Paradise Lost Readathon, Spring 2021

Via Zoom

The Schedule:

Saturday, April 17, 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. Books 1-4

Sunday, April 18, 6 p.m. – 10 p.m. Books 5-8

Saturday, April 24, 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. Books 9-12

All times EDT (UTC -4)

A Dr. Campbell Milton reading-aloud-together tradition since 1994. This year in three parts. All are welcome! Come when you can and leave when you want, on one or two or all three days.

If you don’t have a copy of the text, you can find it on the Web at the Dartmouth College Milton Reading Room: https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml. Note: we don’t read the “arguments,” that is, the prose summaries at the beginning of each Book.

This will be quite the experiment. Here’s how I’m thinking it’ll work.

I’ll set up a recurring Zoom meeting for all of us readers. You’re welcome to come by anytime and stay for as long as you like. My only rule is that if you’re in the meeting, you must read aloud, at least a little! (And no fair ducking in and out to avoid the reading—Milton will shake his head, sadly, even in his beatitude.) I’ll us one Zoom link for all three sessions. I’ll have a waiting room—Zoom requires these—so when you join, you may have to wait a little bit for me to see that you’re there and click on the little “admit” button. I will be vigilant, so the wait shouldn’t be very long at all.

The biggest problem with this virtual experience will be how to know when you’re supposed to be reading. When we’re physically co-located, we sit in a circle and thus we know when we’re the next one to read. Each reader relies on a significant/substantial pause from the current reader as a signal that Now It’s My Turn.

Clearly that won’t work very well in Zoom, unless you like Zoom collisions followed by colliding apologies followed by … nervous silence. And of course we’ll all have different “orders” before us on our screens with regard to who reads next.

So we’ll do a different disruption, one that at least can become familiar and thus, I hope, less annoying as time goes on.

Each reader should read somewhere between 50 and 100 lines per turn. Fewer than that and you can’t get much momentum going. More than that, and there aren’t enough opportunities for other readers.

When you’re done reading, please either look up and nod or smile (if you’re on camera) or type “done” in the chat if your webcam is off. In a pinch, or if you’re on your phone, you can just give your last word a real big emphasis and then go silent—and we’ll get the message.

After a reader finishes, I’ll come on just long enough to call the name of the next reader. I’ll keep order based on the order on the Participants list. So be listening for when I say your name!

One more Big Ask: folks, please stop reading at a period, not just at the end of a line of verse. If the line ends with a period, that’s great. Often, though, the sentence (which ends with a period) does not end with the line, and if you stop at the end of a line and the sentence isn’t over, the next reader has to pick up in the middle of a thought, and That’s Very Awkward.

If you’re interested, shoot me an email (gardner.campbell AT gmail.com, with @ substituted for AT) or if you’re reading this on FB, send me a private message, and I’ll send you the Zoom link. I’d prefer not to put that link out too publicly, for reasons I won’t cite but I hope are obvious. (If not, I can explain in the email.)

I always ask participants to contribute to a Readers’ Journal during these readathons. This time I’ll invite comments, responses, reflections, etc. in the chat itself. I’ll be recording the sessions so I can keep the chat and have a memorial of the event itself. I will not circulate any part of the recording without the consent of the participants involved. The only exception is any part in which I’m speaking, in which case I’ll crop out or completely obscure everyone else’s face. That’s a promise.

I think that’s it. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

I do hope you’ll join us!

Recently I couldn’t help myself. I suppose that could apply to many recencies, if that’s even a word. Couldn’t we go to some special hotel to work on taking the long view, one with a sign outside that said “No Recencies”? Ah, digressing already. Where was am I?

A colleague whom I very much respect tweeted out her commitment to student-centered teaching as opposed to teaching-centered teaching. I replied with a tweet about one of what I’ll call my “new heresies” (although they’re really not new), that I myself favored the both-and. Teachers and students in the center. An interesting Twitter exchange followed, and I promised to explain myself a bit more, so here we are. No longer digressing.

Over the years I have become less and less swayed by this-not-that characterizations of responsible, responsive, effective teaching. For example, we are advised to be the “guide at the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.” (This isn’t exactly what my colleague meant, but I hope she’ll bear with me.) I understand the dichotomy, born of the experience of grand pompous windbags reading from yellowed notes oblivious to the presence of young, disengaged, and sometimes eye-rollingly contemptuous would-be learners in the audience. Or, as one of my own former teachers said in my presence, later in life, to my dismay but not my surprise, given my experience in his class: teaching undergrads is 75% talking about your research to a captive audience.

Undeniably expert, but a cartoon sage on a cartoon stage. Precisely, ugh.

And yet.

