Hildegarde

This is my big teaching day, so I really don’t have time to write a proper post.

I did want to respond to jd’s assertion that the story of Margaret Rule–that was the name of the teen-aged girl Increase and Cotton Mather had strip to below the waist so that they could rub her naked body in an attempt to “cure” her from being tormented by the spectral presence of a witch–anyway, that the story must have come from private documents.

In fact, it came from PUBLIC records.

This was, first, because the Mathers were not secretive about what they were doing.

They invited their neighbors in to watch the “treatment,” and the neighbors told the story all over town.

It was also reported in Robert Calef’s book castigating the Mathers about their part in what became known as “the witchcraft.”

The Mathers were shocked and outraged when the people of Boston and other towns simply assumed that they were rubbing the girl not to treat her, but to…well, to rub her.

The people of Puritan New England were considerably less prissy about this kind of thing than people would be a hundred years later. 

I think I said on the blog that Perry Miller did not report this incident.

When I went back to look over the text, I found that although he did not report it, he did allude to it, very obliquely, so that if you did not already know about it you wouldn’t know what he was talking about.

I then found that he alluded to an awful lot more that I wish I knew about.

Cotton Mather is said to have not as much control over his carnal appetites as he should have had. 

Exactly what that is supposed to mean is not made clear, but the implication is that  people who read Miller’s history at the time he wrote it–the early 1950s–would probably have already known.

Miller also says, without compromise, that Cotton Mather was “neurotic.”

I think we can give him that, even if the meaning of “neurotic” isn’t really clear.

I agree with Cheryl that a lot of the sex abuse trials in recent history have proceeded under what would normally be unConstitutional as ex post facto laws–but there’s been a lot of that going around.

And now, it being my big teaching day, I’d better go pack up.

So, the month wrapped and I still hadn’t gotten around to posting a list of the April books, and then in between not doing that and finally doing it, I read another book, and then–

 Okay, so let’s back up a little.

I want to talk about a book, sort of, and things the book connects to in my life and thinking.

And that book–called The Devil in Massachusetts, by Marion L. Starkey–will appear as the first on the May list. 

It’s a short book and a very good one, but that doesn’t begin to cover the issue here.

So I’ll start with–

By now, anybody who has read this blog  regularly knows that I am very much interested in all things New England, and especially in New England history,  intellectual history, and literature.

Because of this, I sometimes get accused of “liking” things I don’t actually like–the works of the New England Transcendentalists, for instance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson makes my head ache, and I think Hawthorne–although a more interesting and powerful mind–is a leaden writer who tells too much and shows too little.

Still, I am interested in them both, because they are part of a region and a history that are deeply a part of me. 

Sometimes I get interested in things simply for the fact that they belong to me. 

I never studied American history in a classroom setting after I got past high school. 

Over the course of my life, my reading patterns have mimicked my father’s–lots of novels to start, veering into nonfiction, veering into general history, veering into American history.

I have no idea why that should be the case, but there it is. 

The book in question–Marion L. Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts–has been lying around my house for a long time.

I think I may have gotten it from the History Book Club back when Bill was still alive.

For a long time, I resisted reading it, because I assumed that it was a contemporary book, and contemporary books on the Salem witch trials make me very nervous.

Too many of them take a Women’s Studies approach to the issue, which ends up being a lot of ahistorical fulminating about Sexism and Repression and Older Women as the Other.

I own a number of very good books written by academics in Women’s Study, including one of my favorites (Women of the Left Bank, by Shari Benstock), but there is a particular WS mental illness that creeps into a lot of this stuff, and I’d rather not bother.

I picked up The Devil in Massachusetts this time because I had just finished rereading Gone With The Wind.  GWTW is long and fiction.  I wanted something short and nonfiction to follow it with.

Me being me, there is not a lot of short on my TBR pile, but my younger son dutifully started deconstructing the thing to see what we could find, and this was what turned up.

I read the introduction cautiously, and it was good news and what I thought might be bad news.

The good news was that The Devil in Massachusetts was not written by a contemporary Women’s Studies professor.  It wasn’t written by a professor at all.

The author, Marion L. Starkey, was one of those  amateur historians from the  Thirties, Forties and Fifties who seem to have died out with the coming of Major Social Change.

I’m not sure why.  In general, these writers–and they’re almost all women–wrote clearer and more interesting history than most professionals, and the world is poorer for the passing of people like Barbara Tuchman and Catherine Drinker Bowen.

And yes, I do  know that Alison Weir is still writing.

At any rate, Marion L. Starkey was not a Women’s Studies person but one of these, and that made me very happy.

What made me less happy was her announced intent to bring Freudian analysis to bear on the witchcraft incident.

So I started with the feeling that I might have to pitch the thing across the room a few times before I finished it.

As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about.  Whatever Starkey meant about taking Freud into account in understanding the witch trials, it did not result in the kind of heavy handed “exploration” of everybody’s subconscious motivations accompanied by overconfident declarations of the existence of the Oedipus Complex that I’m used to in the worst of Freudian criticism.

In fact, it didn’t seem to me to engage in any Freudian criticism at all. 

It puzzled me for a while, and I finally came to the conclusion that Starkey’s interest in Freud had led her to report–and analyze–a set of incidents and circumstances I’d never read about before.

Those incidences and circumstances pertain specifically to the character and life of Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather.

And they’re a pip.

Increase and Cotton Mather were big time intellectual heavyweights in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, active as both ministers and politicians in every important issue of the day.

Puritan New England was an intellectual society that placed enormous emphasis on study and erudition.  These are the people, after all, whose first act after hatcheting a living out of a wilderness was to found Harvard.

