The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

DSM-5 Disorders I May Have Been Diagnosed with at Some Point In My Life

 

The following are mental disorders, as listed in the DSM-5, that may have been given to me at some point in my life (at least one of which was), given my actions (or lack thereof), feelings, thoughts, or states of mind, had they been observed or known.


Language Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Other Specified Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Unspecified Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Specific Learning Disorder

Developmental Coordination Disorder

Stereotypic Movement Disorder

Tic Disorder (motor, simple)

Tic Disorder (other, specified)

Tic Disorder (other, unspecified)

Neurodevelopmental Disorder (other, specified)

Neurodevelopmental Disorder (other, unspecified)

Brief Psychotic Disorder (with marked stressors, with catatonia)

Delusional Disorder, (erotomanic type)

Delusional Disorder (grandiose type)

Delusional Disorder (unspecified type)

Substance/Medication-Induced Psychotic Disorder

Catatonia (unspecified)

Other Psychotic Disorder (specified)

Other Psychotic Disorder (unspecified)

Bipolar I Disorder (with anxious distress)

Bipolar I Disorder (with mixed features)

Bipolar I Disorder (with rapid cycling)

Bipolar I Disorder (with melancholic features)

Bipolar I Disorder (with atypical features)

Bipolar I Disorder (with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Bipolar I Disorder (with catatonia)

Bipolar II Disorder (with anxious distress)

Bipolar II Disorder (with mixed features)

Bipolar II Disorder (with rapid cycling)

Bipolar II Disorder (with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Bipolar II Disorder (with catatonia)

Cyclothymic Disorder (with anxious distress)

Other Specified Bipolar and Related Disorder

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with anxious distress)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with mixed features)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with rapid cycling)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with melancholic features)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with atypical features)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Other Unspecified Bipolar and Related Disorder (with catatonia)

Major Depressive Disorder (with anxious distress)

Major Depressive Disorder (with mixed features)

Major Depressive Disorder (with atypical features)

Major Depressive Disorder (with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Major Depressive Disorder (with catatonia)

Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia, with anxious distress)

Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia, with mixed features)

Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia, with melancholic features)

Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia, with atypical features)

Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia, with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Other Specified Depressive Disorder (recurrent, brief)

Other Specified Depressive Disorder (short-duration episode)

Other Specified Depressive Disorder (episode with insufficient symptoms)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with anxious distress)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with mixed features)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with melancholic features)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with atypical features)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with mood-congruent psychotic features)

Unspecified Depressive Disorder (with catatonia)

Specific Phobia (blood-injection-injury)

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Other Specified Anxiety Disorder

Unspecified Anxiety Disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (with good or fair insight)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (with poor insight)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (with absent insight/delusional beliefs)

Excoriation (Skin-Picking) Disorder

Other Specified Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorder

Unspecified Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorder

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (with dissociative symptoms, depersonalization)

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (with dissociative symptoms, derealization)

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for Children 6 Years and Younger (with dissociative symptoms, depersonalization)

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for Children 6 Years and Younger (with dissociative symptoms, derealization)

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for Children 6 Years and Younger (with delayed expression)

Acute Stress Disorder

Adjustment Disorder (with depressed mood)

Adjustment Disorder (with anxiety)

Adjustment Disorder (with mixed anxiety and depressed mood)

Adjustment Disorder (with disturbance of conduct)

Adjustment Disorder (with mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct)

Adjustment Disorder (unspecified)

Other Specified Trauma-and-Stressor-Related Disorder

Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder

Other Specified Dissociative Disorder

Unspecified Dissociative Disorder

Somatic Symptom Disorder

Illness Anxiety Disorder (care-seeking type)

Other Specified Somatic Symptom Disorder

Unspecified Somatic Symptom Disorder

Avoidant/Reductive Food Intake Disorder

Anorexia Nervosa (restricting type)

Bulimia Nervosa

Insomnia Disorder (persistent)

Insomnia Disorder (recurrent)

Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder (advanced sleep-phase type, familial)

Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder (unspecified type, episodic)

Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder (persistent)

Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder (recurrent)