Why on earth would anyone pay thousands of dollars to be in the presence of anyone but a sage over fifteen weeks of demanding work on unfamiliar material? Notice that sagacity overlaps with, but is not completely synonymous with, expertise. In fact,  “sage” is one word with two separate meanings and two distinct origins, one of those happy accidents in language that makes a hermeneut like me playfully imagine, “coincidence? I think not.”

Oxford English Dictionary time: a sage is a person who is “wise, discreet, judicious.” Sage as an adjective, as in sage “advice or counsel,” is “characterized by profound wisdom; based on sound judgement.” It’s hard to imagine profound wisdom or sound judgment without specific knowledge, and lots of it. Expertise is necessary. But not sufficient. As I tell my students, if they think I am subjective in my grading, they are correct: it is my subjectivity that makes me valuable to them, as it is the seat of my judgment. There are no guarantees available about the soundness of my judgment–never any guarantees about that sort of thing. What we as human beings have instead of guarantees is a great cloud of witnesses, those from whom I learned what judgment involved, and for whom I demonstrated my own partial but developing powers of judgment. That is, I have somewhere on the order of 40 or 50 teachers who have judged my work over the years. I would say that around half of them qualified as sages, maybe more. Of those sages, all were different, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the classroom, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the task of sharing their sagacity with me in a way that would encourage whatever latent sagacity I might have to develop to its fullest extent.

This process continued, with growing intensity and deepening levels of specific expertise, as I went from elementary school, to junior high, to high school, to college, to graduate school. And the most intense contact I had with sagacity was the dissertation, the moment in which I had to wrestle most intensely with distributed sagacity (i.e., the critical conversation) in its bewildering, contradictory, repellent, and attractive forms, all the while apprenticing myself to one particular set of sages (my dissertation director, my second reader, my unofficial guide and mentor) and prepare myself to be in a formal encounter with at least two sages I had not worked with at all, during what we call the “defense.”

Again, no guarantees. The process does not automatically generate sagacity. Profound wisdom and sound judgment are not the sorts of “outcomes” (even to use that word in this context is to demonstrate its risibility) that can be confidently “designed” for (see above). But the long series of testimonials, endorsements, encouragements, shaped by genuinely profound wisdom and sound judgment and sometimes buffeted and bruised by the limits of my teachers’ sagacity and the strange, unpredictable emergence of my own developing powers of judgment, finally added up to enough of a vote of confidence to bring me into the profession.

That process, in turn, makes me the professor who offers courses of study within a curriculum, courses of study that students enroll in as they progress through a degree program.

Sadly, too many students cannot imagine what I’ve just described. Many of them have no idea that there is such a journey, or what it involves, or how it touches on the very journey they have undertaken. Many, too many, have little sense of their education as a journey. Rather, their education appears to them as a set of concurrent and sequential tasks, assigned by those who have the power of assigning tasks. There is no journey. There is only a conveyor belt. The end of the conveyor belt is the reward of–oh, greater lifetime earnings? social capital? the chance to build conveyor belts for those who follow? grim thoughts, I confess, but perhaps not unwarranted.

So yes, teaching is teacher-centered, and thus also student-centered. The sage demonstrates sagacity, and elicits its development in others. The sage performs sagacity, where “performance” means not falsity or arrogance but (so I delight to imagine) the primary meaning of the word, per the OED: “to carry out.” to “discharge” a “service” or “duty.” As an intransitive verb, again per the OED, “perform” means “to do, carry out, execute, or accomplish what one has to do or has undertaken; to carry out one’s function, to do one’s part….”

In these senses–and why not perform them?–the act of performing is an act of deep service to the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. That surrounds me. Mrs. Wills. Miss Spraker. Mrs. Lane. Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Dixon. Mr. Barnhart. Miss Byrd. Mrs. Arnold. That’s a partial list of the sages who saw me through as far as seventh grade. The list goes on, quite a ways. One of the gifts of age is also that I can see, however grudgingly (still) because of certain flaws and temperamental mismatches in both of us, that probably other teachers had sagacity that was real even if fitful or lost on me at the time. One of the other gifts of age is my own fitful but undeniably stronger powers of discovering sagacity in those who do not immediately display it.

So the stage becomes the place in which the teacher’s sagacity can be visible to all, and thus made present, and thus made meaningful, performed (sagacity is individual but valuable primarily in relationship). Anyone who’s ever attended a great performance of a great play will know that the stage, by some weird alchemy, makes a certain distance and a certain mode of display into an occasion of profound connection, one that could not occur without that nexus of heightened reality framed and made radiant by a proscenium, or thrust into the house, or perhaps surrounded by witnesses as it centers the very space of performance, and by centering that space, empowers what for the poet John Donne characterizes the power of love itself, the power to make “one little room an everywhere.”

