Part One: On the Origin of Rights... here. Part Two: Liberty, Society and the Tyranny of the Individual... here.
In my previous post in this series, I asserted that the aggrandizement of the individual and his emplacement outside society was a denial of fundamental truths about being human. I made this claim despite my extreme discomfort with the notion of "human nature," offering as proof the fact that everywhere humans live, they live in communities. Logically, then, the community must be a development in human evolution that has been positively selected as our species endures. Still, we must be careful about how much we infer from nature. The move from is to ought is fraught with peril and we must avoid falling into the naturalistic fallacy. Yet I contend that we can safely infer some things from our deep past and that these offer intuitions into how we should live now. I plan to explore this idea in this post.
If we are to posit that there is something hard-wired in humans about the need for society, we must step back from the human and look at the level of organism. At this level, so it is generally assumed, the struggle for existence occurs, creature competes with creature to survive and reproduce, "survival of the fittest," as Darwin and Herbert Spencer had it. Upon first glance, then, we assume that nature selects the fittest individuals and allows their traits to be passed to subsequent generations.
How, then, are we to account for traits that are detrimental to individuals? One thinks of the bird that warns others of a predator's approach, or the mother sacrificing herself to save her child, or the soldier who risks himself for his comrades. How can the efficient mechanism of selection produce individuals such as these? Are they flukes? Mutants? Darwin never thought so, and the work of modern biologists bears him out.
The answer is that selective processes do not operate solely on individuals. Nor do they operate primarily on genes. The work of biologists like David Sloane Wilson and E. O. Wilson-no relation-suggests that selection operates on both of these levels, and more. Specifically, they argue, selection can operate on groups and on wider conglomerations as well. Indeed, wherever there is adaptation, there is selection. Groups, then, evolve in competition with other groups and, within those groups, individuals compete.
But there is a problem with this theory- the free rider. The free rider cheats; he lives off the largesse of his fellows, essentially stealing their energy and putting the group at a disadvantage. This should make the free rider a more fit specimen than his fellows and, in time, the whole group should dissolve into a mass of cheaters. Yet it does not. Why? Because of group-to-group competition. This level of competition will tend to produce fitter groups, which is to say groups that are composed of what Wilson and Wilson called "solid citizens." In other words, the exigencies of competition between groups will tend to curb the worst impulses of individuals, just as individual adaptations will tend to be disruptive to the group as a whole. Thus, the worst excesses of free riders will tend to be suppressed since they make the group as a whole less fit in competition with other groups. Most members will be genetically predisposed towards at least some degree of cooperation, because the fitness of individuals is contingent upon the fitness of the group.
What is this to do with us? My contention is simple. The same pressures that shaped the groups of animals Wilson and Wilson observed shaped us as organisms. Society has clearly been favored over individual life, compassion over cheating. Social living is in our genes. We have evolved mechanisms for living close to one another, such as morality and religion and, eventually, government, that discourage free-riding and contribute to the overall fitness of our communities. Their advantage is shown in their continuance, though there is always room for improvement.
Morality, I contend, arose as a set of rules for reining in small societies. Darwin suggested that it would be easy to imagine compassion evolving among these groups in order to keep their members from killing one another. Such compassion did not, alas, frequently extend beyond the group. Religion, however, proved to be more scalable. Evolving from tribal belief systems to global belief systems, religions worked because they extended the notion of the "tribe" beyond kin groups related by blood and marriage to, at least in theory with Christianity and Islam, embrace all mankind. Governments are potentially even bigger, since their power can extend over multiple religious groups, a check on competition among them.
The development of religion and government were required as humans began to live in larger and larger agglomerations. Morality can only hold small groups in check, typically groups where everyone knows one another and is aware of what the other is doing, say a village or a hunter-gatherer group. Religion can work as the binding force in a direct theocracy, where the ruler is the god and is perceived to be so, as was likely the case in early cities. Government works when diverse people come together from disparate places and acts as an arbiter among them.