Nightmare Disorder (persistent, moderate)

General Personality Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

Personality Change Due to Another Medical Condition (labile type)

Personality Change Due to Another Medical Condition (apathetic type)

Personality Change Due to Another Medical Condition (other type)

Personality Change Due to Another Medical Condition (combined type)

Personality Change Due to Another Medical Condition (unspecified type)

Other Specified Personality Disorder

Unspecified Personality Disorder

Other Specified Mental Disorder

Unspecified Mental Disorder

Sunday, February 14, 2021

On the Saviors of Western Civilization

 

Why is it that those who so often claim to be interested in “saving” Western civilization know so little about it? In the US, this phenomenon’s most current iteration goes back to Newt Gingrich, who has made it a common theme. As he is a former history professor, we may have expected him to back up his claims of what was in danger with a few specifics, but very few, indeed, have been forthcoming. This may be because Gingrich has become a politician, and he has realized the dangers of positing specifics; it’s best to let the bigots he means to bring along fill in the gaps themselves.


But there’s something deeper here.


The self-declared saviors of Western civilization don’t seem too well versed in Beethoven and Bach. They seem not to mean civilization literally—in terms of cities—since they are more interested in maintaining outmoded rural and extractive/industrial lifeways than they are about preserving the buildings of, say, Mies van der Rohe or Christopher Wren. They may name-check a Scholastic philosopher but not an author of Modernist fiction. If they do give an example of what they would like to save, they often laud the US Constitution or the Christian bible. Of the former, they rarely recite much beyond one half of the 2nd Amendment, and of the latter little at all, save some vague attestations to its opposition to abortion or its promotion of male “headship.” They’re just as likely to cite John 3:16, perhaps because they saw it referenced on a sign held up at a football game.


This assertion of ignorance indicates another intent: rather than championing the cause of the spur, the screw, or the canvases of Cubism, these saviors of Western civilization are really just trying to express their opposition to all they claim that they are not, to excoriate the Other or anyone else they view as a threat.


And anyway, to mention specifics would be to weaken the case: the US Constitution rides on an ancient Hellenistic culture that owed more to pan-Mediterranean trade routes than to the cultures of Gallic or Teutonic tribes, and the Christian bible is a product of an ancient Hellenistic cultural pastiche from a part of the world that Europeans have been (with apologies to Edward Said) “orientalizing” since at least the Crusades. And it’s hard to say when Western civilization even begins. The best evidence shows that Europe has been overrun by “invaders from the east” multiple times throughout its history, assuring a motley set of genes and a variety of different sources of cultural practices and beliefs—none of them specifically European.


And now, especially, it’s hard to say what Western civilization even is. Is it a musical composition written by an Austrian composer and based on a Hungarian folk dance? Is it a musical style created in the US by the descendants of slaves from Africa and performed on instruments from European orchestras? And what do we do with the stories, languages, arts, and lifeways of the indigenous peoples of the Americas? They are distinctly west—moreso, in a geographical sense, than anything of European origin. But are they part of “Western civilization”? What about a Japanese orchestra conductor of European classics or a Korean boy band with a style patterned after American hip-hop? Are these people part of Western civilization or appropriators of it? Are the saviors of Western civilization really saying that Seiji Ozawa shouldn’t conduct or that BTS shouldn’t record?


We have now reached the point at which the material culture of Western civilization could not exist without the cheap labor of the global East and South. In order to become things, the ideas and designs of ostensibly Western companies must be outsourced to non-Western people. So is that phenomenon, and the interdependencies it creates, an example of Western civilization or not? Is your iPhone a product of Western civilization if it cannot be without a Chinese worker at Foxconn to make it?


Not only is it hard to say what Western civilization is, it’s hard to determine exactly what it was. If we want to restore it to a place of pure European origin, we will have to jettison coffee, certainly tea, and perhaps chocolate, French fries, and tomato-sauce, too. Our current reality is that we cannot eat, clothe ourselves, compute, communicate, or even leave the house without relying on a global supply chain, on concepts, products, and processes deeply embedded in the rest of the world.


