canada is a liberal democracy, and that entails many substantive traditions and obligations. There are many things that we ARE. The Charter is a good place to start, though by no means the only point of reference. At Canada's core is a moral and legal injunction to respect individual freedom and autonomy. We are also a society that is said to respect the rule of law and equality before the law. Thus, multiculturalism is not the core of Canadianism; indeed, it was an afterthought in the Charter process, and its position in Sec. 27 has a lexical ranking clearly below the individual freedoms and legal entitlements that come in the sections before it.

If newcomers, like both of my parents, can live within these obligations, then there is no problem. If they can't, then Canada is not a place for them. And if we can't ask for newcomers to respect these boundaries, then we are a society for which there is little to defend. And to think this is acceptable is what I think is naive.

[The other person] Fair enough. We can apply some cultural definition through our adaptations of British (and French) basis of law and sense of social contract, but socially speaking we are a society constantly in flux, which is why we went from excommunicating homosexuals from many aspects of society 50 years ago to allowing them to marry today, for example.

You say multiculturalism isn't a core of Canadianism, ranking below individual freedoms and legal entitlements, but I would say that such freedoms and entitlements inevitably lead to multiculturalism by their very nature because it provides in law protection to minority groups from the rule of the majority (J.S. Mill would like it I am sure), resting heavily on the most important word in the Charter; 'reasonable.'

The point I was making was against the rather disgusting bigotry directed towards a group of people who for the overwhelming part meet our societal obligations the best they can, with each generation meeting them better than the one before.

[My second response] I'd argue that Canadian multiculturalism is a fairly recent phenomenon that has its roots in the rise of "identity politics", changing post-war immigration patterns and the struggle by many non-Brits and Francophones (including Ukranian and German Canadians) to battle the arrogance of "biculturalism".

On the other hand, the liberal democratic principles I mentioned earlier have been around much longer, and many scholars argue that the Charter is just an extension and codification of long-held principles and beliefs (much of them inherent in British common law). As such, the changes in recognition that you rightly point out do not represent a fundamental change in our society, but a long overdue and logical extension of the universal promise inherent in liberal democratic societies and constitutions.

I do agree that bigots are never far from view, and often target those who have met or surpassed the "bar". However, bigotry can work both ways. When I see certain Muslim families arrive on an annual basis to register their kids in our public distance ed. school, I am overwhelmed. The mothers (I think) arrive in a full burqa, they walk in the back, and they are mute [and thus moot]. The fathers control the registration. And I almost never see daughters.

It is obscene. It is the worst form of bigotry I can imagine. Unlike head coverings and religious symbols, which do not block interaction, the burqa is a portable wall of separation.

What is worse is that nobody says a word (out loud). I would lose my job if I objected.

And while I'm sure some would argue this is a "choice", I recall those lines from Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" - perhaps the best promulgation of Western values in the last 50 years:

... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?...

How Wall Street Lobbied Itself Into A Crisis

In today's Globe and Mail (Dec. 31, 2009: B5), economics reporter Kevin Carmichael discusses a recent report from the IMF that draws a direct connection between Wall Street, political lobbying, and the current financial crisis. The IMF report has apparently caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and among the American political class. Here is the opening portion of Carmichael's article:

The case against Wall Street is getting stronger.

Since the financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession in the autumn of 2008, there has been a swirl of reports suggesting that financial firms used their clout in Washington to avoid tighter regulations in the years leading up to the meltdown. Most of those reports, however, have been anecdotal.

Now, in a landmark analysis, three economists at the International Monetary Fund have pulled together the public lobbying records of U.S. mortgage lenders and have drawn an empirical link between the money spent influencing politicians and firms' tendencies to engage in high-risk lending.

Their report, published this week as a "working paper" and therefore without the official stamp of the IMF, supports previous accounts in The Wall Street Journal and other publications that lenders such as Ameriquest Mortgage Co. and Countrywide Financial Corp. spent millions in the years ahead of the financial crisis to defeat legislation that would have curbed their ability to issue home loans to riskier borrowers.

Aside from documenting the persuasive power of Wall Street, the paper also highlights another challenge facing U.S. President Barack Obama and the various legislators leading the effort to diminish the risks facing the financial system. The findings suggest that some financial firms sought to profit by shaping the regulatory system to fit their business strategies or to position for a government bailout. To reduce that risk in the future, policy makers may need to weaken the financial industry's political influence - but it's not clear how that can be done. (The authors of the report declined to give specific solutions.)

"[O]ur analysis suggests that the political influence of the financial industry can be a source of systemic risk," Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra and Thierry Tressel wrote in their conclusion....

According to the report, the most intensive lobbying came from the firms that ended up with the highest rate of financial "delinquencies".

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A few things come to mind after reading the newspaper article and the International Monetary Fund report.