And I already knew something about Increase and Cotton Mather, including the fact that Increase wrote a book about how to discern true witchcraft from false allegations that was–well, let’s just say that if you ever came to trial for any reason, you wouldn’t want your court to be relying on those rules.

The Mathers were not intellectuals I respected, and there were a number of other intellectuals in the colony at the time (and later) that I respect very much.

Still.

You’ve got to understand that witch trials were driven by accusers who claim to be possessed by witches who sent their spectral bodies to pinch,  hit and otherwise torment their neighbors.

And these accusers–the girls who claimed to be afflicted by witches–were almost always  teen-aged girls.

Afflicted girls would fall down to the ground and writhe in fits and tell the authorities that the “spectral body” of Mrs. X was grabbing at them and giving them pain.

The authorities would t hen arrest Mrs. X and “examine’  her.  Then they would demand that she confess.  If she would not confess,  she would be sent to trial and convicted.  If she would still not confess, she would be hanged.

And she would inevitably be convicted, because the assumption was that “the devil can’t appear in the form of the righteous.”

That is, if the Accuser saw the “spectral body” of Mrs. X, it really was Mrs. X, because the Devil was incapable of sending a spectral body that looked like a good Christian.

If this is beginning to sound to you like what was going on in the day care child sex abuse hysteria of the Nineties–children never lie about being abused!–it is.  In fact,  it’s virtually exact. 

It’s exact right down to the “if you confess, we won’t totally destroy your life” bit.  Gerald Amirault remained in jail for decades because he adamantly refused to “confess” to something  he didn’t do.  Salem’s accused witches went to the gallows for the same refusal.

And you think this thing can’t happen any more. 

At any rate, Increase Mather didn’t start the Salem witch trials and he didn’t participate in them, but he also did nothing to stop them and did a lot to insure that the hysteria continued  unabated far longer than it would have done by endorsing (albeit ambiguously) that business about how the devil couldn’t appear as the spectral body of a good person.

And his son Cotton was worse.

Anyway, I knew all that before I started this book.  And Increase and Cotton Mather were never among my favorite New England people.

But then came the information I’d never read before.

The first inkling I got that something was even more wrong with the Mathers than I’d realized was when Starkey reported that Cotton Mather would often take “afflicted” girls to help “cure” them of the influence of witches upon them.

Cotton Mather was, by then, a middle aged man.  His father was an old man.  And these were teen-aged girls.

Hummm.

But then there was the report of an incident–actually, a series of incidents–where the Mathers took in an afflicted girl and then called the neighbors in to watch while they worked to affect a “cure” of demon possession.

The cure consisted of stripping the girl to well below the waist and having father and son rub her naked breasts and belly until she stopped having “fits” and calmed down.

I mean–um?

And no, the people of the time were not all in awe of the Mathers or driven into blindness by the idea that important ministers like the two of them couldn’t possibly  be engaged in–well, what that looked like.

Increase and Cotton, however, were outraged at any suggestion that what they were doing had anything to do with sex.  And they were powerful enough in the colony that you didn’t want them outraged at you.

In the long run, it didn’t matter.  The witch trials destroyed both of them.  Their reputations haven’t recovered to this day.

My problem is that I can’t get the image out of my head, and it’s a foul and nasty image.  Those two old man, rubbing and rubbing at the breasts and bellies of a girl younger than their own daughters, with an audience of neighbors for a kick.

It’s like the plot of a bad porn movie.

And I will never, ever be able to think of the Mathers in any other way but this.

I followed The Devil in Massachusetts with volume two of Perry Miller’s intellectual history of New England, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.

He devotes a chapter and a half to the witch hysteria, without, of course, mentioning the Mathers and their young girls.

Miller has no  more use for the Mathers than I ever did.  Even without the young girls, it’s hard to see how anybody could have any use for them except as cautionary tales for stopping witch hunts–and given the day care sex abuse hysteria, we aren’t using them for that.

But the young girls are, I think, an important piece of information–a part of what caused both Increase and Cotton to think about witches and witch trials in the way they did.

Maybe that’s how Freud affected Starkey’s writing of this history.

Unlike everyone else, once she was in possession of the information about t hose girls, she thought it was important to report it.

I know, I know.  I’m a little late here.   But May 1st was a Wednesday, my biggest teaching day, and I’m trying to finish a new Gregor.

That being said, I’ve got the list, and the notes.

I do want to point out one thing–there is a novel on this month’s list, and I intend to go into my feelings about it at length.

If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading when the title comes up.

I hate that thing where people write SPOILERS in capital letters and make that sort of fuss about it, so you are forewarned.

The list is this:

24) Eric Alterman.  Why We’re Liberals:  A Handbook for Restoring America’s Most Important Ideals.

25) David Hackett Fischer.  Albion’s Seed: Four  British Folkways in America.

26) Corliss Lamont.  The Philosophy of Humanism.

27) Margaret Mitchell.  Gone With The Wind.

          e) Avram Davidson.  “The Necessity of His Condition.”

And, the notes:

Alterman is a columnist for The Nation, and earlier known for a book called What Liberal Media?

This was actually a reread for me.  One of my sons bought it for me when it first came out in hardcover, around my birthday a few years ago.

The format, which is a kind of question and answer thing, is really helpful. 

And the book is very good at getting across positions for a certain brand of liberalism, and on that basis I would definitely recommend it.

What’s more, there’s a lot less of the casual snobbery you get in many of these things, and the man is remarkably clear and admirably lacking in arrogance in most of what he writes.