In this respect, government is like money. Money appears in situations where trust is required between persons who do not know each other and want to do business. It is a fiction that is agreed upon by participating parties. Whether is is so-called "fiat money" or specie does not matter. The one has worth because some printing authority says it does and we assent. The other has worth because it is relatively rare and we like shiny things. Either way, our approval is required.
Government is the same. It is an abstraction that is required when communities are too large for face-to-face interaction among all members. An impartial arbiter, ideally, it takes the place of the trust we would have if we lived in a community where we all knew each other. It fails, in as much as it does fail, because it lacks personal connection. It succeeds, inasmuch as it does succeed, because it lacks personal connection. The larger the scale it operates on, the more will be required of it. Those who would have us abandon government and fall back on the safety net of family and friends, want to return to the era when we all knew each other individually. That ship has sailed. Government, to put it bluntly, is our family and friends when we have no others because, at bottom, it is us. It is left to us, then, to determine what the relationship will be.
16 September 2011
10 September 2011
Let the Wounds Heal
I will not join you as you wallow in the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I will not watch the countless specials, read the retrospectives, nor indulge in any empty, symbolic gestures on the Internet. I will not allow myself to be swept up in the great, emotional current over the hurt done to me and my country. I will not howl my hurt until the noise of my howling joins with the howls of others until the sound of our collective pain drowns out all other human voices. I will not pat myself on the back because "we" liberated Afghanistan. I will not pump my fist because "we" got Osama bin Laden.
I will remember, silently, and mourn. I will mourn for our losses: for the Americans who have died prosecuting the "War on Terror," for the civilians caught in the middle, for the innocence that died on that day, for the fortitude that might have kept us from meekly submitting to the will of our leaders, for the way we are still cowed whenever the event is brandished in support of some new iniquity. I will mourn those killed that day, but not because they died (I did that when it happened). I will mourn them for the world we have created in their names.
It is not a better world, on balance. We are not a better people. Challenged by history to become larger, to extend our vision beyond ourselves, we instead became smaller. We could not see past our own hurt and, blinded by the pain, we lashed out at others and, indeed, set upon ourselves. We paraded our wounds and used them to excuse the inexcusable.
If you want a wound to heal, you bandage it, keep it clean, medicate it. Afterward, if the wound is severe enough, it leaves a scar that fades over time, a reminder of the hurt tougher than the undamaged tissue around it, an emblem of the healing. It will not heal if you constantly rip off the dressing, expose it to air, and poke at it to remind yourself of the pain. Picking at your wounds, and inflicting new ones on yourself, is the very definition of masochism. Yet we will do this tomorrow, and consider it part of the healing process.
Of course it was a horrible day and of course, though it is almost a cliche, the world changed. But as we mourn our losses we should not only consider what was ripped from us but also what, more tragically, we gave away willingly.
I will remember, silently, and mourn. I will mourn for our losses: for the Americans who have died prosecuting the "War on Terror," for the civilians caught in the middle, for the innocence that died on that day, for the fortitude that might have kept us from meekly submitting to the will of our leaders, for the way we are still cowed whenever the event is brandished in support of some new iniquity. I will mourn those killed that day, but not because they died (I did that when it happened). I will mourn them for the world we have created in their names.
It is not a better world, on balance. We are not a better people. Challenged by history to become larger, to extend our vision beyond ourselves, we instead became smaller. We could not see past our own hurt and, blinded by the pain, we lashed out at others and, indeed, set upon ourselves. We paraded our wounds and used them to excuse the inexcusable.
If you want a wound to heal, you bandage it, keep it clean, medicate it. Afterward, if the wound is severe enough, it leaves a scar that fades over time, a reminder of the hurt tougher than the undamaged tissue around it, an emblem of the healing. It will not heal if you constantly rip off the dressing, expose it to air, and poke at it to remind yourself of the pain. Picking at your wounds, and inflicting new ones on yourself, is the very definition of masochism. Yet we will do this tomorrow, and consider it part of the healing process.
Of course it was a horrible day and of course, though it is almost a cliche, the world changed. But as we mourn our losses we should not only consider what was ripped from us but also what, more tragically, we gave away willingly.