I am most grateful, then, in my own journey, not for breakout rooms and report-outs (valuable as they can be), or for think-pair-shares (catalytic as they can be), or polls, or any of the myriad ways in which we rightly encourage what we sometimes confusedly call “interaction.” I am most grateful for those sages who performed where I could see them, and thus could mysteriously be with them, could fill myself with the savor of their sagacity and then, as Hopkins once wrote of the effect of great art, be inspired to “go and do otherwise”–not in reaction or rebellion, but in accepting my duty, now, to perform my own profession, infused by theirs, but distinctly, for better or worse, my own.

You’ll see what I did there with that word “savor.” “Sage” is also a spice. Unlike the “sage” above, which comes from the Latin sapere, to be wise, sage-as-spice comes from the Latin salvia, a “healing plant.” To this day, though the OED warns the usage is “Now rare,” a sage can still mean “A kind of herb or medicinal preparation of herbs.”

My sages keep saving my life. The medicinal wisdom they performed then, they perform for me still, evermore, beyond measure.

As every grateful acknowledger must acknowledge, the remaining faults are my own.

During Lent I blogged every day. I can’t imagine I’ll keep up that pace, though that may simply be a failure of imagination on my part. But I do hope the habit of blogging regularly has settled back into my working and dreaming self.

I’ve mentioned before that a return to blogging reawakened my sense of the network as a tool for conviviality, to borrow Illich’s phrase. That’s been a very good thing, as my experience of that conviviality had eroded quite a bit over the years, probably since about 2008–though the erosion was imperceptible at first. Blogging, reading, linking, commenting–not branding or gathering the tribe, but conversing–these are nourishing things.

Eugene Eric Kim undertook a similar season of blogging last year, and his delightful blog post appeared in my revitalized network this year. My learnings are much like his. More conviviality there; thank you, Eric.

I’m also feeling more prepared to dive back into my work on Doug Engelbart, and hope to restart the Framework interview series over the next few weeks. I’ve got some great interviews “in the can,” so to speak, and I have some ideas about more interviews … so there will be more on the way in that area, I hope.

And last but by no means least, I’ve felt more connected to my earlier self, my pre-pandemic and my pre-exile self. As I work with students, I find myself googling phrases I could dimly remember like “the perfume of an idea” (apt meta-experience, there) and rediscovering long, thoughtful posts some Gardo fellow had cast onto the waters many years ago. Not a bad chap. He did okay. I’ve even begun clicking on the algorithmically generated “related posts” that show up beneath my new posts, and been surprised by the connections between then and now. Surprised, and sometimes dismayed as well … it’s discouraging to see those places where not much has changed, aside from people become even more entrenched and loud in their various Positions.

But all in all, it is good to be reacquainted: with blogging, with steady writing, with friends on the network and what they have to say. With myself.

So, at the conclusion of a new beginning, greetings and felicitations!

The organ loft at St. Paul’s Covent Garden, London. Photo CC BY-SA-NC Gardner Campbell

Today I wanted to do something special for Easter. Why not a podcast then? And for this podcast, I return to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I read for the first time in the fall of 1977. It was love at first reading. Forty-four years later, my enthusiasm for his work is undimmed. As with all great work, the longer you read it, the deeper it becomes.

Hopkins wrote a great Easter poem called “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.” He called it a “sonnet with two codas.” (A later critic helpfully points out it has three codas.) As he did with several of his poems, especially as he became more interested in the musical quality of spoken verse, Hopkins marked particular stresses in the poem where one might not ordinarily place them when reading (the “This” of “This Jack” is a good example). He also marked what he called “outrides” (syllables to be hurried along) and “ties” (syllables to be linked together across consonants and vowels in one long arc). The marks are reproduced in the notes of the edition I’m working from, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (4th ed., revised and enlarged), edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie.

I have tried to convey Hopkins’ markings in my reading. My American accent works against, me, of course, but I have done the best I could. This was about the 10th attempt, I guess, and each time I found more things to attend to, more textures to try to realize in my voice. Then I had to try to remember them all in each successive reading. I ended up with what you’ll hear below. Whether or not I nailed this take, I do hope I have managed to communicate the wondering, oneiric beginning, the middle section of elegy and anger, and the conclusion of renewed resolve and, then, a kind of astonished peace.

I reproduce the poem below, with a recording of my reading beneath it. The vertical lines indicate caesurae, that is, deliberate pauses in the middle of each line.

Happy Easter.

I.—OF TRUTH.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting freewill in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth: nor again, that, when it is found, it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.

The opening sentence in Bacon’s essay “Of Truth” is justly famous. Famous, memorable, and sad: if ‘”jesting Pilate” had only waited, just a while, would he have gotten his answer?

Bacon continues in his weary catalog, depicting those who simply like to spin and spin, saying one thing and then another, thinking to flaunt their freedom by never believing anything, nor speaking with any conviction. Then comes an even harsher pronouncement: the problem is not that truth is hard to find, or that it overrules everything once it is found, but that all too often the lie is simply delicious, irresistible. Lovable. 