Unfortunately, he does tend to go for the straw man in all the predictable places, and in some–discussing the work of Charles Murray, for instance–he leaves the realm of valid argument altogether.

On matters of liberal argument,  he’s good.  On matters of liberal faith–well, he’s responding from faith.  It shows.

Especially interesting is his attempt to connect modern-day Liberalism with the Liberalism of Locke and Mill.

The argument is torturous, and it doesn’t work.  The principles of modern liberalism–and especially modern liberalism’s understanding of the relationship between citizen and government–are in near polar opposition to what goes by the name of Liberal today.

Still, Alterman’s exposition is interesting, and especially interesting because he so obviously wants there to be a connection.

I went into Albion’s Seed here on another occassion, so I’ll skip it here.

Corliss Lamont’s The Philosophy of Humanism was another reread for me, and the second time around gave me pause about my ability to remember what’s in a book when I haven’t reread it in a few years.

Corliss Lamont was one of the original signers of the first Humanist Manifesto and one of the founders of the American Humanist Association.

He was also an outright apologist for Stalinism while it was going on and unrepentant about that fact for all of his life, which lasted into the Sixties. 

It’s a fact that nobody at the American Humanist Association these days seems to care about one way or the other, if they even know.  And there’s a lot of not knowing. 

Lamont was the uncle of Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont, who tried to take Joe Liebermann’s seat a few election cycles ago.

During that period, politic discussion groups on the Web buzzed with people outing CL’s Stalinist support and other people declaring that it was all just a lie.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

In case you’re wondering, I never did buy this book.  Several years ago, it used to be the standard premium for subscribing to The Humanist magazine, which I did on and off in those days.  As a result, I ended up with two copies.

When I read this book the first time, I remember being very angry at it. 

When I read it this time, I found myself being just flabbergasted.

A lot of it consists of lists–these people are declared Humanists, these other people were probably Humanists even though they said they weren’t because when they lived they couldn’t say they weren’t without getting into a lot of trouble.

What all this reminded me of was a participant in an Internet discussion group I knew a few years ago who would every once in a while insist that lots of particular religious people–say, William F. Buckley–weren’t really believers.  They just said they were believers because once they lost their faith, they were stuck with all their public expressions of belief and didn’t want to embarrass themselves by recanting.

How did the participant know these people were no longer believers?  Well, they couldn’t be.  They were too intelligent.

Yeah, I know, okay.

The bottom line, however, is that this book  just does not set out the philosophy of modern Humanism–or any philosophy of any modern Humanism–clearly enough or with enough detail to be useful to someone trying to find out what modern Humanism is all about.

As far as I know, there is no such book.  Which is too bad.  It would be a  useful thing to have. 

(And no, the New Atheism books are not useful here.  They’re about Atheism.  Humanism is a considerably wider philosophy and lots of atheists are not Humanists.)

And now we come to the novel, and I’ll repeat:  if you don’t want spoilers, stop here.

This is, I think, the third time I’ve read Gone With The Wind. 

I read it the first time when a paperback edition was released to coincide with the re-release of the film in theaters, sometime in the mid-sixties.

I still have that paperback around here somewhere.  It’s got a bright blue cover and the then-shocking  price of $1.25.

Gone With The Wind is one of the two books I think are going to come out of the 20th century and last a hundred years or more.  The other is Atlas Shrugged, and I can hear the howls  already.

For better or worse, though, those two books have significantly changed the way we live and think from what would have been if they’d never existed.

Gone With the Wind, of course, had a highly successful, and still highly popular, movie to help it along, and it’s probably the movie that most people remember.

The book, it turns out, is very, very odd.

In the first, place, the charge that the book is riddled with racism is absolutely true, and it’s riddled right through.

The problem is that it’s not riddled with the same kind of racism all the way through.

This causes some bizarre passages over the course of the book–and by bizarre, I mean completely bonkers.

At the beginning and end of the book, we get the casual racism of well-meaning upper class whites.  They think “darkies” are childlike, and that they look like apes and gorillas, but they also think they’re rather noble. 

If you ever doubted that the old myth of the Noble Savage is racist in its genesis,  you can see it work right here. 

But racist or not, it’s a gentle racism, and because it is it’s open to changes of heart and mind–or at least to doing the right thing in the long run.

What goes on in the middle of the book–and it’s far and away the longest part–is something else altogether.

In fact, the tone changes so drastically it’s almost like watching somebody suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder.

Okay, MPD probably doesn’t exist, but you know what I mean.

The narrative voice  just switches into this other thing and goes beserk.

The first real intimation I had of it was when Scarlett declared that the Yankees were “n– lovers.” 

This was after Mitchell  had taken several occassions in the first part of the book to point out that “ladies and gentlemen”–that is, quality folk–never used the N word.

But it was’t just this.

If all you knew about race relations in the United States was what you’d read up to that point in Gone With the Wind, you’d be hard pressed to explain why being an “N- lover” was a bad thing.

Scarlett herself is on record in several places as loving Mammy more than she loves her own sisters. 

In fact, the deep and abiding love of people like Scarlett for people like Mammy–and the fact that that love is supposedly returned–is one of the prime themes of the beginning of the book and its end.

So is the oft-stated contention that many “negroes” are far superior to certain white people, including most of the members of the Union Army and the eventual occupying force during Reconstruction.

And in those two bracketing parts, Mitchell trains a fine gimlet eye on both the white planter class and on slavery itself.

But then, as soon as she starts writing about Reconstruction, she goes completely off the rails.

The racism in the parts of the book that deal with Reconstruction is not only not mild, it’s completely bonkers.