My first thought is, "Is this actually news?" It appears that only economists and business reporters are surprised by the report's conclusions. Left-wing critics have been making similar critiques of the current financial crisis for many years. [For example, check out virtually every edition of The New York Review of Books for the last 4 years, or the critiques of David Harvey.] Indeed, the relationship between capitalism and the state has been an essential part of the socialist analysis of capitalism for 150 years. Nevertheless, it is interesting that such a direct rebuke of Wall Street and America's capitalist system has come from an organization that is emblematic of the American (and global) financial system. And, as the writers of the report add, "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine empirically the relationship between lobbying by financial institutions and mortgage lending in the run-up to the financial crisis."

A second point is that the current Wall Street example illustrates how corporate capitalism exists in large part because the government has provided a regulatory environment where short-term profits override responsible, long-term decision making. Government is, in this example, integral to capitalism. It is not the enemy of the market society. It is not minor player or a neutral night watchmen. It makes and implements policy which is absolutely essential for capitalism to pursue its interests, however short-sighted they turn out to be.

This example also sheds light on the Ralph Miliband-Nicos Poulantzas debate about the nature of the state in a capitalist society. Poulantzas, for whom I have great respect, argues that the state is the "unifying element" in capitalism. In this, he follows people like Karl Polanyi, who believes that the historical development of the modern market economy and the modern state were tightly and inevitably linked. But Poulantzas goes beyond this analysis, and explores the idea (building on Gramsci and Althusser) that while the state and capitalism are intertwined, the state nevertheless does (and must) have a certain degree of autonomy. The state must have this "relative autonomy" because, according to Poulantzas, the capitalist class is a fractious group that is dominated by short-term interests, and often pursues policies that are inimical to itself. If capitalism is to survive, it requires a state to save capitalism from itself.

Under Clinton and Bush, the corporate class almost succeeded in convincing the American government that short term profit was in everybody's interest. If the state was potentially autonomous, it did not utilize its potential. It will be interesting to see if the Obama administration wants to take a longer-term perspective and repair American capitalism, and, assuming it does, if it even can.

Olympic Fever?

With less than two months before the 2010 Olympics, I find it curious that only one person I know has Olympic tickets. Indeed, in my Fraser Valley community, there seems to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the Games.

Many people have mentioned the high price of tickets, or the need to divulge sensitive financial information without any guarantee of tickets. But the majority have pointed to one dominant concern: there seems to be no way to travel to Vancouver, let alone Whistler. Currently, the only efficient way to reach Vancouver from the Fraser Valley is to drive and park. Yet all we hear from VANOC and the media is that driving and parking in Vancouver will be difficult, if not impossible. Perhaps we could drive 2/3 of the way and take the Skytrain from the Scott Rd. Park and Ride. But that is full at the best of times, so I can’t imagine what it will be like during the Olympics. Or we could drive to Mission and catch the West Coast Express, but its prohibitive cost for families and limited return times makes the WCE a less than useful option. Of course, we would like to use the Fraser Valley Regional Transit System… but no such thing exists.

So I guess we will stay at home and watch the Games from the comfort of our living room. We might as well be watching from Norway!

Things You Learn On A Ferry Trip!

Things you learn on a Wednesday evening ferry trip!

You know things aren't right when...

... you hear your ferry is canceled when you're already half way there.
... your alternative ferry terminal, Horseshoe Bay, is so windy that you don't leave your vehicle to go to the bathroom.
... you find out your 5:00 pm ferry is the last one to leave for Vancouver Island.
... the swells are so bad that you don't feel like eating dinner.
... the Captain says we will be making a hard turn and that we need to sit down, hold on, and brace ourselves - and then concludes gravely, "Here we go!"
... while he is saying this, you're in a toilet stall with your pants down.
... you quickly pull your pants up [unrelieved] and hold on to the walls of the stall.
... you go to the bathroom quickly, waiting for the big Poseidon wave that... thankfully never hits.
... grown but panicked men are asking the crew, "Is this normal?"
... the passengers clap with gratitude when we hear the Captain's address at the end of the ferry trip.
... there are hardly any other vehicles on the highway from Nanaimo to Victoria (because only idiots would be driving in a storm).
.... another storm is coming the following night, when we are coming home.

Wonderful.

Is modern music going down the drain?

I recently came across an interesting article on the musical legacy of our current decade (2000-2009). The article, written by Kris Millet for Culture Magazine, takes a dim view of this century's musical output. His central thesis is that the technological fragmentation of the last 10 years has destroyed our ability to follow a band for any significant length of time, and that a fragmented music press prefers short-term bandwagons that disrupt the long-term appreciation of a band.

While I sympathize with his viewpoint, I think there are other forces at work, too. The biggest one would be economic. Millet's discussion of long-term support for U2 is a perfect example. What record label now can afford to support a band for four albums before it hits the big time? Not many, I would think. I know it's old hat to blame record labels for everything that's wrong in modern music, but their increasingly obsolete business model does have some upsides: money for promotion, grooming and time to learn.