Given the “natural though corrupt love of the lie itself,” why, indeed, would one wait for an answer to so spectacularly unsophisticated a question as “what is truth”? Who would even ask such a question unironically? Bacon implies that Pilate’s question was contemptuous–“scoffing,” as Brian Vickers defines “jesting” in the Oxford University Press edition (1996). It’s easy to read the question that way, especially in the long tradition of portraying Pilate as a patsy, a buffoon, a dandy utterly unconcerned with justice who washes his hands of the whole matter.

But there may be another story here.

Perhaps Pilate’s question is not a contemptuous question or a cynical scoff, but the evasive, desperate, and finally exhausted maneuver of a career politician facing a situation he could not have anticipated, convinced that even if there is such a thing as truth, even if he beholds before him the very man who might answer such a question, it will not, cannot matter. When has it ever mattered?

I feel some sympathy for Pilate. It is hard to stay for an answer. Truth, justice, vindication, deliverance: these are so often delayed, sometimes many generations, until we fear they will never come.

Tomorrow, though, is Easter Day.

By Nikolai Ge – http://www.picture.art-catalog.ru/picture.php?id_picture=7515, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4267825

Polarization has eaten our brains.

That’s the thesis of the excellent first installment of Zeynep Tufekci’s projected three-part series called “The Misinformation Trifecta.” Here’s how part one begins:

“There’s been a lot of focus on misinformation over there—often focusing on the outright COVID denialism. Indeed some of that misinformation has been outright deliberate  falsehoods and lies. Some of it—the polarization around masks or the obsession with hydroxychloroquine—is complicated by events early in the pandemic. Some of it, like claims around vaccines changing your DNA or the wild rumors around 5G chips, are clearly outright false, though the former is also complicated (as it is related to the furor around genetically-modified foods as well).

“But then there is the misinformation over here which is also quite persistent and also wildly wrong. This misinformation has its own cast of characters, ranging from the outright grifters to the misleading alarmists to, yes, large swaths of respectable opinion leaders and even officials spreading falsehoods. A few days ago, I noticed an article that seemed to hit the trifecta, both content-wise and visually (a no less important form of misinformation).

“What’s the trifecta here? It’s polarization (eating our brains), bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health).”

“Bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health)” will be the next installments, Tufekci promises.  I eagerly look forward to those essays. And yes, Tufekci makes it clear that she’s not advocating any kind of “false equivalence”:

“some falsehoods are worse than others, and at least in the United States, the damage done by the political parties to fighting the pandemic is clearly not equal. But it also seems important to understand how, and why, misinformation, bad science and policy and terrible attitudes are not just a problem over there.”

The entire essay is essential reading, and I’m grateful for Dr. Tufekci’s work, here and elsewhere.

I wonder if Tufekci might also consider what I believe to be a potential fourth candidate for her list: Pundit-Trolls (masquerading as journalists). For example, look at this advice from “Sifted,” a technology “opinion site”‘ run by Financial Times:

Here’s what we’re looking for. A punchy opinion.

We like starting conversations. There’s nothing better than a somewhat controversial or unusual point of view to get people talking about a subject.

So, don’t pitch us an idea about why it’s a good idea to talk to your customers early on (everyone knows that!) Pitch us an idea about why customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs. That sounds much more intriguing.

I’m not so sure. Hyperbole and hot takes may attract rubberneckers, motivate clicks, generate more hyperbole and more hot takes, and feed the hot spew that one encounters routinely via “social media” (a tag almost comically useless by now). But do they start conversations? Is the answer to banal pieties like “it’s a good idea to talk to your customers early on” only a “somewhat controversial or unusual point of view” like “customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs”? Really?

I think about “interrogation” and “pushback” as metaphors that foreground combat and coercion, compared to metaphors like “give-and-take.” When I hear “punchy,” I think “duck” or “swing back” or “give as good as I get.” I do not find myself intrigued.

Just as with the virologist in the New Yorker article, and the “neglect of social promotion” the 2014 New York Times internal strategy report warned about, the idea seems to be “grab them by the amygdala.” Frontal lobe engagement is just too slow, and unpredictable.   In this respect, “Sifted” is a misnomer. “Punched” or “pinched” or “provoked” or “outraged” might be more apt. I sure don’t think conversations get started this way. More like the “conversations” in an episode of the old Jerry Springer show.

But this isn’t a problem with “Sifted” alone. They at least have the cover of punditry, the land of angles and takes and provocations. Take a look at the headlines and taglines in The New York Times or The Washington Post on any given day. (The mobile version of the Post has particularly “punchy” taglines.) Think about how they engage your attention. Make a list, and rate them on a “hot take” scale. (I didn’t even know what a hot take was until my students started a “hot take” thread in one of my class discussion forums. At least the definition here was honest and funny: “Hi, I need a place to let all of my really pretentious, unpopular, and insufferable opinions into the ether.”)