The very narrative voice changes.  The vocabulary changes.  We get the Ku Klux Klan as a noble enterprise.

The effect is bewildering, and it gets even more bewildering because, as soon as Reconstruction is over and the Democrats are back in the Governor’s office, it just disappers.

As if it had never happened.

I don’t remember noticing any of this when I read this book before.

My guess is that the first time, when I was well under eighteen, I wasn’t paying much attention to the race issues because I was paying attention to Scarlett’s love life.

Scarlett’s love life is what most people pay attention to in this book, and it’s certainly what most people pay attention to in the movie.

To do the movie credit, however, it lacks the racial schizophrenia of the book. 

It was, all in all, a very odd experience. 

It’s also one of the few times I can say that I am thoroughly and unambiguously glad that the movie has more influence than the book.

And now, it’s getting to be that time of day when I need to go off and Do Things.

So I’ll go.

So,  I’m looking at the comments, and to start I’d like to say that I agree with Mike Fisher 100%–in fact, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying for years now.

I’d also like to say that I’ve got at least one way in which I can do a rough check  on the differences between what is being called “high school work” now and what was being called that when I was in high school.

When I went to high school, the required math courses were Algebra 1, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Math 4, which we’d probably now call “precalculus.”

At my son’s private high school just six years ago, the required math courses were Algebra 2, Geometry,  Trigonometry and Calculus.

My students, however, routinely arrive with not so much as Algebra 1.  If they want a degree that requires some math–like, say, nursing–they take Algebra 1, Geometry and Trigonometry at “college.”

And in spite of what the university tells the students, it’s not some kind of super duper special “college” version of Algebra.  I know, because I once sat outside a classroom where Algebra 1 was being taught and listened while a teacher gave a lesson that was virtually identical to the one my younger son had that same week–in 7th grade.

To say that high schools have been dumbed down is to put it mildly.

Outside the Gold Coast towns and the private schools, an actual high school education isn’t even offered in most of the public schools in my state.

And my state has one of the best public school systems in the country.

And I also agree with Mike that the reason for t his is the stubborn refusal to accept the idea that there is such a thing as academic and/or intellectual talent and that some people just don’t have it.

But the reasons for that were entirely well meaning–at least as described–and in no way connected with what corporations wanted.

In fact, if corporations had gotten what they’d wanted, the educational system wouldn’t look like this.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been much better, but it would at least have been less expensive for the students.

But businesses don’t really care about graduation rates.  They care about skill sets.

What happens when schools run into the brick wall that is the uneven distribution of natural talent and still want to raise their graduation rate is that they lower the standards for graduation so that more people can meet them.

And then it all works out the way Mike outlined in the comment.

And yes, the people who are hurt the worst are the kids whose families don’t have the money to buy them a proper high school education.

And the next worst hit are the kids whose families do not have the cultural capital to give them at home what the schools no longer give them in class.

But there are two big problems with trying to fix this.

The first is actually the easier one to get past–and that is the fact that if we did return high school graduation standards to what they were in, say, 1940, the graduation rates would be even more skewed by race and ethnicity than they are now.

This would be true no matter what the distribution of intellectual talent was–it would be true even if African American and Latino children had higher native talent than whites or Asians.

That’s because it’s not enough to have an IQ of 170, or–okay,  much more commonly–130. 

A child needs other things if he is going to be academically successful, and a lot of those things are incredibly basic.

One of those things–and,  yes, this is my big hobbyhorse–is organization.

My bright remedial students (and there are more of them that you think) seem to report coming from homes that make absolutely  no sense to me:  no set time for everybody to wake up on even week day mornings, no set times for meals, no pattern from one day to the next.

I’m talking here not ab0ut rigidity but about basic organization. 

A kid who arrives in the classroom, even the Head Start classroom, who has never had such schedules and who leaves school every day to go back to the free floating chaos is inevitably using half his intellectual power just trying to cope.

Things you and I do without thinking about them are things that kid has to make conscious decisions about, day after day, hour after hour.

What seems  like mental slowness may actually be just this–the desperate attempt to figure out what to do in the next half second, what’s supposed to go where, what’s supposed to happen when.

The good news about this is that the  problem is fixable. The bad news about this is that the problem is not fixable in a single generation, unless you’re willing to go in for draconian policies that couldn’t get into a Congressional committee at this point.

Such as–removing poor kids from disorganized poor homes and  have them raised by foster parents very well paid and judged on their ability to provide discipline and structure.

Like I said, it’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t.

It is situations like these that programs like Head Start are designed to fix, but without the draconian measures they can’t fix them. 

They can, however, make a dent–and that dent can pass down to these student’s children, where the dent will be deeper.  And that generation will pass the dent down to the next, where the dent may be just big enough to get the results everybody wants now and immediately.

But ALL of that requires resetting standards to the higher levels, graduating fewer people from high school, and having some kind of integrity about content.

And yes, it’s terribly unfair.  These kids did nothing to land in the families they have.

But reality is inelastic.  It can’t be done in a single generation.  It can’t be done at all with an attempt to pretty up everybody’s resume by giving them high school diplomas that not only mean nothing, but often mean that employers and colleges know to stay away from you at all costs.

The biggest problem with getting something done about this is the breathtaking racism of the teaching profession and the administrators and legislators who  support it.

It you want to see a group of people who honestly believe, right down to their gut, that black and Latino children are just not as bright as white and Asian ones, this is where to look.

But the real issue with fixing this will be the obvious–the money.

And no, I’m not talking about for-profit schools making cash off the skills crash, although that’s a (very small) part of it.