16 July 2011
World Religions Class- My "Manifesto"
Note: I am being considered for a full-time teaching position at a two-year college to teach history, mostly World Civilizations and U.S. History. But an intriguing prospect is that I might have to teach a World Religions class that is cross-listed with Religious Studies. This is my philosophy of such a class and, ideally, would be part of an introductory lecture, or perhaps a challenge to students as the class starts, a touchstone for the duration of the course to test for accuracy. Some of the original ideas were first posted here.
The chief problematic of the study of religion is that it crosses a number of boundaries, many of which cannot be seen until after they are transgressed. If we are to treat religion on its own terms, we are forced to admit that it does not exist, that religion proper is an abstract, a genus in scientific terms, that contains members sharing general characteristics, members who can mate, though with varying success. Yet it is an abstract induced from the very real practices of very real people. In that sense, we might then say that while there are real religions, religion is a construct, just as there are real dogs, but no Canes. Accepting this, we are then forced to deal with each faith individually, regardless of the commonalities they share, especially the commonality of ancestry. This will not do, so we posit the notion- a very useful notion- of religion as a separate discursive space in which Christianity and Islam, animism and deism, henotheism and atheism, can all be studied as members of the same genus. But the boundaries between religions are real boundaries, whose crossing often causes discomfort, and the creation of religion as a category of analysis exposes us to the risk that we will confuse the model with reality.
If, then, we admit the futility of examining "pure" religion is there anything to say that can render it useful? Assuming there is, we must approach the topic from the bottom up, addressing the origins of religious belief and working our way to individual religions and beyond. At the deepest level religion, with all the caveats listed above, is a cultural phenomenon and culture, I argue, is an outgrowth of biology. Darwin recognized this, at least in part, when he posited that morality and religions were the products of selection. "No tribe," he wrote, "could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery & c., were common; consequently, such crimes within the tribe are branded with everlasting infamy." This insight led him to suppose that sympathy, an evolved trait, was the glue that held societies together, and that a perceived lack of morality in so-called primitive peoples was due to a lack of sympathy for those not in the tribe. He even suggested an early scheme for the evolution of religion when he suggested that belief in unseen agents could easily become belief in one or more gods.
This is not, however, a class about Darwin; it is a class in the history of religion. But our starting premise is that religion is a product of men and societies, and that culture, like biology, is subject to selective pressures and that, again like biology, it does not evolve to an end. And it is this organizing premise that, I hope, will prevent this class from being a mere recitation of data points about religions through history. We will discuss religion in historical and anthropological terms, tentatively adopting as our framework for both the classification of religions offered by sociologist Robert Bellah: primitive, archaic, historic, early modern and modern. These are not static categories and, as we shall see over the course of this term, religions evolve. They are also not meant to privilege one "stage" over another, a fact which Bellah, when he proposed this classification, was at pains to remind us, stating, "primitive man is as fully religious as man at any stage of existence." The categories are more about the interaction with the exoteric culture than they are an evaluation of the advanced nature of a religion.
How do religions evolve? Culture, the geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has suggested, "enables us to accumulate prior discoveries and helps us profit from experience transmitted by our ancestors- knowledge that we would not have on our own." Just as biological evolution arises from the accumulation of new genetic information, culture evolves as it responds to novel circumstances through the accumulation of cultural genes. This is not a completely blind process, as human agency is involved, but the end is almost always and only survival, not arrival at some new and improved form. Those arise by accident. Still selection will tend to favor customs and rules with real social utility.
Religion will tend to evolve in the same way. Just as organisms evolve by recombination of genes and genetic drift, so do cultural artifacts. Imagining a religion as an organism, we can theorize the beliefs and rituals as genes and, having done this, we can postulate how recombination might affect them. Systems that are relatively closed will evolve by cultural drift, analogous to genetic drift, through slow, random change brought about by imperfect transmission. In a group of this kind a religious ritual, or other cultural artifact, would have little impetus to change once its utility is established, all other things being equal. A group-level adaptation, it would be especially resistant to change except in response to competition from other groups. It would be most resistant to change from within, since in such circumstances individual adaptations tend to undermine the group and are usually suppressed.