A misinformation trifecta is bad enough. A Four Horsefolk of the Misinformation Apocalypse is worse. I know that “if it bleeds, it leads.” But cortisone as a business strategy masquerading as “engagement” is no way to empower a democracy.

Michel de Montaigne’s Essais begin with an address to the reader:

Au Lecteur

C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur.

To the Reader

This is a good faith book, reader.

Many translators render “bonne foy” as “honest.” Florio’s 1603 translation into English, the version Shakespeare likely worked from, translates the opening this way:

EADER, loe here a well-meaning Booke.

Nothing wrong with these translations, of course, but for my purposes, “good faith” with its legal and ethical connotations gets closer to the heart of the matter. Honesty can often but not always be demonstrated. I say there are five dollars there, and you could count the dollars, and there are five. Honestly. But of course the currency is backed by the full faith and credit of the government issuing it, and “full faith and credit” isn’t very far from “good faith” in its reliance on a willingness to undertake a calculated risk.

In Montaigne’s words, “good faith” is both a promise on the part of the speaker and a working assumption on the part of the reader, a working assumption that the promise aims to encourage. Good faith, then, is not so much a judgment as an ongoing commitment to relationship that results from a working assumption and works toward maintaining trust on both sides. “Process” doesn’t really get at what I mean here. “Marriage” might, or hospitality, or a willingness to know and be known even if the objects of knowledge are sometimes difficult or elusive. Difficult and elusive are one thing, but deliberately concealed is something else, especially if one hopes to gain some advantage thereby.

When I last taught the Early Modern English Literature survey at school, I decided to look at some Montaigne with my students. We spent a good deal of time on this first section, “To The Reader,” so we could explore the question of what it might mean to say a book is a “good faith book,” and likewise, what it might mean to believe a book when it says to you, “this is a good faith book, reader.”

I asked my students which of the books they had read along the way they would call “good faith books.” The question sent us into a lovely period of silent meditation. I think Montaigne would have been pleased. Or was pleased. After a few moments, students offered names of books they remembered from childhood, or books they had felt especially close to in some way–some of them books they had read in their high school and college classes, thankfully. Later, one of the most delightful students in that class did some digging to find other translations of Montaigne’s address to the reader, and came up with this pithy statement on the difference between “well-meaning” and “honest”: “Montaigne’s essay on lying makes me think that an honest promise by Montaigne to be well-meaning may very well be more honest than a well-meaning promise to be honest.” That student’s work was inspired, and thus inspired further thought on my part–a good faith exchange that’s a great delight in a sometimes frustrating vocation.

To entertain the prospect of welcome, of hospitality; to open oneself to voices that are not familiar, voices that speak of things that may be puzzling or repellent or just strange; to say, I will be here for this book, because I believe it is a good faith book, or because people I trust have told me it is a good faith book: these are the adventures of an education, the ways in which teachers open doors.

Today it can be harder to earn that trust than it was when I first began professing the study of English literature. Believing a statement like Montaigne’s can seem naive, or damaging to the cause of unmasking deception. Writers are complex. Because they are human, they are fallible, and do not always act in good faith, even when they say–or think–they do. Yet readerly hospitality is still possible, and is often extended, surprisingly so. And on that assumption of good faith, a conversation can begin. Education can commence. We can go up into the library tower, just as Montaigne did, and see a little farther than before.

Au Lecteur

C’est icy un blog de bonne foy, lecteur. 

I’ll take a short break from the “good faith” series to share a video featuring Rod Serling, creator and principal writer of The Twilight Zone, as he talks to a small group of students at Ithaca College in 1972.

I first saw these interviews at a friend’s house as he showed off (and rightfully so) his new boxed set of laserdiscs collecting all of the original Twilight Zone episodes. This would have been in the early 1990s, just as I was beginning my career as an English professor. I vividly recall my fascination with the way Serling spoke to these students, the care he took to listen to them with intense attention, and his refusal either to talk over them or to pretend he was just one of them. The seminars are teacher-centered, not “student-centered,” because this teacher, and the center he helped to form in that room, was an example to all. And rightfully so.

Here’s one fascinating discussion, in which Serling takes care to disagree with one student but in a very cordial manner, and then takes equal care to engage the one woman in the room by highlighting her very important question. I felt such strength and warmth and true intellectual leadership emanating from Serling in this environment. I said to myself, “I want to teach like that.” And I still do.

To continue some of the thoughts from yesterday:

Zeynep Tufekci has been working nonstop–I think she must not sleep more than two hours a night–on the complexities arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the problems of interpreting data and, most importantly for this discussion, what she terms the metaepistemological problem of how we talk about, and ask questions about, the very idea of evaluating knowledge.