I also wonder if songwriters are running out of ideas. Could it be that there is a finite number of good melodies? It would be impossible to measure, I guess, but maybe time will tell. Who knows - maybe in 10 years every rock and pop act will only be recording cover tunes. Then modern music will be just like classical music!

Put up a sign!

I don't normally promote anything written in the The Province, but a recent column by Ethan Baron certainly caught my eye. The scenario he presents, that of the police entering your house to confiscate anti-Olympics signs taped to your window, seems like a fairly plausible proposition. Is it populist fear mongering? Perhaps, but given recent laws proposed by municipalities and the provincial government, I don't feel totally confident that we can trust the municipalities to go after commercial signage only. Moreover, the RCMP seems oblivious to the growing concern over their tactics and Olympic mandate, a mandate that seems to pay more attention to the needs of the IOC than the requirements of Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Anatonomy of a Murdered High School Course

On Sept. 22, The Tyee published an articled called "Anatomy of a Murdered High School Course". Here is the text of my response:

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I appreciate the article, Nick. As an English 12 teacher and part-time college instructor, I can certainly sympathize with your point of view. I’d like to add a few thoughts to the discussion.

I followed TPC 12 from its inception, and I knew a number of teachers who, like me, were interested in its approach. However, TPC appeared doomed before it was even deployed. Like so many BC humanities courses, new and old, the TPC curriculum guide was hopelessly vague. It had so many mushy and feel-good objectives, so many potential learning resources, and yet so few practical classroom tools, that it seemed very difficult to work with. I know that professional autonomy is important, but this course was so formless that I had no idea where to start. And I wasn’t the only teacher to hold that view.

As you mentioned, the universities were never on board. As a result, the kids voted with their feet and many teachers interested in the course never got a chance to work with it. I‘m mystified why there is such a disconnection between the K-12 and post-secondary education bureaucracies. Why isn’t post-secondary approval secured well before a new course is introduced? This lack of prior approval has hurt other courses, too, particularly in math and social studies. I remember a Pro-D meeting a few years ago regarding the new Civics 11 course, and the Ministry rep. in attendance seemed to have no idea why the universities had not yet given their approval. To me, this affirmation is one of the first things that must be secured. Otherwise, why invest your time as a teacher in developing a new course?

With regard to your comments on literature vs. communication, I couldn’t agree more. But my solution is simple: I don’t take the En. 12 IRP very seriously. Thankfully, the provincial exam doesn’t really match the curriculum, and its literature demands have been scaled back, so I focus much more on writing, critical thinking and argumentation. My students still do well on the provincial, and I feel they are much better prepared for post-secondary education.

Firefighting: A Public Good?

In a 2008 speech for TVO, Naomi Klein discussed the shrinking public sphere in the United States. Already small by Western standards, America's public sphere appears to be shrinking by the week. One of the few realms of American society that is still considered to be a public good is firefighting and disaster relief. But even that is disappearing. AIG Insurance (as well as Chubb Alarm) have set up their own private fire fighting forces to help insurees protect their homes... assuming your house is important enough to save. (For Chubb, that means a market value of at least one million dollars.)

Two stories that explain the trend can be found here and here. Notice that the business website (link 2) paints a substantially rosier picture in its conclusion compared to the Bloomberg article (link 1).

A "public good" can be defined as any item or service that is publically funded and available to all. Moreover, it's good for you if other people also have it. For example, public education is a public good because it's a benefit for you if other people around you are educated. Presumably firefighting is a public good, too, as the protection of all helps protect you as an individual.

The same is not true of a private good. This type of good does not require equal access to a product or service. The fact that others lack what I have (let's say, a Porsche) is not a hindrance to me if they can still move efficiently with public transit, a bicycle or a Kia. Inequality in this case is a matter of reward and preference, rather than mutual benefit.

Canada's ratio of public to private goods is slightly higher than the United States (especially with health care), but less than most western European countries. Even within Canada, Quebec sees child care as more of a public good, while most other provinces do not. BC still views basic auto insurance as a public good ("it's good for me that other people are insured"), while Alberta or Ontario consider it a private good.

What constitutes a public good varies greatly. Each country tends to have a different ratio of public to private goods, but this ratio is a relatively stable predictor of daily politics. In other words, the dominant ideology of any country can be measured by this ratio. It shows how much we (or the political elites, at least) are other-regarding or egoists.

If we are living in an age of increasing political egoism, perhaps those who defend public goods, or seek their expansion, need to emphasize the self-interested nature of public goods (they help you, too). It wouldn't hurt to also emphasize the efficiency of public enterprises when delivering goods we all need, in the sense that private enterprises replicate bureacracies and lead to higher administrative costs, like in the American medical system.