I want  you to think for a minute about how many people are employed in the US today to “fix” the problem of kids who don’t have basic high school skills.

There are, first, all the faculty and administrators at all the colleges, universities,  community colleges and all the rest, including both full time and part time workers.  These people are teachers and special tutors and “academic support staff” and a million other things, tens of thousands of them–maybe hundreds of thousands of them.

They include teachers teaching remedial education, teachers teaching prospective teachers of remedial education, teachers teaching “regular” courses on a hundred different levels, tutors and writing centers to provide back up for students who can’t spell or do grammar, ESL teachers, math tutors and support staff for math tutoring centers, bureaucrats at the federal Department of Education and all the state Departments of Education, bank employees hired to deal with student loan issues, bureaucrats hired to deal with federally guaranteed student  loan issues and things like Pell Grants–

I could go on, but you get the point. 

If we returned high school graduation standards to their 1960 level, a lot of people would lose their jobs, because there would be no need of them.

If we returned high school graduation standards to their 1930 level, we’d also lose tens of thousands of high school teachers, along with “academic support staff’ to provide tutoring and other “services” to kids who were flunking out.

Of course, the kids would be better off.  They wouldn’t  have to run up bills and debts to get the same skill set that would be available to them at around eighth grade.  They could go out and go to work earlier, enter the job market with more skills and more prospects, and–because they wouldn’t have those expenses and that debt–even be able to flounder a little until they got their bearings so they had a chance of ending up doing something they actually wanted instead of doing what they have to do not to default on those loans.

But, of course, this system is not being run for the benefit of students.

It is spring, and with spring comes what I think of the inevitable and you probably don’t–term papers.

It also brings the end of another Gregor novel, and I’m getting up at ridiculous hours of the morning to do that, but I like writing Gregor novels.

I don’t so much like correcting term papers.

Part of the reason for that is the obvious.  Correcting essays,  if you do it right, is dull, slogging work.    You have to pay attention to everything, including things you haven’t thought about for years:  grammar, punctuation, spelling, argument structure.

I’m not saying that these things are not important in my every day life.  Of course they are, but they’re also things that I learned decades ago and don’t really think about anymore while I’m doing them.

When I first came back to teaching after many years of being away, I would find myself stuck on the obvious wrongness of things in papers, with no way of being able to articulate why they were wrong.

Spelling was easy enough, but the other stuff just let me blank.  It was so obviously wrong that I couldn’t understand how anybody could miss is, never mind not know.

I’ve gotten past that by now, of course, and I’ve got a lot of things to say when the papers come in looking like they’ve been written by people whose first language is Klingon.

Oh, and by the way–papers from ESL students are almost always better written than papers from native English speakers, because they ESL students know they don’t k now and are careful about it.

But it’s not that kind of thing that gets to me now.  It’s the stupid.

To give you some idea–the stupid is not about people with low IQs.  My guess is that, if we ever decided to admit people with significant mental handicaps, they’d be like my ESL students–better, because they’d know they didn’t know.

The stupid does not have to do with that but with a kind of casual thoughtlessness.

One of the things I do is to give a short quiz at the start of every class.  This is a three paragraph writing sample, and the point of it is to let me watch my students’ progress through the term.  The daily writing samples tell me if my students are progressing or falling back, if there are things I need to work on with them–and, of course, what their writing is generally like.

This means that when a paper comes in with a vocabulary worthy of The Atlantic Monthly, I know if the student who submitted it does in fact write in a vocabulary worthy of The Atlantic Monthly.

And, of course, many of them don’t.  I can confirm this fact by calling them up and asking them what various words mean, and I can reconfirm it by Googling specific phrases until I find the original document (or documents) that the student has plagarized.

But if this was the extent of the plagarism problem, it wouldn’t be so bad.

What blows me away is the extent to which these kids go to the Internet, copy and paste an essay straight off the Web, and then hand it in.

It’s not the dishonesty that shocks me.  I do understand that there will be a certain amount of this kind of thing whether I like it or not. 

What shocks me is that they’ve apparently never considered the p ossibility that if they could easily find this thing to hand it, other people before them probably found it, too.

This is about the tenth term in a row that somebody has handed in the essay that starts–“there are three kinds of love: agape love, eros love, and philos love.”

To be fair, I should note that there are actually several versions of this essay on the web. 

They all, however, use these three names for the kinds of love, and the students who turn these things in to me cannot define the terms if they’re not looking at their papers.

Now, plagarism is a slippery slope.  There are sometimes shades of grey.

Sometimes students will say to me that they did see the essays on love, but they just used them to write their own essay using the same ideas.

Then I have to explain that not citing ideas is also plagarism, whether they used somebody else’s exact wording or not.

At that point the student will tell me he or she did not know that.

At that point I will have to explain that I went over the  parameters of plagarism already twice in class, and that there’s material on the subject up on Blackboard.

But for me, the kicker isn’t this, either.

It’s their absolute shock that I, um–I actually know how to use the Internet. 

And they are genuinely shocked, as if anybody over the age of 25 couldn’t possibly spend time web surfing or figure out how to use a search engine.

Actually, I’m better at all of it than any of them are, although I don’t know why.  I thought they were supposed to be geting computer training in high school.

Come the research paper, I have to spend an hour or so showing people how to find the information they need to produce an MLA format works cited item on a web site.

I still find it enormously depressing to find these papers scattered in among the rest. 

Part of me wants to say, “for God’s sake, if you’re going to cheat, at least do it right.”

Instead, I try to put the best face on it I can, and explain as patiently as I can.

