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Before adolescence, when I discovered science fiction, I didn’t read much fiction (a bit of Charlotte’s Web and Clan of the Cave being exceptions). But I did read a lot of Greek mythology. I quickly outgrew the “childrens’ section” of the library, and spent a fair amount of time reading from the adult stacks. This meant that I encountered a lot of weird material, which I was definitely not psychologically ready to process. Some of that stuff is seriously fucked up. It starts at the beginning, when Cronus eats his own children. And it ends with Orestes slaying his own mother, though perhaps more disturbing to me was the killing of Astyanax (though let’s be honest, you can pick your poison in The Iliad). Then there’s The Odyssey, which can be spun as an adventure tale. What’s not to like? But it definitely makes The Hobbit seem rated PG. For a pre-adolescent child the climax, where Odysseus kills all his suitors, was disturbing and confusing. Specifically, this seemed a major overreaction! But then at that point I didn’t understand the social context, nor did I really understand romantic feelings and jealousy in any concrete manner.
I bring this up because The Wall Street Journal has a piece out which is now a standard template form, School’s Out at Columbia, but a Debate Over Trigger Warnings Continues:
But students said the school is prioritizing an outdated, Eurocentric selection despite Columbia’s diverse student body, mandating works with overtones of racism and sexism and teaching them uncritically. Many of them have said that if the school insists on requiring works depicting rape then those books should come with a warning—either verbally from a professor or stated on the syllabus.
“Some people would prefer not to be blindsided by reminders of traumatic experiences,” said Charlotte Bullard Davies, a rising senior studying political science.
Some of the issue here is the standard demand for a canon that expands beyond “Dead White Males.” And some of the concern has to deal with people who have experienced genuine trauma. I’m not a psychologist, but there are two rejoinders that came to mind. First, there was a whole generation of Jews who survived the Holocaust and likely encountered disturbing literature. How exactly did they deal with being “triggered”? It strikes me that some of the premises of being triggered need be examined, in terms of the science. My mom was shot, “by mistake”, by the Pakistani army in the early 1970s, and nearly bled to death. But she’s never expressed being disturbed by the presence of guns and such in film or even on the racks of pick-up trucks. Perhaps there are individual differences.
A second response is that one way to avoid having classroom discussions which challenge and disturb you is to major in science. That way you can avoid all the social and political questions, and just be freaked out by quantum indeterminacy. Yes, it is true that there are aspects of the science curriculum which will challenge the beliefs of some students. Those who are Creationists, for example. But we all know that these sorts of students getting disturbed and overwrought with their beliefs being put under the microscope is not a major issue for academia (it’s a bug, not a feature). The sensitivities of religiously conservative students are irrelevant to most academics (well, unless it happens to be Islam).
Which gets to the heart of the subjectivity of all of this. How can one talk about the fact that “this canon represents a particular segment of the privileged population”, without acknowledging that Columbia University students are privileged and used to getting what they want? The average Ivy League undergraduate is from an upper middle class background. They’re achievers, they succeed, and they’ve been told they’re the best, and been validated all their life. Not only do they think they’re clever, but the university has told them they’re clever by admitting them. It is unfortunately likely that these issues will bloom indefinitely in a culture of quasi-egalitarianism, where the university maintains a pretense that student feedback is welcome. Not only do these upper middle class students think they are special snowflakes, but society has told them they are special snowflakes and the university has backed that up by admitting them out of all their applicants.
Finally, it is always ironic to me that those protesting the literature of ancient cultures offer up as an alternative contemporary authors of prominence (e.g., Toni Morrison in The Wall Street Journal Piece). The reality is that modern authors, no matter how “radical”, are of our time and place, and reflect our history and values. They are worth reading, obviously, but they don’t offer up a window into a startlingly alien Weltanschauung. Consider The Golden Ass. Though a broadly sympathetic portrait of the Roman lower orders, the narrative takes slavery for granted in a world where it was a relatively uncontroversial practice. Reading the The Golden Ass can be instructive in as an example of literature which sheds light on a our deep commonalities across millennia, along with radical divergence in values.
And it need not be “Dead White Males” or their ancestors. Recently I read with great interest the figures central to Bushmen mythology. When referring to marginalized authors outside of the mainstream of the Western canon it seems rare to me that the alternatives are as radically alien as this, though I would like to be corrected on that.