What about when groups, and their religious systems, come together? Relatively few groups endure for long in complete isolation from others, and it is in the places where they meet that changes will occur. Darwin noted that while isolation was good for slow improvement and better assured the survival of a species, the fastest adaptations occur when species of the same genus come into contact. So when religions meet and compete with each other, we should expect to see the greater change and the change will be greatest when the religions are already structurally similar. The exchange of cultural genes in religion is the root of syncretism and it is the most important aspect of this course. No religion is entirely an original product and, as we examine each, we will see how it arose from what came before it, and follow its traces as it meets others.
This does not mean that all religions converge on a single point. In addition to acknowledging the debt any particular religion owes to others, we will also examine those aspects that are original to it. Whatever currents feed the stream of a given religion, each arises in its own cultural and geographic milieu. So each religion we study will be considered also on its own terms. We will examine the core tenets of each faith we encounter, and take the faith claims of its believers seriously as best we are able to access them. We will attempt to understand how each establishes its core beliefs and deals with deviance. We will trace the impact of each religion on the world, by placing it in history.
Whatever our individual creeds, religious belief has been a powerful force in our lives. It has helped to shape human civilizations as human civilizations have shaped it. It is my goal in this course neither to disparage nor to encourage any individual belief, merely to show the trajectories of the major world religions, from their origins to the present day, and to provide, however limited, a means of gauging their importance to the societies that created them and which they, in turn, created.
23 June 2011
On Rights, Part Two: Liberty, Society, and the Tyranny of the Individual
A little more than a year ago, when I had grander ambitions for what I might do with this platform, I tried to raise some questions about where rights come from and what they mean as we interact with each other. In that piece, I noted how we alienate our so-called "unalienable" rights, rights which, by their very definition, can neither be taken nor given away. I suggested that the very fact that we do abridge them and that they can be abridged should cause us to pause and to re-think this notion. I ended with a plea that we take responsibility for the exercise and limitation of our "rights," asking if the tyranny of the majority was really any worse than the tyranny of the individual. These questions still plague me.
A number of articles I have read online recently, about a variety of topics, have brought me back to thinking about these issues, about the way that individual rights intersect with those of the community. Mostly, it has to do with a rising tide of libertarianism, embodied in politicians such as Ron and Rand Paul and in the Tea Party movement; everywhere we look, shrill voices are crying out about the loss of personal liberty and the encroachment of government in our daily lives. Smaller government, lower (or indeed no) taxes, much less regulation, absolutism on property rights, an end to foreign wars, the aggrandizement of individual rights... these are major components of the libertarian agenda. I have to admit a certain sympathy for it. Authority and I have at best a cordial relationship. I have, for the record, voted Libertarian twice (1996 and 2000, in states where it made no difference, it should be noted). And my inner two-year old, who stamps his feet and takes his toys and goes home when he gets mad, finds it easy to understand a political philosophy that can be summed up in a single word, "Mine!"
But the libertarian movement, whatever point its adherents might have about the morality and advisability of our foreign wars, whatever legitimate fears they may have about government overreach, encapsulates everything I fear about the tyranny of the individual. It forces to the fore my earlier question about where we calibrate the balance of personal liberty and the greater good, unless I am question-begging by assuming they are not the same. Embracing the otherwise laudatory goal of non-coercion, libertarians deny that we have any responsibility towards each other that we do not voluntarily take on. Thus, progressive taxation to fund public goods such as infrastructure, welfare, education and health care are prima facie immoral, constituting a taking from one person to give to another. Governments exist only to protect citizens against fraud and force; individuals are best left to chart their own destinies completely free of outside interference.
This valorization of the individual is all well and good, except that there is an accompanying moral apparatus that is truly horrifying. It assumes that we all succeed or fail by dint of our talents and, so, we should own all the fruits of those talents. It seems a natural outgrowth of a religious worldview that sees success as proof of God's favor and failure as the result of immorality. We see echoes of it in the popularity of the "prosperity Gospel," which seems often little more than a fig leaf for divinely-sanctioned greed. The resurgent appeal (recrudescence?) of Ayn Rand's work, which presents a world where the truly creative stand astride the world attempting to shed the common parasites who live off their labor, in conservative circles is a testament to the search for justifications. Placing the individual at the pinnacle of the social world is empowering, bold, American. And wrong, because it denies everything that makes us human.