Then I give the paper a 0 and don’t allow a rewrite.

There’s so much plagarism now that no place I know of maintains the old zero-tolerance, expelled on your ear the first time policy I remember from my own years in college.

I’m not sure that I think that that policy was ever the right one–and now, dealing with “nontraditional” students, students who are first in their families to go to college, students who have had a lot of life before they show up at the door, and all the rest of it–

With all of that, it makes a certain amount of sense that we’re a little more flexible than we used to be.

Even so, the cheating is an indicator of something, and I think it may be yet another indicator that the entire credentialing system is going to go up in smoke.

Because some students cheat because they’re panicked.

And some students cheat because they’re dishonest.

And some students–maybe most of them–cheat because the entire process has lost all meaning.

They don’t think we have anything to teach them, or that they have anything to learn.

They just think their futures are being held hostage, and sitting for four  years in classrooms so that teachers and administrators get paid and universities make money is the price of admission to real life.

 I think they’re honestly shocked when they find out that we care that they cheat at all.

I’ve got papers to correct.

I’d better go do them.

I’ll admit it.  When I first started thinking about writing a blog post this morning, my  initial inclination was to say “well, here we go again,” and leave it at that.

There’s a “here we go again” feel about these things to me these days.

They’ve begun to all run together for me,   in spite of the fact that their perpetrators seem to have (at least superficially) different motives and different personalities.

And I can’t get behind the reductionism of people who declare that anybody who does anything like this is by defintion “mentally ill.”

The designation seems to be shorthand for saying “I don’t understand it, I don’t think anybody can understand it, so I’m going to call it a disease.”

Certainly some of the people who do these things seem to be mentally–um, off–on some level.  It’s difficult to know what to say about somebody who dresses up as The Joker to stage a mass shooting in a theater showing a Batman movie except that he’s got a brain that may be missfiring in all sorts of directions.

In this case, the media grumbling has been not about “mental illness” but about “terrorism.”

And I get that.  In spite of the BBC’s snarking over the use of the term, I think that in the present state of the world that line of inquiry has to be run down.

But I also think it’s unlikely to pan out, at least if we assume “terrorism” means something like a politically or religiously motivated attack.

Those kinds of attacks tend to have people all over the place trying to take credit for them.  After all, what’s the point of making a political statement unless the world knows what you’re trying to state?

Whoever did this does not seem to care if anyone knows who or why or what for, which could bring us to “domestic terrorism.”

“Domestic terrorism” in the US–see Timothy McVeigh–is usually meant to be retaliatory (getting back for Ruby Ridge) or destabilizing.  It’s not necessary to publish a manifesto if  you think the relevant parties (meaning the US government) already know what’s going on, or if you think it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t because you only want to see them collapse.

The last possibility is the one that tends to be true–some lone guy, or pair of guys, whose most coherent motivation is to make as much fuss as possible and get “famous” in the only way they know how.

On that last point, I’m with the people who want to start the blanking out of perpetrators’ names in the press, so that obscurity and not fame attaches to the people who commit these things.

You’d still have some of those outliers, though, because for some of them revenge or the sheer act of violence will be enough.

But I wonder about something.

If this phenomenon is new–the one about fame and retaliation, now, not about political or religious terrorism, neither of which are new–

If this phenomenon is new, and we’re going to pla that game where we blame it on something else that is new–

Why isn’t the therapeutic culture, and the triumph of  therapy and psychological management in the schools, a likely candidate?

How does anyone–and especially a child–defend himself against being “identified” as having a “mental illness” or a “disorder” and the subsequent attempts to “fix” him?

The  most frightening things about the therapeutic culture all seem to me to be unfixable:

There’s the fact that the people who enforce these regimes are almost all trained out of being able to accept other people as human beings. 

Stuck in a room with a therapeutically “trained professional,” it can be virtually impossible to figure out what is going on. 

If you don’t know the jargon or haven’t seen “good social work practice” in operation, it’s as if the entire world has gone fluid and words mean whatever the “professional” wants them to mean at any particular moment.

It’s virtually impossible to get any of these people to make a simple, unambiguous declarative sentence at any time. 

Instead, you get endless forays into “empathic” language whose only purpose is to manipulate you. 

And any attempt to fight back against what feels increasingly like an assault is merely labelled as yet more “evidence” that you have “mental health issues”–after all, what could you possibly be getting upset about?  We were just trying to explore your  own feelings and ideas so that you could get the “help” you need.

If you don’t find some third party knowledge of what’s being done to you, you end up feeling that the world is a dangerous and hostile place where anything you do at any moment can be labeled and used against you–because, in fact, that is exactly what the world actually is.

And since you have neither the vocabulary nor the insight to pinpoint the real cause of the problem–well, the problem is the world and what’s in it and that world has already labeled you fair game for mental aggression.

So maybe it’s not so odd that some of these people–Adam Lanza, say, or the Colorado theater shooter–do what they do.

And then we declare that the proper response to what we’ve done is to “take mental illness more seriously.”

It’s a gloomy, miserable, depressing day. Practically everything I tried to accomplish over the week end has failed.  I could be the poster child for not worth going on with.

And none of that matters, really, so let me get to what does. 

I got an e mail from a friend containing a link to a book review (of sorts) of an autobriographical novel by Christa Wolff.  For those of you who have never heard of her, Wolff was an East German writer and prominent dissident who spend several years teaching in California after th fall of the Berlin wall. 

Then it was revealed that she had spent a lot of her time as a dissident actually informing on her fellow writers to the Stasi.  She was asked to explain herself.  She responded that she’d…just forgotten she’d ever done it.