Much more than ever, humans are cultural hybrids, drawing into our identities products, both physical and conceptual, that have their origins across the globe. Genes have never determined cultural identity, of course, no matter what our traditions or our commercial decoding companies want to believe. But especially now, the notion is difficult to defend. It is perhaps this reality of hybridity that makes the desire to forge an identity, to feel part of something to which we feel personally connected, of which we feel personally proud, all the more acute—and all the more dangerous.



Sunday, January 24, 2021

The Thing About Conspiracy Theories

 

The thing about conspiracy theories is that so many of them are plausible, or begin so. The anti-Vaxx movement, for example, began with the revelation that some vaccines contained thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. Since signs of mercury-poisoning can resemble the behavior issues parents were seeing in their children who had been diagnosed with autism, worried parents concluded that the thimerosal may have been involved with their children’s autism.


And parents had very real reasons to be worried: pharmaceutical companies have not exactly comported themselves well over the past few decades: from ghost-writing research papers to create an evidence base for their products to misleading direct-to-consumer marketing practices to their role in the opiate-epidemic, which was emerging at the time. Then there is the case of Risperdal, a so-called “atypical antipsychotic,” which was being prescribed to young boys, causing them to grow breasts. Had Johnson & Johnson admitted to the problem to begin with, confidence may have been restored, but their decision to deny was just one of many confidence-sapping actions Big Pharma has taken over recent years. Add in the denial that Paxil can cause suicidal behavior in children in Study 329, and it’s no surprise parents would not believe the pharmaceutical companies’ denials that vaccines cause autism.


Quickly, fueled by social media, the concern turned into panic, which turned into a movement, which turned against vaccines on the whole, somehow forgetting the original, narrow, and understandable, if inaccurate, worry.


There was no clear link between thimerosal and autism, and, in order to address the concern, pharmaceutical companies stopped using it or reduced its use. But the anti-Vaxx movement has other problems: vaccines have been around for centuries, and there has not been a proportionate uptick in autism diagnoses until fairly recently. The way vaccines work is now well understood, consistent, and widely, if not universally, replicable for a host of viruses. Further, drug companies tend not to make much on vaccines: the process of developing them and manufacturing them is time consuming, complex, and costly. This isn’t an example, then, of following the money since there is precious little of it to follow, in this case.


And then there’s the far more likely reason autism seems to be on the rise: it is more likely to be diagnosed. Doctors, parents, and school psychologists have become more attuned to autism as a diagnosis as activist groups such as Autism Speaks have sought publicity for their cause. The IDEA act and the Olmstead case have increased focus on special education programs in schools. And the DSM-5, psychiatry’s “bible,’ has steadily broadened the autism diagnosis into a “spectrum.” Briefly, there are many more ways to be autistic now than there were in the past, and there is more awareness that you might be.


The ability of anti-Vaxxers to organize and internally radicalize, though, the way it morphed from a somewhat plausible theory into a movement, has made it all but impossible to debunk.


Understanding conspiracy theories becomes even more complicated when we take into account conspiracies that seem entirely implausible but that turn out to have been true. A prime example is a secret US government program that became known as MK-Ultra. It is, on the surface, almost impossible to believe that the federal government could secretly fund a program involving LSD, sensory deprivation, and electroshock in order to attempt to create mind-control techniques. Still crazier is the idea that the money behind it would be funneled to well-regarded universities and psychiatrists, that those subject to it would leak LSD out, helping to form and flavor an entire counterculture.


Yet this is actually what happened. Less surprising, perhaps, is that the techniques developed in ML-Ultra went on to become “enhanced interrogation” in the War on Terror and as torture techniques in CIA-trained militaries the world over, as Naomi Klein recounts in her groundbreaking book The Shock Doctrine.


But what distinguished MK-Ultra as different is that the truth, when it came out, helped defuse the conspiracy’s mystique: we may not have wanted to believe it, but the same government that held it secret was now admitting to it. It may also be that MK-Ultra just seems so weird that it could only be believed or disbelieved, and when it was revealed, we had no option but to believe it. At any rate, it was revealed before the Web allowed communities devoted to it to develop. Additionally, as a society, we did something different with what it wrought: we created a counterculture, the vestiges of which are still with us, often aligned with the forces of progressive and positive change.