The individualistic streak in Western political philosophy was a seventeenth-century invention, and runs counter to the main stream of most previous Christian and pre-Christian thought, which saw man as being most complete, indeed natural, in a community. While I generally shy away from claims about a so-called human nature, I think it not unreasonable to assume that there are certain habits that are, so to speak, hard-wired into the species. One such is society. What is my evidence for such a contention? Only this: that everywhere humans live, they live in the company of other humans. There may have been a point in our distant evolutionary past where humans lived alone, but the exigencies of sexual reproduction and simple survival made social organization advantageous. Simply put, those who lived in societies out-competed those who did not, they reproduced in greater numbers and we who live now are the beneficiaries of their success.
This is what makes the tyranny of the individual so pernicious. What I mean by this term is the notion that individual rights always predominate, that none of us can be forced into involuntary associations with others, that none of us should be required to contribute to the well-being of our fellows. If the absolute freedom of one requires others to suffer for lack of help we can provide, so be it, goes this line of reasoning. As we have seen earlier, their failure or suffering is the result of moral turpitude, so it would be immoral for government to tax the just in order to aid them. The tyranny of the majority is little better, and I would not argue for it, but there is of course a middle position and it is the position that, despite the absolutism of our founding documents, we have tried to steer as a nation. For the most part.
And, of course, it is important not to tar all assertions of individual rights against those of the greater society as tyranny. It is not tyranny to assert rights that do not harm others (in my opinion gay marriage, for instance, falls into this category; others may differ) and, in fact, the majority is tyrannical when it insists on abridging such rights. The community ought not abridge your right to speak because you say unpopular, even vile, things. It is positively tyrannical, however, to assert that your right to do what you will outweighs the rights of others, even rights broadly construed and un-enumerated. Sorry, but those taxes you pay are the price of civilization and if you think civilization is bad, go live in Somalia and tell me what the alternative is like. The discipline of civilization is the restraint of individual will, a discipline that must be enforced if we are to have civilization at all. Part of this discipline is the harnessing of resources to the greater good. We all give up some measure of autonomy for the privilege of living with others, an arrangement that has served us well. To assume you can live otherwise is childish.
I hope that I have not strayed too far from my original notions, but I am a little too close to this to tell. In a later post, I hope to offer my understanding of the nature of human societies, which informs the views I have expressed. If there is anything to take away, it is simply that I think it is fine to assert individual rights, but only to the point where it does no harm to others, and that individuals must be as careful about asserting the primacy of their rights as society must be. Libertarians would, generally, agree with the first part of this, though the sphere of action they claim would extend much farther from themselves.
And, a final point. I have picked on libertarians a great deal without going after far leftists. That is because, here at least, true leftists have such an insignificant voice that it does not even register. Radical collectivism is not the answer to our troubles any more than radical individualism is. Indeed, both are susceptible to the same aggregation of power and wealth in the hands of a few, and in the breakdown of social structures, as to be hard to differentiate by their results.
A number of articles I have read online recently, about a variety of topics, have brought me back to thinking about these issues, about the way that individual rights intersect with those of the community. Mostly, it has to do with a rising tide of libertarianism, embodied in politicians such as Ron and Rand Paul and in the Tea Party movement; everywhere we look, shrill voices are crying out about the loss of personal liberty and the encroachment of government in our daily lives. Smaller government, lower (or indeed no) taxes, much less regulation, absolutism on property rights, an end to foreign wars, the aggrandizement of individual rights... these are major components of the libertarian agenda. I have to admit a certain sympathy for it. Authority and I have at best a cordial relationship. I have, for the record, voted Libertarian twice (1996 and 2000, in states where it made no difference, it should be noted). And my inner two-year old, who stamps his feet and takes his toys and goes home when he gets mad, finds it easy to understand a political philosophy that can be summed up in a single word, "Mine!"