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Dear Mr. Khan:
1) I understand that it sounds very cool to say
“be freaked out by quantum indeterminacy.”
But mostly Quantum Mechanics is for calculating something absolutely deterministic:
gain coefficient in a laser; rate of transition from upper state of sodium atom to lower one (orange street lights); volt-ampere curve of a semiconductor diode; energy content of gases at low temperatures (rotational energy levels); voltage, at which light-emitting diode can produce green light; radiative heat transfer from a warmed body.
It was exactly the latter problem that served to Max Planck as the task, for which he started the development of Quantum Mechanics. The same problem constitutes the basis of the Global Warming process.
(I neither approve, nor disapprove any of sides in GW debates.)
Most students freak out by countering the necessity to calculate (or at least to estimate) something very deterministic via Quantum Mechanics.
2) Traditional … .
I agree. QM places limits (or perhaps more accurately, "exposes" or "describes" limits) on the accuracy with which things can be measured (on what can be determined), but it does not indicate that physical entities actually behave in a nondeterministic (i.e., non-causal) way. The universe as we currently understand it has "built-in epistemological limits," forcing us to treat it (predict events on the subatomic level) probabilistically. This does not indicate that the events themselves (as opposed to our measurements of them) actually entail any uncertainty. The notions that on some sufficiently fundamental level events lack causes, that matter behaves in a non-causal fashion, and that events could have happened other than the way they did are, in principle, unprovable. QM certainly doesn't prove these notions, bandied about as they are by irresponsible physicists trying to write physics books that appeal to the layman. QM is about measurement and prediction -- that's all.Replies: @Immigrant from former USSR
They’ve so over done the “survivor” meme and trigger warnings for sexual violence that they’ve ruined their own cause. You have to question whether they’re all really “survivors” because they wear it as a badge of honor. You ruined rape. Thanks a lot, Mattress Girl!
Really? I too read the Iliad and the Odyssey at a very young age, and I absolutely loved all the tales. I especially appreciated Achilles on the rampage after the death of Patroclus (what warrior does not love his companion thusly and seek vengeance for his friend’s death?) as well as the humility and courage of Priam (and Achilles’ eventual decency in releasing Hector’s body for a funeral).
And I found the slaying of Penelope’s suitors particularly delightful. It just so happened that my father introduced me to archery about the same time as he gave me a copy of The Odyssey (I had my first recurved composite bow made in the older East/Central Asian pattern), so in my head, the whole scene of Odysseus slaying the covetous suitors with his bow was just fantastic.
I have spent many a countless nights since putting my own children to sleep while reading the Iliad to them. They appeared not to be disturbed or confused in any way.
Well, my wife and I did go to school with these “special snowflakes.” We, being religious, conservative, and traditional, have a certain disdain, perhaps even contempt, for our almae matres and other Ivies. But we must acknowledge that we met many highly intelligent and accomplished people through them, and quite a few of them has gone on to become political, business, and scientific elites.
The problem with Ivy Leaguers, in my view, isn’t that they are “special snowflakes” (which strikes me a term of resentment and envy). It’s that they are a self-serving, meritocratic elite that lacks a sense of service and noblesse oblige. It used to be that the Ivy League sought to produce gentlemen and ladies in the classical sense, leaders devoted to learning and service to their communities and nation, a self-conscious elite that cared about their socio-economic inferiors. Now, despite all the leftist lip service to peace, global development, and racial equality, the actual behaviors of the products of the Ivy League are remarkably self-centered. David Brooks captured this trend very well in his “Bobos in Paradise.” Regrettably, intelligence does not translated automatically to wisdom or virtue, and there is former aplenty among the recent products of the Ivy League, but precious little of the latter.
My wife and I interviewed high school students for our almae matres for many years, so we saw legions of the pre-“special snowflakes” firsthand. It was mostly a distressing experience. I frequently asked them to tell me about virtue and encountered that “deer caught on headlight” look too many times (or worse was met by a panoply of liberal pieties unconvincingly told).
So we have kept our children away from the academic “rat race” and have inculcated (partly through homeschooling in order to have a similar peer group) a strong love of God and country, service to our community, and constant endeavor toward virtue (in the Aristotelian sense).
Or cultural ones.