This brings us to conspiracy theories that are entirely implausible but that are self-perpetuating. The QAnon theory (or set of theories—it continues to morph and develop), which contends that there is a vast, international, left-wing network or child pornography, child-murder, and child blood-harvest (!). Those implicated run the gamut from Tom Hanks to Hillary Clinton to George Soros, but those engaged with the theory will throw in anyone they deem not sufficiently devoted to the cause, including Mike Pence. Even more astonishing, they posit that Donald Trump’s mission as president was to rid the US of these pedophiles, who are, conveniently, part of a so-called “deep state” shadow government that really controls the levers of power.


Unlike the anti-Vaxx conspiracy theory, there is no indication that QAnon arises from even a kernel of truth, unless we include Jeffery Epstein, who, it should be noted, buddied up to monied elites across the political spectrum, including one Donald J. Trump.


Even weirder is that it’s unclear what the conspirators QAnon accuses would have to gain: even if it’s not the case with vaccines, pharmaceutical companies do have a profit motive overall, and the US had a Cold War it aimed to win using psy-ops, among other means. What would Hillary Clinton or George Soros possibly have to gain from pedophilia and child trafficking? They are already financially successful, secure, and well-connected. To engage in such risky behavior they would have to be pathological, evil, insane.


And that is, perhaps, exactly why this conspiracy theory has proliferated: these figures are widely reviled by the radical right; therefore there is a population primed to believe anything negative about prominent liberals. Even more compelling for those who believe it, QAnon is fueled by a mysterious person (or people) who goes by the handle “Q” and who posts on anonymized internet chat platforms. This keeps the mystique of the conspiracy going, with adherents eagerly awaiting the next “Q-drop,” and then feverishly working to decipher its meaning. For those who like a good mystery, it would be possible to be a Q fan without actually buying the conspiracy itself, but even one’s status as “Q-adjacent” would help expand the conspiracy’s popularity.


That many do believe it indicates that conspiracy theories meet some need: that people who believe them need to belong or are desperate to have their worldview validated. Conspiracy theories that, like QAnon and anti-Vaxx, form into distinct social movements and self-reinforcing communities, perpetuate themselves and end up doing real damage, as the resurgence of measles and the events of January 6th, 2021 demonstrate.


The Web, while it has enabled and expanded these communities, is not the whole reason for their existence: the “blood libel” conspiracy theory, that all Jews are implicated in the murder of Jesus, has existed for millennia, and helped touch off pogroms and eventually the Holocaust.


We may not be able to prevent conspiracy theories, and they may always be with us in one form or another, but we would do well to listen to why they develop so that we can create societies less prone to believe them.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

First They Came For [Trade War Rmx]


First they came for the solar panels, and I did not speak out—
Because my landlord thinks they're tacky.

Then they came for the metals, and I did not speak out—
Because I will never buy a new car.

Then they came for the lumber, and I did not speak out—
Because no one can afford a house.

Then they came for the sorghum, and I did not speak out—
Because what the hell is sorghum?

Then they came for the medicine, and I did not speak out—
Because I lost my healthcare last year anyway.

Then they came for the technology, and I did not speak out—
Because I was still paying off the last gizmo.

Then they came for Dollar Tree—and there was nothing left to buy.



With huge apologies to Martin Niemöller

Sunday, June 10, 2018

On Being Unhappy

by Lael Ewy


To look out over a barren backyard in the middle of winter, contemplating crows.

To grumble at the idiocy of workplace rules, the stupidity of traffic, the vapidity of the political status quo.

To despair at a planet polluted and melting, the indifference of those in charge, the greed of those in power.

To, considering these, wonder if going on is really worthwhile, if contributing to them through our labor and social compliance is more morally right than to just stop living.

To do these things is to be unhappy.

But they are both common and widely pathologized.