For Tufecki, metaepistemology involves among other things the “mundane skill” of “reading between the lines.” She first expounds on this skill in an essay called “Lessons from a Pandemic Anniversary,” in which she identifies three working principles (one could also call these “heuristics”) for evaluating not so much the content of specific knowledge as tell-tale signs about that knowledge, a kind of metaepistemological “tag” or “tell,” that will help you understand the truth about the facts presented. You’ll need to read the essay to make sense of these items. Here I’ll just list them.

• The  Principle of “You Can’t Finesse the Steep Part of an Exponential” (in other words, if the smoke is dense and the temperature is climbing quickly the fires are likely raging no matter what explanation is given)
• The “Principle of Always Pay Attention to Costly Action” (in other words, watch where resources are expended instead of listening to what people say about motives, plans, etc. I ran into this principle in senior leadership, where the saying was “if you want to see a university’s real strategic plan, don’t look at the plan, look at the budget”)
• The Criterion of Embarrassment, which Tufekci calls “something historians use all the time … the idea that something that embarrasses or puts the speaker in a difficult position is more likely to be true.”

I encourage you to follow the link to the “criterion of embarrassment,” as you’ll learn how important this criterion has been to New Testament research–which is not to say that by itself the criterion is always reliable. Indeed, part of the problem with the criterion of embarrassment is that it can lead to the sometimes useful, sometimes treacherous heuristic that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” which is essentially an irrefutable argument.

This problem in particular appears in Tufekci’s follow-up essay, “Critical Thinking Isn’t Just A Process“:

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.

A principle that’s often useful in these situations is that most deliberate misinformation from authorities—especially in places that are mid-range in terms of institutional trust and strict licensing—comes from omission, not saying the truth, rather than outright lying. That offers a way to get at the truth by trying to detect a picture, and looking at the parts that have been obscured, to make out the actual shape.

Notice that “reading between the lines” really means “reading the real lines and ignoring the things the liars are calling the lines.” I say this because many of my students believe that literary analysis is all about reading between the lines, when it’s truly all about reading the lines–that is, attending to the words, their order, the arrangement of chapters and lines and rhymes and voices, etc. In other words, “reading between the lines” is a process of substitution, while what I want my students to do is to become skilled at detecting implied or symbolic meanings. (But I digress.)

In the end, it seems to me, Tufekci’s argument in “Critical Thinking Isn’t Just A Process” derives from a prior assumption, based on experience, that “authorities are lying at all levels.” This assumption is also a conclusion, and one that drives interpretive strategies for finding out what’s really true. But by now it’s clear that this survival strategy, born of hard experience and, from what I can tell, eminently justified, is also at the heart of conspiracy theories and, even less dramatically, the habit of “critique” and corrosive skepticism that one can routinely find in my profession. (Rita Felski and Lisa Ruddick have done very important work in this area. Ruddick’s “When Nothing Is Cool” has been a touchstone for me in this regard.)

Tufekci’s conclusion is sobering indeed, both as a salutary warning and, in its shadow, a strategy whose guardrails may not hold:

There is often talk of teaching people “critical thinking” thinking skills, and that’s certainly something worth doing. A mistake, though, is to think that such critical thinking skills are independent of knowledge: that there is a recipe, or a way of interrogating conclusions, that can turn into “critical thinking.” In reality, the process by itself isn’t where the magic happens.

These do not seem complicated skills in some sense—and especially not in retrospect, once the actual answer is known. But they require more than parsing of words. The institutional operation, and the status and psychological incentives of the people, matter greatly to discerning the truth. Like most knowledge, this is more than “word games.” It is a mixture of sociology and psychology—if we are putting them into fields—but also involve probability: what’s the most likely outcome? What types of evidence would help tip the balance in which direction? How do these institutions operate? What are the personal and professional incentives of this particular person? And so on.

Critical thinking is not just formulas to be taught but knowledge and experience to be acquired and tested and re-examined, along with habits and skills that can be demonstrated and practiced. But there is no separating the “process” from the “substance”.

I am not sure any community can survive the relentless practice of inquiring cui bono? about every single expert or authority. I cannot imagine reading a full financial disclosure of every physician I consult, though I can at the same time imagine a duty to inform that would compel the physician to disclose any clear conflicts of interest–while also raising the question of whether the clear conflicts are as dangerous as those that seem less defined and less of a problem. The question of how to judge a conflict of interest is itself not as straightforward in every case as it might seem. Some apparent edge cases may determine very unhappy outcomes.

But all of that said, I do think that “knowledge and experience … acquired and tested and re-examined, along with habits and skills that can be demonstrated and practiced” sound more like wisdom than simple “competency,” and point to a cycle of learning and thinking and learning and thinking that sound very much like the practices a liberal arts education seeks to model and encourage. It also does not sound like “critique” or “skepticism,” but a positive commitment to hope and trust that has to be renewed and re-asserted over a lifetime. That is to say, an enlightened, wise approach to assuming good faith where such assumptions are warranted, or even where such assumptions are necessary whether or not one can judge their warrant.