My parents survived a terrible war as children. My mother, along with her grandmother, was separated from the rest of her family, and fled her home on foot for weeks (she remembers being strafed on the road by an attack aircraft and saw countless people die all around her). She was malnourished and caught a highly infectious and deadly disease and somehow miraculously survived it all. My father remembers not having any food to eat for days and scrounging for crumbs of other people’s food in dirt during the same period. Many men on both sides of my family perished in battle (one was decorated posthumously for charging an advancing enemy tank with a satchel charge), and half of my mother’s family was murdered for being on the wrong side.
My mother once told me while I was a teenager that “Life is pain and suffering, punctuated by a few moments of joy, a small glimpse of Heaven. Then you die. And if you were good, you might get to Heaven.”
When one comes from that kind of a phlegmatic culture, it’s difficult to get too worked up about mock outrage and “trigger warnings.” I suspect your mother might feel the same.
I wonder how this Aristotelian virtue will work out in an increasingly Machiavellian world?
"Work out" means different things to different people. At the end of the day, every man dies a physical death. I want my children to meet their Maker one day with a clear conscience, having loved their God, country, community, and family, and having done good and avoided, or better yet and if they could muster the courage and convictions, fought, evil.
I want them to have been a good link between those who came before them and those who will come afterwards, and be virtuous member of the Communion of Saints.
A part of this world has been Machiavellian, always… at least as far as Machiavelli’s time and well before that too.
“Work out” means different things to different people. At the end of the day, every man dies a physical death. I want my children to meet their Maker one day with a clear conscience, having loved their God, country, community, and family, and having done good and avoided, or better yet and if they could muster the courage and convictions, fought, evil.
I want them to have been a good link between those who came before them and those who will come afterwards, and be virtuous member of the Communion of Saints.
Just to be contrarian: A (non-SJW) defense of trigger warnings.
@ Twinkie
I felt the same as a young boy. I actually liked how the spear of Achill was able to strike several enemies at once. I was just impressed how strong Achill has to be. But I am quite sure that a movie with that kind of details would have been much to much for me.
Slightly O/T but your reading trajectory is scarily close to mine; I read a huge amount of Greek Mythology when I was around 9/10 before I moved onto Foundation and Sci-fi.
It’s worth pointing out that PTSD is heritable and is the exception rather than the rule for people exposed to traumatic events.
It seems worth mentioning that even if you major in science you will have enough “general education” requirements in college that you are bound to be exposed to some level of literature and social sciences, even if it’s only 2-3 classes in each subject. AFAIK it’s really only engineering (which, for whatever reason, has resisted the shift to a mandatory graduate degree of other professions) where the requirements on students are so heavy that gen-eds are essentially waived.
My opinion on the humanities and social sciences in higher education has changed dramatically since I was involved in it. Outside of the most quantitative portions of the social sciences, I now feel like at best it trains students to be sophists – to argue well, but without much self-reflection. You are called upon to be critical of the ideas of others – to be able to deconstruct any ideas to see the bias behind them. The one exception is your own ideas. Professors may attack your sloppy writing or argumentation, but they generally will not downgrade you for having priors which are ill thought out or even indefensible. This tendency is becoming more extreme in the age of “trigger warnings” – where not only are the priors of students before entering the class not questioned, but the exposure to things which might make the students uncomfortable is also becoming verboten.
I have to say this is one fundamental reason I believe that the idea that professors indoctrinate students in certain majors to be “SJWs” is a load of bullocks. I went to college from 1997 to 2001, when the first-wave of PC had died down, and the second wave had yet to arise. It was pretty common, even in my lefty major, to make fun of some of the precepts of PC thought. Yet I always found that fellow students were the serious enforcers of the PC code, never professors. I remember many times that avowedly liberal/socialist/feminist professors tried to talk down students who said extreme things in class – for example, a woman claiming that the difference between male and female strength was due to patriarchy, or that anyone who didn’t support open borders had a racist agenda. The only case I can think of where a conservative student was belittled was when I was studying abroad in the UK, and the professor belittling him was also conservative (the student was a devout Christian, and the teacher an atheist).
In the end I think, as with most things in society, it’s peer group self-enforcement driving this crap. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of people pushing for trigger warnings are people mainly motivated by not wanting some mysterious “other” to be offended. And one thing which has universally irked me is when people of any political stripe believe they should be advocates for someone other than themselves.