But the libertarian movement, whatever point its adherents might have about the morality and advisability of our foreign wars, whatever legitimate fears they may have about government overreach, encapsulates everything I fear about the tyranny of the individual. It forces to the fore my earlier question about where we calibrate the balance of personal liberty and the greater good, unless I am question-begging by assuming they are not the same. Embracing the otherwise laudatory goal of non-coercion, libertarians deny that we have any responsibility towards each other that we do not voluntarily take on. Thus, progressive taxation to fund public goods such as infrastructure, welfare, education and health care are prima facie immoral, constituting a taking from one person to give to another. Governments exist only to protect citizens against fraud and force; individuals are best left to chart their own destinies completely free of outside interference.
This valorization of the individual is all well and good, except that there is an accompanying moral apparatus that is truly horrifying. It assumes that we all succeed or fail by dint of our talents and, so, we should own all the fruits of those talents. It seems a natural outgrowth of a religious worldview that sees success as proof of God's favor and failure as the result of immorality. We see echoes of it in the popularity of the "prosperity Gospel," which seems often little more than a fig leaf for divinely-sanctioned greed. The resurgent appeal (recrudescence?) of Ayn Rand's work, which presents a world where the truly creative stand astride the world attempting to shed the common parasites who live off their labor, in conservative circles is a testament to the search for justifications. Placing the individual at the pinnacle of the social world is empowering, bold, American. And wrong, because it denies everything that makes us human.
The individualistic streak in Western political philosophy was a seventeenth-century invention, and runs counter to the main stream of most previous Christian and pre-Christian thought, which saw man as being most complete, indeed natural, in a community. While I generally shy away from claims about a so-called human nature, I think it not unreasonable to assume that there are certain habits that are, so to speak, hard-wired into the species. One such is society. What is my evidence for such a contention? Only this: that everywhere humans live, they live in the company of other humans. There may have been a point in our distant evolutionary past where humans lived alone, but the exigencies of sexual reproduction and simple survival made social organization advantageous. Simply put, those who lived in societies out-competed those who did not, they reproduced in greater numbers and we who live now are the beneficiaries of their success.
This is what makes the tyranny of the individual so pernicious. What I mean by this term is the notion that individual rights always predominate, that none of us can be forced into involuntary associations with others, that none of us should be required to contribute to the well-being of our fellows. If the absolute freedom of one requires others to suffer for lack of help we can provide, so be it, goes this line of reasoning. As we have seen earlier, their failure or suffering is the result of moral turpitude, so it would be immoral for government to tax the just in order to aid them. The tyranny of the majority is little better, and I would not argue for it, but there is of course a middle position and it is the position that, despite the absolutism of our founding documents, we have tried to steer as a nation. For the most part.
And, of course, it is important not to tar all assertions of individual rights against those of the greater society as tyranny. It is not tyranny to assert rights that do not harm others (in my opinion gay marriage, for instance, falls into this category; others may differ) and, in fact, the majority is tyrannical when it insists on abridging such rights. The community ought not abridge your right to speak because you say unpopular, even vile, things. It is positively tyrannical, however, to assert that your right to do what you will outweighs the rights of others, even rights broadly construed and un-enumerated. Sorry, but those taxes you pay are the price of civilization and if you think civilization is bad, go live in Somalia and tell me what the alternative is like. The discipline of civilization is the restraint of individual will, a discipline that must be enforced if we are to have civilization at all. Part of this discipline is the harnessing of resources to the greater good. We all give up some measure of autonomy for the privilege of living with others, an arrangement that has served us well. To assume you can live otherwise is childish.
I hope that I have not strayed too far from my original notions, but I am a little too close to this to tell. In a later post, I hope to offer my understanding of the nature of human societies, which informs the views I have expressed. If there is anything to take away, it is simply that I think it is fine to assert individual rights, but only to the point where it does no harm to others, and that individuals must be as careful about asserting the primacy of their rights as society must be. Libertarians would, generally, agree with the first part of this, though the sphere of action they claim would extend much farther from themselves.