Which brings me to Montaigne and Bacon–but that’s for the next part.

Good Faith by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

I’ve been wanting to explore this topic for a few years now, and I need to start somewhere, but I don’t have the bandwidth just now to do more than juxtapose a few things.

The overarching problem sometimes goes by the need for media literacy, or news literacy, or (alas) “critical thinking,” the latter a phrase I always struggled with and now feel little more than exasperation over. What’s wanted, I think, is for people

• to be able to reason well,
• to ask pertinent questions,
• to be skeptical when that’s warranted and trusting when that’s warranted (because communities are ultimately based on elements of trust),
• to be self-aware enough to practice a certain kind of mindful self-correction at all times, if only at a low level.

The list is not exhaustive. (I warned you about my bandwidth.)

It’s worth noting that every single one of the items in the non-exhaustive list above is the site of not inconsiderable controversy. “Reasoning well” has been problematized on grounds of “reasoning” and criteria for evaluating “well.” What makes a question “pertinent” and who’s to say? (“Who’s to say?” is a frequently combative way of raising the problem of evaluation.) When is skepticism warranted and when is trust warranted? (See Othello, to cite one example, for a fascinating case study.) And by what magic properties are we able to transcend our own biases (or cultural contexts, or whatever one terms the determinisms) to be “self-correcting”?

I myself do not believe it’s turtles all the way down, but I’ve met people who’ve argued the opposite and seem unaware that turtles all the way down is a conversation-stopper, not a reasoned argument about axioms in reason.

And media literacy? Some essential reading here from danah boyd.

It’s one thing to talk about interrogating assumptions when a person can keep emotional distance from the object of study. It’s an entirely different thing to talk about these issues when the very act of asking questions is what’s being weaponized. This isn’t historical propaganda distributed through mass media. Or an exercise in understanding state power. This is about making sense of an information landscape where the very tools that people use to make sense of the world around them have been strategically perverted by other people who believe themselves to be resisting the same powerful actors that we normally seek to critique.

True story: I once argued with a colleague for an hour about the question of truth. He was a sort of everything-is-provisional, who’s-to-say, truth-claims-are-dangerous kind of arguer, so I wasn’t making any headway until it occurred to me to ask if he thought one could tell lies about the Holocaust. He thought a moment, and said yes, of course. To which I replied, then by extension it must be possible to tell truths about the Holocaust.

The point here is that today we seem to be able to problematize everything, often in a vigorous effort to stay on the run from dogmatic thinking (usually, but not always a good thing), and thus the very idea of combatting disinformation, let alone misinformation, becomes itself weirdly weaponized, as I saw over and over again with a small set of former high-school classmates during the prior administration.

So step-by-step methods such as SIFT seem to me to presuppose widely shared standards of reasoned approaches to informing oneself about the world, and I’m not sure that presupposition has ever been valid. I’m certain it’s not now. And I’m certain that some set of assumed truths must precede the operation of reason–not that that idea is original with me. (See danah boyd, above.)

At the same time, part of the operation of reason is to demonstrate limits to the operation of reason, including but not limited to the lack of conclusive evidence. This I take it is a sign of humility and evidence of good faith, as Jon Udell writes:

Here’s evidence that acknowledgement of uncertainty really is a powerful signal of credibility. Maybe machines will be able to detect it and label it; maybe those labels will matter to people. Meanwhile, it’s something people can detect and do care about. Teaching students to value sources that acknowledge uncertainty, and discount ones that don’t, ought to be part of any strategy to improve news literacy.

Part of this idea is the adage that “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” where too-good-to-be-true means “rest your weary head because there’s one answer and you have it.” (But what an interesting saying: “too good to be true”–as if anything more than a little bit of okay is likely hollow at the core.)

Another part, though, lines up nicely with the Walker Percy quotation I included in a post several days ago:

The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbooks are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn’t have much use for the equipment or the jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.

(My earlier note about Percy’s androcentric language applies here as well.)

It doesn’t take long, though, to see that acknowledging uncertainty can lead to cascades of turtles, especially where there are highly specific outcomes that are easily tracked and, in many cases, readily verified (did they live or die? did I pass or fail? did it happen or not?). Too much acknowledgement of uncertainty begins to feel like evasion, as our epidemiologists have found to their sorrow (and ours).

Then come the virologists who seem to make all the above completely beside the point, as they engage, like Milton’s Belial, with “words clothed in reason’s garb.” This 2015 New Yorker article is essential and difficult reading:

On this occasion, I was the only person listening to his speech, but he spoke in a distant and deliberate tone, using studied pauses and facial expressions, as if I were a video camera’s lens. When he got to the part about virality being a superpower—“I realized that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionize industries”—I asked whether that was really true.