Yeah, I know.

The review is here:

So, it’s Saturday morning, and I’ve gotten the real writing down, and I’ve even gotten some work done on my latest side project, which is to produce a systematic account of the way I think about politics, morality, and Americanism–including what I mean by that last word, which is not what everybody else means by it.

In case I’m remembering wrongly and I’ve never put up any indication of this last project here, it’s mainly born out of frustration.

A lot of people accuse me of being contradictory in t hese things, which I’m not, if  you understand the underlying assumptions/axioms/priorities, and somehow just explaining these things on the fly doesn’t quite do it.

I thought I would set down things as they came to me and then organize them later into a coherent whole with chapters and sections and everything to make it easy to find the information you want–what do I think about gay marriage? gun control? abortion? physician assisted suicide? God?–and then get somebody like Keith Snyder to turn it into an e book for me and defray the expenses by charging $1.99 for a copy.

I figure I’d sell about six, but what the hell. 

And yes, I do realize that the format as I’ve planned it would sort of defeat the purpose I have for writing it, since anybody who wanted could skip the foundational sections in the first chapter and just read the notes on the hot button issues.

Still, I’d have it out there, and when people started yelling at me, I could go “See that?  Go read that.”

On top of that, I think I still own a website called How To Be An American, which I meant to use for a project that was supposed to include just this kind of thing,  so I could also put it up there.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that the  incredible roller coaster that has been my life is finally getting to a place where it settles down and I can free  up panic-and-respond time for doing things that actually interest me.

Like I said, fingers crossed.  Fingers really crossed.

Anyway, I did a little work on that today.  The people who comment here have been a tremendous help, because you’ve shown me where my explanations need to be clearer or more fully fleshed out. 

So you’ll probably hear a lot about the stuff that’s going into this as time goes by.  You’ve heard a lot of it already.

In the meantime, I’m still reading Albion’s Seed, and I’ve gotten to what he calls the “backcountry.”

This is, I have to admit, the fun part.

I think I’d been reading through this section for about ten minutes when I realized that my head had started to play Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” on a nonstop loop.

By the time I’d been reading for an hour, there was so much hard liquor and so many guns, the image was dizzying.  The description of courting, wedding, and marriage customs was hysterical.  I was just starting to wonder why there wasn’t somebody dead at virtually every wedding when it turned out, well, that there was.

There we were in the middle of the eighteenth century, and these people were not only exhibiting virtually all the characteristics of life in a redneck trailer park, they were making the most anarchic of those trailer parks look tame.

I don’t know when it was I started to realize that I was having a better time–that I was happier in the company of these people–than I had been with any of the others.

I’ve been to trailer parks.  I know rednecks.  I know there are many bad parts, not the least to which can be an instinctive racism and xenophobia.

But.

First, I think there is an instinctive racism/homophobia in a lot of places in this culture, and the incidence of it here seems to me to be at least honest.

Honest  prejudice is, I think, a lot easier to overcome than the hidden kind–easier to overcome almost because it tends to be violently expressed. 

These people know who and what they are and are not shy about expressing it, or owning up to it, either.

You can argue with that, and argue directly.  You’re going to have a lot more trouble arguing with the Hollywood starlet (or college professor, or politician) who mouths all the right platitudes about affirmative action and multiculturalism and whatever while at the same time making perfectly damned sure that he never has to actually associate with any of the minorities or immigrants he thinks he’s championing.

Over at Victor Hanson’s website, there’s a good essay (“American in the Age of Myth”) about just that.

Second, there is just something wonderfully, exuberantly male about all this. 

I suppose I’m talking about “male” in the sociological sense, and I’m willing to stipulate that individual female people could have the same characteristics.

The thing is, I’ve never met one.  Everybody I have ever known and observed who has this sort of no-holds-barred attitude to life has been biologically as well as sociologlically male, and most of them have been young.

Male in this sense is Fred and George Weasley and every test pilot who ever lived.  It’s the stories you read when they give out the Congressional Medal of Honor.  It’s “Look, Ma, no hands” and lighting farts. It’s pride in skill and competitiveness gone in almost everything.  

And that brings me to the third thing.

What I remember best about Fred and George Weasley  is the scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where they effectively  put an end to the reign of Delores Umbrage.

Because the Delores Umbrages–the Nurse Ratcheds–of this world have one purpose in life, and that is to destroy this kind of maleness. 

And maleness of this kind is the one thing that can destroy a Delores Umbrage.

I look around lately and think we need  more and more of this kind of being male, and see that we are spending more and more time trying to beat it out of our children. 

Don’t defend yourself (or, by extention, anyone else)!  Wait till the authority comes!  Anything you do is going to require you to spend a really long time in school, and to get  into college!  Learn to sit still and never challenge the teacher–you’ll get bad recommendations!

And on and on and on.

People here sometimes talk about when the “rot set in.”

I’ve got my candidate:  it was the day when they decided that Chuck Yaeger couldn’t be an astronaut because he’d never gone to college.

I mean, for God’s sake.

Just a couple of notes in response to Lymaree’s post.

1) My shoulder is like Lymaree’s husband’s shoulder.  I first dislocated it at 15.  It’s been popping in and out ever since. 

I don’t know if they had the surgery back then, but if they did nobody mentioned it to us.  If they had, my father would have had me in the hospital before I had a chance to complain.

The surgery was recommended to me many years later, when I was first married, but I treated it the way I treat all suggestions that I seek medical attention.

Phooey, as Nero Wolf would say.