And, a final point. I have picked on libertarians a great deal without going after far leftists. That is because, here at least, true leftists have such an insignificant voice that it does not even register. Radical collectivism is not the answer to our troubles any more than radical individualism is. Indeed, both are susceptible to the same aggregation of power and wealth in the hands of a few, and in the breakdown of social structures, as to be hard to differentiate by their results.
20 June 2011
A Teaching Philosophy
Note: I haven't done anything here for awhile because... well... I've been lazy about writing for pleasure. Or for any other purpose. My latest project (outside the normal school stuff) has been testing the waters in the community college job and private high school market, weighing some options. Inevitably, they ask for something called a Teaching Philosophy. Ugh. Such a statement, and cover letters, are about all the writing of consequence I've done of late. So, why not? Something to jump-start the writing habit?
Teaching should be a passion. It should be something one does because one cannot imagine anything more satisfying than the exchange of ideas in robust discussion. This, at least, is what has drawn me again and again to the teaching of history. Teaching was my first choice as a profession in high school more than twenty years ago, and though life diverted me temporarily, the desire to teach was always there. Indeed, as I look back over a varied career path, it was the jobs where teaching was an element of my job that were the most satisfying. It was the urge to teach history that drew me out of the corporate world and back into the academic world, a decision that has left me materially poorer, but richer in knowledge; it is a decision I have never regretted.
I approach the classroom as, I hope, my students approach it- as a learner. I cannot, alas, know everything there is to know about history and it is a constant surprise and pleasure to discover how much my students know that I might not expect. They sometimes teach me how to look at things in a way I had not before, and this is a joy to experience. The teaching experience is a learning experience not only through what happens in class, but what happens out of class. Preparation always brings up some new fact that seems to be a piece of a larger puzzle, one I cannot wait to put together with my students. Both of these require a sort of humility in the face of one's own ignorance, a humility that I sometimes struggle with but that, on my best days, I achieve to my own betterment and that of my students.
My own experience both as a student and a teacher has shown me that a successful class is an engaged one. To that end, I try every day to bring a high level of energy to my work. It does no good to be enthusiastic about history without projecting that enthusiasm and students- I remember this from when I was a student- are very good about picking up on false enthusiasm. Energy is required to create the positive learning environment that leaves both students and teachers certain that the time spent in class is time well spent.
Teaching history is little different from teaching anything else in the end. As a historian and a teacher, I want to show my students the grand arc of whatever subject I am teaching, provide them with the plot in which the people and events are story elements. I enjoy making connections in this regard and, through discussion, I encourage my students to make them as well. At all times I try to make them aware of the contingency of history, to make them aware that any given episode could have turned out differently, to make them aware of human agency throughout. History is not the result of vague, impersonal forces; it is the result of people doing things.
I recognize that, often, the Western Civilization or U.S. History class a student takes in his or her first or second year is the only academic contact with history that student has in college. As teachers, then, we should strive to use this opportunity to demonstrate history's relevance to their lives. I am constantly looking for ways to connect historical material to current events. No event is without a back story and it is the study of history that provides them with context.
One of the best ways I know to engage students is by showing them how history is done. Study of primary documents and writing about these documents is of supreme importance in this endeavor, as students learn how to marshal facts in support of an argument and how to present this argument clearly. The critical thinking and writing skills learned in this manner should, one hopes, attune students to the world around them, helping them better understand the media they consume.
I have always felt that, in order to learn and to avoid hidebound thinking, categories need to be destabilized. There must be a point where disciplines converge and it is impossible to move towards that point if disciplinary divides are rigidly policed. My goal as a history teacher has always been to help students breach the boundaries around the discipline and to bring their own experiences and disciplines to bear. Since my undergraduate degree was in philosophy, I use some of the tools I learned in that field. I also bring insights gleaned from my reading in the social and natural sciences and in other areas. I feel that the variety of my interests has translated well to my dealings with young college students who come with a variety of academic gifts and interests. I share with them an intense curiosity about the world and a desire to understand its workings. Together we teach each other to see the world anew, a process in which I can only serve as a facilitator.