It’s no wonder that the rise of a psychiatry of depression—indeed, of psychiatry itself—tracks parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism. Certainly, unhappiness precedes these social phenomena, but its one-to-one association with a medicalized illness is a product of how we now live, and a reification of it. The Lord of the Manor cared little enough about his serfs that their states of mind were all but immaterial; it’s probable he considered the serfs incapable of the kinds of depths and nuances of thought and feeling of those of his own class. But it bothers the modern master that his employees are not both compliant to his dictates and also happy about it. As with all other things, “employee morale” has simply become a reflection of the ego of the CEO.

The economy of the US has moved toward services and retail, and the imperative for the worker to always be happy has only increased. Customer service representatives at a call center are judged not only by the speed with which they dispatch customer complaints and the adroitness with which they upsell, but by the attitude with which they go about their work.

To be sure, they “represent” the company; increasingly, they are not the company. They are contractors or other easily-eliminated classes of employee. The company is merely a set of legal parameters. Loyalty and pleasure in one’s work for its own sake are expectations of the company, not something in which they feel the need to actually invest.

Like the Lord of the Manor, they want something for nothing.

But even if they did want something for something, it would imply that emotions, just like anything else worthwhile in this system, are essentially transactional, that, like your labor and your time, I can buy your emotions as part of a package deal. And the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less your happiness is worth, and the more important it is to maintain if you are to be employable at all.

The policing of emotions, then, the sanctions against unhappiness, are matters of economic necessity: you can’t afford to be unhappy. The market demands it.

If you’re poor enough or a person of color, your unhappiness is a positive threat, and the displeasure it causes a literal policeman can be taken out on your body with little or no consequence of the cop.

Fortunately, industry has a solution to our problem in the marketing of antidepressant medications—a quick fix for a population that has as its basic mode of living a series of quick fixes.     

At this point, the prescription and monitoring of mood-altering chemicals has become the primary job a psychiatrist does. Insurance companies are happy to reinforce that model: 15 minute “med checks” are efficient uses of a psychiatrist’s time. If psychiatry is, indeed, the medicine of “the soul,” it seems what the soul needs nowadays is a pill, the strength of which is nudged this way and that every other month.

This is a system that, from the perspective of a consumer culture and a market-based economy, ought to make everyone happy.

Only it doesn’t.

We’re sicker, sadder, and more suicidal than we’ve ever been. And when the prescription drugs don’t work or don’t work well enough (statistically speaking, their effect sizes are fairly small), we’re turning more and more to street drugs—heroin and methamphetamine—to fight the depression and the inner pain that still wrack us day to day.

But perhaps my scope here is too narrow: Freud’s theories were built on the discontent of the Viennese middle classes of the 19th Century, mostly of their women, a class which expressed its values as a matter of how contented the household could be. Prior to that, in the US and England, Puritans had gone a long way toward waging war on emotions at large as signs of not being among the heaven-bound. The self-improvement we used to revere in the US was geared toward tamping down both sadness and joy. The former was once considered a sin; the latter a frivolity.

We’ve posited in the Declaration of Independence the right to “pursue” happiness. But now we’ll punish you if you achieve it in excess. And no concomitant right to be unhappy has been widely fought for. Indeed, our scientific community has no solid notion of what emotions are even for.

Sadness, like tears themselves, upwells within us, in unexpected places and unexpected ways. Sad songs, the blues and country, and sad images abound. Edward Hopper’s stark canvases have gained a massive following, and the crying emoji is just as popular as any other. People who would not be able to tell a Picasso from a pizza can easily identify a Hopper. And the same psychiatrist who makes his living waging chemical warfare on his patients’ emotions feels no compunction about indulging in the bluest of jazz.

As someone whose unhappiness has ranged from the merely sad to the existential crisis, I haven’t found unhappiness to be entirely bad. It is unpleasant, and it can be overwhelming. I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit that it has put my life and health at risk. But then, so can the drugs we take to combat it, the work we do that demands we deny it.

Moving through it, wrangling with it, and coming to terms with it can also be deeply satisfying.