2) When I said that all the Reform denominations seem to end up in the same (philosophical, political and religious) place, I was talking about their organizations and hierarchies, not their individual  members.

Most of the individual Methodists I know are fairly conservative, but the United Methodist Church as an organization could trade its web site with the American Humanist Association and be pretty much where they are now, except for a few mentions of God, which they don’t seem to know what to do with anyway.

And although I do get Robert’s point about people and the way they behave, it fails to explain why the Catholics–although they go in for all the welfare state and soft socialism stuff–do  not get snared by the rest of it.

The problem seems to me to be specific to Protestant denominations, and I can’t quite figure out why.

And the right royal mess of it started early, too.  You can see its beginnings in 19th Century Quakerism and in the Unitarianism of 19th Century New England. 

I’ve got to teach two three hour classes today, back to back.

I come home from these things so hoarse I can barely talk.

In some cases, ice cream is medicinal.

This is Tuesday, and Tuesday is a day on which I don’t teach.

Today I also have very little to do in the way of correcting or prep. I had a long stretch of office hours yesterday, and as a result I put up all my Blackboard content and worked out  my 102 lecture for tomorrow and did all that kind of thing that I usually put off to Tuesday afternoons.

Add to that the fact that we’ve gotten to the part of the term when practically nobody is handing in assignments, and that I didn’t sleep through the alarm clock going off, and I was looking forward to a nice long stretch of music and book after I finished my writing.

I alsomst managed it, too, except that the arm that got dislocated is still a little sore, and I had a nearly impossible time holding up the book in order to read it.

The book is called Albion’s Seed.  It’s off in another room at the moment, and I’d go look for the complete title and the author, but at the moment I’m mad at it.

I’m not angry at the content.  It’s one of the more interesting books I’ve read in a long time.

It purports to be a study of the ways in which the original settlement of the American colonies was derived from distinct British regions with distinct regional cultures whose characters are with us still.

When I first heard that description, I thought the book was going to be an expanded version of a Thomas Sowell book (Black Rednecks and White Liberals, I think), which is about the ways in which black underclass culture is a direct descendant of white “cracker” (hillbilly?) culture.

That’s a very interesting book, too, but it’s a polemic against the modern fashion for declaring that ghetto culture is “authentically black” while things like getting good grades in school and not fathering children out of wedlock is not.

The Sowell is a very interesting  book, too, and very well researched, and very well worth looking into, but Albion’s Seed is not that.

What it actually is–in spite of what seem to me to be mostly cursory nods to the English regions from which the colonies sprang–is a sociological study of the attitudes, habits, ideas and religious convictions of just those colonies. 

In each case, at end of each such study, we get a look into how the colonists of each particular region defined the idea of “freedom.”

 This, as the saying goes, explains a lot.

It especially explains a lot of my own ambivalent feelings about my own American region. 

The Puritans of New England, it seems, pretty much invented the idea of policing and punishing domestic violence and punishing sexual transgressions of various kinds (adultery, fornication, whatever) equally harshly (and sometimes more harshly) for men as for women.

They also invented something very much like our Child Protective Services, except that they’d take your child away from you and give it to another family if you didn’t punish it enough.

To me, this does not sound like an actual substantive difference.

The book is not answering all my questions about this period, and I’ve got a hunch it isn’t even going to address my big questions about religion (specifically, about Christian denominational histories), but it is very interesting indeed, and it even included an explanation of Quaker belief and practice.

I still don’t understand Quaker belief and practice, mind you, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that it isn’t really possible to understand it in anything like an intellectualized way. 

Reading about this reminds me of the 1960s truism about LSD: you can’t understand what being on acid is like unless you’re actually on acid.

In case you’re wondering–my big question about religion (and particularly Christian denominational histories) is why the Reform denominations seem to predictably and exclusive to descend into some form of what we would now call “left liberalism.”

I’m not talking about the socialist aspects of mainline Protestantism.  Given the New Testament, a bias in favor of at least some forms of socialism makes a certain amount of sense.

I’m talking about the (by now almost inevitable) plunge into what amounts to militant secularism covered in fancy theological language, a recoil against all things supernatural, and the complete abandonment of any concept of personal sin.

If there was one thing the Puritans were convinced of, it was the centrality of personal sin.  Their present day descendants (Congregationalists, United Church of Christ) see sin only in “systemic injustice” and don’t think anything can be done about it unless we get to the “root causes.”

Of course, they’re still true to their heritage in wanting to police everybody’s private behavior and innermost thoughts–so there’s that.

Apparently, one of the things the Puritans had was a guy who went around and inspected life in all the houses to make sure the family was living the way it was supposed to be, with the power to bring charges if they weren’t.  The court could then dissolve the family if it wasn’t behaving as proscribed.

Puritan towns also existed as vast networks of informers, with  neighbors running to tattle to authorities about everything from religious opinions to a husband calling his wife bad names.

At any rate, I’ll get back to that, and probably to my big religious question, too.

At the moment, I’ve got a problem.

The book is fun to read.  It’s well written.  It’s got lots of information in it I haven’t seen before.  It’s got charts and maps and all kind of other things.

It’s also as large and as heavy as a piece of furniture.

Serious furniture.

Which means I probably couldn’t read it for long periods even if the arm wasn’t still aching on and off.

It’s literally too heavy to hold up for long periods of time, and I can’t take it in to school with me at all.

I’ve already ruined two tote bags this years trying to carry heavy textbooks.  Add this thing to the latest one and it would disintegrate on the spot.

Surely somebody, somewhere, ought to have consider this sort of thing when they designed the book.

But then, this year, I’m continually surprised by what book designers aren’t considering.