Conversely, the engineers were required to take electives in these areas as a condition for getting their degrees.
And I found the slaying of Penelope's suitors particularly delightful. It just so happened that my father introduced me to archery about the same time as he gave me a copy of The Odyssey (I had my first recurved composite bow made in the older East/Central Asian pattern), so in my head, the whole scene of Odysseus slaying the covetous suitors with his bow was just fantastic.
I have spent many a countless nights since putting my own children to sleep while reading the Iliad to them. They appeared not to be disturbed or confused in any way.Well, my wife and I did go to school with these "special snowflakes." We, being religious, conservative, and traditional, have a certain disdain, perhaps even contempt, for our almae matres and other Ivies. But we must acknowledge that we met many highly intelligent and accomplished people through them, and quite a few of them has gone on to become political, business, and scientific elites.
The problem with Ivy Leaguers, in my view, isn't that they are "special snowflakes" (which strikes me a term of resentment and envy). It's that they are a self-serving, meritocratic elite that lacks a sense of service and noblesse oblige. It used to be that the Ivy League sought to produce gentlemen and ladies in the classical sense, leaders devoted to learning and service to their communities and nation, a self-conscious elite that cared about their socio-economic inferiors. Now, despite all the leftist lip service to peace, global development, and racial equality, the actual behaviors of the products of the Ivy League are remarkably self-centered. David Brooks captured this trend very well in his "Bobos in Paradise." Regrettably, intelligence does not translated automatically to wisdom or virtue, and there is former aplenty among the recent products of the Ivy League, but precious little of the latter.
My wife and I interviewed high school students for our almae matres for many years, so we saw legions of the pre-"special snowflakes" firsthand. It was mostly a distressing experience. I frequently asked them to tell me about virtue and encountered that "deer caught on headlight" look too many times (or worse was met by a panoply of liberal pieties unconvincingly told).
So we have kept our children away from the academic "rat race" and have inculcated (partly through homeschooling in order to have a similar peer group) a strong love of God and country, service to our community, and constant endeavor toward virtue (in the Aristotelian sense).Replies: @James Kabala
I agree that the killing of the suitors seemed like a proper ending to Child Me and that only to Adult Me (or maybe Adolescent Me) did it occur to have moral qualms about it.
My opinion on the humanities and social sciences in higher education has changed dramatically since I was involved in it. Outside of the most quantitative portions of the social sciences, I now feel like at best it trains students to be sophists - to argue well, but without much self-reflection. You are called upon to be critical of the ideas of others - to be able to deconstruct any ideas to see the bias behind them. The one exception is your own ideas. Professors may attack your sloppy writing or argumentation, but they generally will not downgrade you for having priors which are ill thought out or even indefensible. This tendency is becoming more extreme in the age of "trigger warnings" - where not only are the priors of students before entering the class not questioned, but the exposure to things which might make the students uncomfortable is also becoming verboten.
I have to say this is one fundamental reason I believe that the idea that professors indoctrinate students in certain majors to be "SJWs" is a load of bullocks. I went to college from 1997 to 2001, when the first-wave of PC had died down, and the second wave had yet to arise. It was pretty common, even in my lefty major, to make fun of some of the precepts of PC thought. Yet I always found that fellow students were the serious enforcers of the PC code, never professors. I remember many times that avowedly liberal/socialist/feminist professors tried to talk down students who said extreme things in class - for example, a woman claiming that the difference between male and female strength was due to patriarchy, or that anyone who didn't support open borders had a racist agenda. The only case I can think of where a conservative student was belittled was when I was studying abroad in the UK, and the professor belittling him was also conservative (the student was a devout Christian, and the teacher an atheist).
In the end I think, as with most things in society, it's peer group self-enforcement driving this crap. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of people pushing for trigger warnings are people mainly motivated by not wanting some mysterious "other" to be offended. And one thing which has universally irked me is when people of any political stripe believe they should be advocates for someone other than themselves.Replies: @Joe Q.
That may be true in the USA, but not everywhere. I went to university in Canada as a science major and didn’t take any real literature or social science classes in my time there. I knew many others who were in a similar boat. It was simply not expected and not done. (This was in the mid-1990s)
Conversely, the engineers were required to take electives in these areas as a condition for getting their degrees.