If unhappiness exists for a reason, and its ubiquity would suggest that it must, it can help us to see that something needs our attention—something in the way we live, in our relationships with those we love, our orientation to the world we inhabit.

It only makes sense to be unhappy if we’re being abused or oppressed, if we’re dealing with trauma or constant pain. What doesn’t make sense is that we should blame the sadness for the sadness, that we should try to do away with the unhappiness itself instead of trying to change things if we can.

At the very least, the lassitude and disengagement that unhappiness can cause is able to lead us to deep reflection and taking stock, two things our productivity-obsessed culture considers wastes of time. It’s OK for you to express gratitude, of course, because you’re supposed to be grateful for your shitty lot in life, but purely and openly contemplative? Heck, no.

I’m getting upset again. I’m getting unhappy at the disdain in which our culture holds unhappiness.

And maybe that’s not an entirely bad thing. 

Monday, May 28, 2018

On Reading the Long Novel

by Lael Ewy


When one references War and Peace, one does so in order to invoke a cliché. War and Peace is the quintessentially long novel. It is known for that and for nearly nothing else—certainly not as something anyone would actually read.

In fact, the cliché itself is really not about the length of the book; the cliché is about the impossibility of reading it, and the disdain the speaker has for long novels.

For these reasons, among others, I set out to actually read it.

I suppose people hear the call to engage in physical challenges such as running marathons to prove something to themselves (or others), or the call to climb mountains “because [they are] there,” but I set out to read War and Peace in order to try to restore reality to it. For at least one living member of the species, it would become a novel again.

Since you probably won’t read it, here’s what you need to know from someone who has:

1. It’s good. For the most part. It’s not the novel you’d think it should be at least in part because novels weren’t what you now think they are when Tolstoy wrote it. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the analysis of the individual’s place in history and the minutiae of the War of 1812. The latter was of great importance to his expected audience, and it might still be of interest to scholars of military history. The former should be of interest to anyone with a pulse. But

2. no doubt all that would annoy contemporary readers. I honestly have no idea what contemporary readers want out of a novel these days. Apparently, they want to be terrified by the prospect of a dystopian future. To me, this seems silly given that the prospect of a dystopian present is quite frightening enough. However,

3. it’s not a “hard” read. There’s merely a lot of it there. Tolstoy, as is typical of the great Russian writers, draws characters who are detailed and complex, so if you put the book down for a while, it’s easy to pick back up. Like with old friends, you may not recall every detail of their lives since you saw them last, but you’ll always remember who they are.

Few western European writers create characters who are this fully realized. Perhaps Dickens’ main characters, but he also populated his book with caricatures in a way that Tolstoy never would. Even soldiers we meet for only a few pages seem like real people we might know. In the US, maybe Hurston Henry James, or Melville (at his best) were capable of such things, as, perhaps, the greatest of the French. 

4. It’s a romance, historical novel, and philosophical treatise. And that’s probably why it’s so long. The historical figures, including Napoleon himself, as the other characters, come across as actual people. The book’s philosophy, while I disagree with it, must be defended, and the novel almost achieves that as well. To a degree, the characters themselves might contradict the philosophy it seems to promote, but perhaps Tolstoy intended that, pitting the lived experiences of the humans against the cynicism and determinism of the narrator.

At any rate, it’s ambitious. That’s in its favor overall, but it also means that there is a lot for the book to do.

5. Reading it is familiar if you’re used to 19h century novels and philosophy. Most people these days aren’t, I guess, and maybe that’s why they should read more 19th century novels and philosophy.

Reading War and Peace will change your orientation to time, people, and thought, and that’s a good thing. The thinking that most people are able to do is severely compromised by the media they have chosen to consume. We’re unable to think long thoughts because we seldom encounter them. We’re distracted because we surround ourselves with distractions. And consume media we do: popping tweets like we do Skittles and gnawing video games like endless bags of chips. This has reinforced our inability to think in a coherent way. We may have deep maps in our minds of a million virtual adventures, but if we’re unable to appreciate the lives of those we believe are not like us—the Russians of 200 years ago or a Black laundress in the Jim Crow South—maybe we’re wasting our time. Perhaps we’ve “escaped” during the time we’ve played, but we haven’t really prepared ourselves to make the world we inevitably re-enter a better place.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

The Arts and Humanities, Again and Always


By Lael Ewy, MFA, CPS


In some ways, the arts and humanities are the only endeavors in which “lived experience” has always been privileged. So it’s no wonder they’d be marginalized or actually argued against in an essentially technocratic age. But the arts and humanities are also what’s missing from the current “job oriented” educational realignment. These programs may prepare people for specific jobs (although that’s questionable), but they do not prepare people for work in a future in which the nature of specific jobs is constantly in flux.