These are the beliefs and attitudes that I bring as a teacher. I come expecting to learn as much as I teach. I believe in offering my students all of my energy and focus while I am in the classroom with them. I seek to emphasize trends and not events and to show the contingency of history which is the result of human agency. I strive to make history relevant by showing its impact on what is happening today. I attempt to demonstrate history's utility in developing critical thinking skills by making students, at least temporarily, into historians. I have never experienced anything so satisfying in my professional life as when all of these mesh together.
Teaching should be a passion. It should be something one does because one cannot imagine anything more satisfying than the exchange of ideas in robust discussion. This, at least, is what has drawn me again and again to the teaching of history. Teaching was my first choice as a profession in high school more than twenty years ago, and though life diverted me temporarily, the desire to teach was always there. Indeed, as I look back over a varied career path, it was the jobs where teaching was an element of my job that were the most satisfying. It was the urge to teach history that drew me out of the corporate world and back into the academic world, a decision that has left me materially poorer, but richer in knowledge; it is a decision I have never regretted.
I approach the classroom as, I hope, my students approach it- as a learner. I cannot, alas, know everything there is to know about history and it is a constant surprise and pleasure to discover how much my students know that I might not expect. They sometimes teach me how to look at things in a way I had not before, and this is a joy to experience. The teaching experience is a learning experience not only through what happens in class, but what happens out of class. Preparation always brings up some new fact that seems to be a piece of a larger puzzle, one I cannot wait to put together with my students. Both of these require a sort of humility in the face of one's own ignorance, a humility that I sometimes struggle with but that, on my best days, I achieve to my own betterment and that of my students.
My own experience both as a student and a teacher has shown me that a successful class is an engaged one. To that end, I try every day to bring a high level of energy to my work. It does no good to be enthusiastic about history without projecting that enthusiasm and students- I remember this from when I was a student- are very good about picking up on false enthusiasm. Energy is required to create the positive learning environment that leaves both students and teachers certain that the time spent in class is time well spent.
Teaching history is little different from teaching anything else in the end. As a historian and a teacher, I want to show my students the grand arc of whatever subject I am teaching, provide them with the plot in which the people and events are story elements. I enjoy making connections in this regard and, through discussion, I encourage my students to make them as well. At all times I try to make them aware of the contingency of history, to make them aware that any given episode could have turned out differently, to make them aware of human agency throughout. History is not the result of vague, impersonal forces; it is the result of people doing things.
I recognize that, often, the Western Civilization or U.S. History class a student takes in his or her first or second year is the only academic contact with history that student has in college. As teachers, then, we should strive to use this opportunity to demonstrate history's relevance to their lives. I am constantly looking for ways to connect historical material to current events. No event is without a back story and it is the study of history that provides them with context.
One of the best ways I know to engage students is by showing them how history is done. Study of primary documents and writing about these documents is of supreme importance in this endeavor, as students learn how to marshal facts in support of an argument and how to present this argument clearly. The critical thinking and writing skills learned in this manner should, one hopes, attune students to the world around them, helping them better understand the media they consume.
I have always felt that, in order to learn and to avoid hidebound thinking, categories need to be destabilized. There must be a point where disciplines converge and it is impossible to move towards that point if disciplinary divides are rigidly policed. My goal as a history teacher has always been to help students breach the boundaries around the discipline and to bring their own experiences and disciplines to bear. Since my undergraduate degree was in philosophy, I use some of the tools I learned in that field. I also bring insights gleaned from my reading in the social and natural sciences and in other areas. I feel that the variety of my interests has translated well to my dealings with young college students who come with a variety of academic gifts and interests. I share with them an intense curiosity about the world and a desire to understand its workings. Together we teach each other to see the world anew, a process in which I can only serve as a facilitator.
These are the beliefs and attitudes that I bring as a teacher. I come expecting to learn as much as I teach. I believe in offering my students all of my energy and focus while I am in the classroom with them. I seek to emphasize trends and not events and to show the contingency of history which is the result of human agency. I strive to make history relevant by showing its impact on what is happening today. I attempt to demonstrate history's utility in developing critical thinking skills by making students, at least temporarily, into historians. I have never experienced anything so satisfying in my professional life as when all of these mesh together.
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