In the U.S., engineering majors include requirements for humanities and social science breadth which are much more stringent than the requirements for math & science in humanities and social science majors. The engineers’ requirement includes two semester (or three quarter) upper-division courses in H&SS, and the equivalent of almost a full semester of H&SS courses, not including English composition or equivalent or basic language classes (literature classes were ok). How many history or sociology students could handle two upper-division physics or chemistry or engineering courses?
For the record, I’ve read Greek mythology in the edition of Robert Ranke-Graves. The most impressing story was, for me, the sex story between Achilles and Troilos, in which Achilles behaved so bearishly that Troilos died.
It was my first infatuation with a gay bear. So different are memories.
I find it fascinating the the vast majority of social justice warriors who love the idea of more women and minorities getting STEM degrees have liberal arts degrees themselves.
There is no one on this planet, nor is there any act on this planet, that is not self-centered. Friedman said it many years ago, he was correct, and otherwise intelligent people forget it everyday.
1) I understand that it sounds very cool to say
"be freaked out by quantum indeterminacy."But mostly Quantum Mechanics is for calculating something absolutely deterministic:
gain coefficient in a laser; rate of transition from upper state of sodium atom to lower one (orange street lights); volt-ampere curve of a semiconductor diode; energy content of gases at low temperatures (rotational energy levels); voltage, at which light-emitting diode can produce green light; radiative heat transfer from a warmed body.
It was exactly the latter problem that served to Max Planck as the task, for which he started the development of Quantum Mechanics. The same problem constitutes the basis of the Global Warming process.
(I neither approve, nor disapprove any of sides in GW debates.)Most students freak out by countering the necessity to calculate (or at least to estimate) something very deterministic via Quantum Mechanics.2) Traditional ... .Replies: @Anonymous
“But mostly Quantum Mechanics is for calculating something absolutely deterministic…”
I agree. QM places limits (or perhaps more accurately, “exposes” or “describes” limits) on the accuracy with which things can be measured (on what can be determined), but it does not indicate that physical entities actually behave in a nondeterministic (i.e., non-causal) way. The universe as we currently understand it has “built-in epistemological limits,” forcing us to treat it (predict events on the subatomic level) probabilistically. This does not indicate that the events themselves (as opposed to our measurements of them) actually entail any uncertainty. The notions that on some sufficiently fundamental level events lack causes, that matter behaves in a non-causal fashion, and that events could have happened other than the way they did are, in principle, unprovable. QM certainly doesn’t prove these notions, bandied about as they are by irresponsible physicists trying to write physics books that appeal to the layman. QM is about measurement and prediction — that’s all.
I do not want to overburden the blog of Mr. Khan "Gene Expression" by non-related topics.
If you want my opinion on in-determinism, you may look at my comments on another section of Unz Review:
https://www.unz.com/freed/can-scientists-think/#comment-971595
https://www.unz.com/freed/can-scientists-think/#comment-971860
Your truly, F.r.
I agree. QM places limits (or perhaps more accurately, "exposes" or "describes" limits) on the accuracy with which things can be measured (on what can be determined), but it does not indicate that physical entities actually behave in a nondeterministic (i.e., non-causal) way. The universe as we currently understand it has "built-in epistemological limits," forcing us to treat it (predict events on the subatomic level) probabilistically. This does not indicate that the events themselves (as opposed to our measurements of them) actually entail any uncertainty. The notions that on some sufficiently fundamental level events lack causes, that matter behaves in a non-causal fashion, and that events could have happened other than the way they did are, in principle, unprovable. QM certainly doesn't prove these notions, bandied about as they are by irresponsible physicists trying to write physics books that appeal to the layman. QM is about measurement and prediction -- that's all.Replies: @Immigrant from former USSR
Dear Mr. DMT Elf:
I do not want to overburden the blog of Mr. Khan “Gene Expression” by non-related topics.
If you want my opinion on in-determinism, you may look at my comments on another section of Unz Review:
https://www.unz.com/freed/can-scientists-think/#comment-971595
https://www.unz.com/freed/can-scientists-think/#comment-971860
Your truly, F.r.
Yes, and those are the ones insisting that engineering and programming be taught as “collaborative problem-solving” as a way to make them more “woman-friendly.”