That, however, is not why we should keep them around.

The argument against lived experience is also an argument for process over understanding, the idea that through research and evaluation processes alone we will be able to gather all of the data we need to make the decisions we need to make. This is ridiculous; without “real life” understanding of something, you can’t even create meaningful criteria for evaluation. In this sense, the movement away from lived experience is a power play by those in charge and their academic lackeys to replace what they cannot control, direct understanding, with what they can control, processes and policies—in terms Bakhtin might use, to replace the novel with the epic.

This is the same attitude that privileges supervisory structures and administrative processes over the work itself, the executive summary over the full report, the report over the voices from the field, the data over the principle—if, that is, the principle is even addressed at all. It’s the driving force behind dismissing all truly new thinking as “theoretical” and all real world information as “merely anecdotal.”

In this sense, both “street smarts” and “book larnin’” are being marginalized in favor of the kinds of evaluative processes that exist for the sake of controlling the terms in which ideas are discussed (again, if they’re discussed at all) and for the sake of reinforcing power by those who already have it. “And we have the numbers to show it,” or “researchers say” are statements that seem unassailable, and so few question where those numbers come from or the assumptions upon which their gathering and interpretation are based.

When we lose an art, we lose a way of understanding the world. Consider that for a minute. What other realm of human endeavor would allow itself to just die, to be told by wealthy and powerful and supremely ignorant and unimaginative people that it should simply go away, that there is no place in the future for how it knows and what it has discovered? Yet that is exactly what academic institutions and their rich donors are doing to the humanities and the arts.

When its critics level against the arts and humanities that they aren’t practical or don’t prepare people for “the real world” or “real jobs,” what these people are actually saying is “The only thing that’s important is what I believe I can immediately sell,” or “The only thing that has any value is what I believe the market wants.” Nobody ever asks these same people to back up what they’re saying or to defend the principles they’re using to make the claim. So the debate about the value of the arts and humanities isn’t even about practicality at all but about a very narrow view of what’s important to human beings, a view that almost all of us accept without question because it’s the view of rich and powerful people. When the actual pettiness and ignorance of their position is revealed, it’s easy, or at least easier, to see why it is wrong, yet because of the positions of those who share this view, we are still collectively afraid to confront it.

So we try to justify what we already do as preparing people for jobs, as having practical components. We repackage arts programs as graphic design, drop studio arts majors for career programs in video game design, shrink studies of poetry for badges in advanced tweeting. Some of this has merit: studying the arts and humanities will make you a better communicator, and it will improve your critical thinking skills. When you see, as I have, respected scientists making basic errors in logic, when you see tech company executives utterly unable to imagine the negative experiences of their users much less dystopias they are busy creating, when you see presidents unable to understand why calling immigrants “animals” is wrong, you can begin to see why these people might need a few more novels and poems and paintings in their lives.

But the value of the arts and humanities is inherent, and that’s not something those currently in power, who understand “value” only in the most basic of monetary terms, can even begin to understand.

When we look back at the great cultures of antiquity, we don’t marvel at their technology except in the most patronizing of ways, amazed at what such “primitive” people could accomplish. But when we read their literature, when we hear their stories, meditate on their holy writ, when we analyze their design and witness the world from the perspective of their visual art, we experience something that a patronizing attitude never could: recognition, an understanding of the experiences they, and we, live every day.

When we encounter their art, their literature, their philosophy, we recognize something that we can learn from: we learn more, and more deeply, about being human. And that is continually new.