“Can you rephrase your question in a more concrete way?” he said.

I mentioned “Kony 2012,” a thirty-minute film about the Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony. It has been viewed on YouTube more than a hundred million times, but it did not achieve its ultimate goal: Kony remains at large, as does his militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“To be honest, I didn’t follow too closely after the whole thing died down,” Spartz said. “Even though I’m one of the most avid readers I know, I don’t usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.”

He went on, “If I were running a more hard-news-oriented media company and I wanted to inform people about Uganda, first, I would look it up and find out exactly what’s going on there. Then I would find a few really poignant images or story lines, ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make those into a short video—under three minutes—with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do, something to feel hopeful about.”

This apparently admirable rhetorical advice, the kind of thing one might encounter in a freshman composition class, turns out to be in the service of clickbait, and the narrative of “The Virologist” finds its climax in the infamous New York Times report on how to stay afloat (successful, impactful, important, profitable, relevant, relatable, etc.) in the digital age. You may recall that the report caused a bit of a stir at the time.

In March, a working group at the Times presented an internal report to the paper’s top editors. A few weeks later, the report was leaked, and BuzzFeed published it. The first sentence was “The New York Times is winning at journalism.” However, it warned, “we are falling behind in a second critical area: the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.” Virality, in other words. The report’s authors argued that sharing and promotion should not be seen as a “chore”; on the contrary, “watching a year-old story go viral on social” could be “truly exciting.”

Old-media loyalists were troubled by some of the report’s recommendations. The metaphorical “wall” separating editorial staff and business staff, long considered an axiom of journalistic ethics, was cautiously called into question. Yet traditionalists might not have recognized how good they had it. The report repeatedly distinguished the Times’ core mission—“winning at journalism”—from more easily quantifiable goals, such as winning at page views. In our data-obsessed moment, it is subversive to assert that the value of a product is not reducible to its salability.

When I e-mailed Spartz to ask about the report, he said that he hadn’t heard of it. After skimming it, he wrote that it seemed like too little too late: “Nothing struck me as being particularly eye-opening, just confirmed my suspicions about how far they are behind the . . . Times. (Sorry.)”

The report acknowledged a “tension between quality control and expanded digital capabilities.” Spartz experiences no such tension, because he does not distinguish between quality and virality. He uses “effective,” “successful,” and “good” interchangeably. At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

Spartz does not call what he makes journalism, even if he employs a few journalists, and he does not erect barriers between his product and his means of promoting it. Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, “A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.”

Now you can see that I was unfair when I compared the virologists to Belial. Their words are not clothed in reason’s garb. Their words are reasonable. They simply start from a vastly different set of assumptions about what constitutes human flourishing, what is the common good, and how then must we live.

One last item in the series is Wikipedia’s dicta that editors should “assume good faith” and strive to write from a “neutral point of view.”

Assuming good faith (AGF) is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors’ edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were untrue, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning. This guideline does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in the presence of obvious evidence to the contrary (e.g. vandalism). Assuming good faith does not prohibit discussion and criticism. Rather, editors should not attribute the actions being criticized to malice unless there is specific evidence of such.

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic….

NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. It is also one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies; the other two are “Verifiability” and “No original research“. These policies jointly determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in Wikipedia articles, and, because they work in harmony, they should not be interpreted in isolation from one another. Editors are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with all three.

This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus.

Both of those principles have been widely contested, even mocked–I got in a brief but intense Twitter back-and-forth on the NPOV principle at the 2019 WikiNorthAmerica conference–and both are, I think, essentially related to the problems and problematizings I’ve sketched out above. I also believe that both principles are vital to the success of any human endeavor, and never more bewilderingly elusive in a hall-of-mirrors way than now.

Lest you think I have become completely untethered, or am perhaps bouncing on every carapace on a joyride down that lovely series of turtles, I should say that I encounter and wrestle with each of the items above on a daily basis in my teaching, my research, and my writing. I understand that may be more the case for folks who work in the humanities, as I do, than in the physical sciences. But that’s not an answer to any of these questions.

I have some additional thoughts but that’s the bandwidth for now. All I can say in my own defense is that I go through these items, these questions, because I am trying to keep my thinking straight, or as straight as possible. If I end up sneaking in a version of an assumption I am apparently inquiring about, I would like to be able to detect it, admit it, and ameliorate the situation enough to take another step or two. I am not confident I can do that, but I am confident that I must try, and I am confident that I must believe it is possible to do so lest the effort be anything other than absurd.

I also find it all kind of fascinating, and every now and then I’m in a conversation that seems to me, for at least a while, to be built out of good faith and a scrupulous attention to the conditions and progress of the argument. But then someone says “and you know, higher education is a business,” and I drown.

Are we having fun yet?