The Doughty Traveler

Reason #1 why you don’t want the government legislating morality: you might disagree with the government definition of moral.

The irony here is that the people who have argued for years that we should not legislate morality now make the most strenuous use of the law, when the “logic of morals” is attached to their own policy. Lincoln, grasping that logic, conceded that “if slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.”

To everyone who ever doubted the utility/importance of memorizing passages from Shakespeare, I give you the brilliant send up of Hamlet below, courtesy of a British newspaper in 1805. Napoleon’s army awaited only a fortuitous break in the blockading British fleet to descend on Dover, his battle-tested army sweeping across the green fields of England like a plague.

Faced with such a grave predicament, for the British Army was a shambles compared to its ‘wooden walls,’ at least one newspaper editor took the time to taunt the Emperor, and his invasion fleet cooped up in Boulogne.

T’invade, or not t’invade – that is the question –

Whether ’tis nobler in my soul, to suffer

Those haughty Islanders to check my power,

Or to send forth my troops upon their coast,

And by attacking, crush them. –T’invade – to fight –

No more; – and by7 a fight, to say I end

The glory, and the thousand natural blessings

That England’s heir to; – ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. – To invade – to fight –

To fight – perchance to fail: – Ay, there’s the rub;

For in that failure, what dire fate may come,

When they have shuffled off from Gallia’s shore,

Must give me pause. – There’s the respect,

That makes me thus procrastinate the deed:

For would I bear the scoff an scorn of foes,

The oppressive thought of English liberty,

The pangs of despis’d threats, th’attempts delay,

The insolence of Britain, and the spurns,

That I impatient and unwilling take,

When I myself might head the plund’ring horde,

And grasp at conquest? Would I tamely bear

To groan and sweat under a long suspence,

But that the dread of something after battle,

That undecided trial, from whose hazard

I never may return, – puzzles my will,

And makes me rather bear unstated vengeance,

Than fly from Boulogne at the risk of all.

And thus my native passion of ambition

Is clouded o’er with sad presaging thought:

And this momentous, tow’ring enterprise,

With this regard, is yearly turn’d aside,

And waits the name of action.

For an enjoyable history of this period, check out The War for All the Oceans.

I’m two chapters into Tyler Cowen’s new book, Create Your Own Economy, and frankly, I’m baffled. The root of my confusion? Cowen’s strident defense of the autistic.

I purchased Cowen’s book after reading Ben Casnocha’s excellent review in The American. Ben’s piece nailed the euphoria I feel as curator of my own information stream, a curious combination of opinion headlines, news from the cartographical world, the occasional blog war over localism, among other topics. I ruthlessly purge my feeds, striving for a funnel of news where each headline has a personal relevance, but still offers breadth and opinions that challenge my beliefs. The river of posts and stories get funneled into appropriate tags, which I later revist.

For instance, a DIY tag is attached to interesting projects that would help me improve from hopeless handyman to soul crafter (to use Matt Crawford’s lingo). I budget an hour or two over the weekend to try my hand at simple soldering or turning old maps into wallpaper. I have a “readme” tag that goes on longer articles: on a weekend getaway I printed out several dozen and lingered by the poolside diving into essays on Aristotle, career development, and Catholic liturgy. Afterward, I digitized my notes and created several outlines for future blog posts.

This process renders intelligble both my collection of feeds and the myriad random articles I read at the behest of friends’ emails, Tweets, blog posts, Facebook, and the every other form of sharing a hyperlinked, “You gotta see this.” Coupled with the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet, I’m able to find fascinating connections, and preserve them in a coherent fashion, in spite of my unspeakably bad memory. For instance, while reading the Adkins’ excellent naval history of the Napoleonic Wars, I came across a line recounting popular discontent with Britain’s naval strategy. It stirred a memory of a hilarious map I’d seen on the web, but I couldn’t remember beyond that. I nipped into Google Reader, searched my “Mappish” tag for Britain, and scrolled through the handful of results until I found this hilarious image.

That whole process is what Cowen calls autistic thinking. Not in a perjorative way, mind you (don’t even think of making that mistake). No, here’s how he describes it:

One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, categorizing, and listing. Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to theri areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I will call them.

…

I began to see that the autistic mind-set about engaging with information is a powerful way to understand the whole world around us. Especially now.

Cowen believes that autism, far from being the severe mental handicap it is often made out to be, actually has some benefits. In our digital era, where categorizing is invaluable, anyone tapping the benefits of autistic cognition has a great competitive advantage and will be much more comfortable in our information-rich age.

So, what’s the problem? Chapter Two.

Cowen spends the second chapter hammering the point that autistic kids are neither to be pitied nor censured, but celebrated. Autism is a blanket term crudely applied to a variety of conditions and larded up with connotations, all of it negative. Cowen wants us to think of recognize that autistic congnition is can be a blessing and the condition is far from a curse. Autistic folks, as much as the infinite variety that term is slapped upon can be described, are no more handicapped than brunettes, Chinese or short people.

That’s a wonderful sentiment, but I don’t understand who exactly he’s arguing with.

Do people really view autism as a completely negative term? I can’t help but wonder if that’s generational. My first thought on hearing “autistic” more closely matches what Cowen is celebrating in autistic cognition. I thought, “socially awkward, sometimes extremely so, with potential intelligence benefits, a la Bill Gates.” By comparison, my mother described autism in purely negative terms. My wife, who has taught students ranging from seriously to mildly autistic, had a more nuanced view.

Don’t underestimate the downsides of autism. Some high-functioning autistic children may benefit from that kind of cognition, but the problems that many autistics face aren’t just the imaginary creation of overwrought “experts” and distraught parents.

Like I said, I want to enjoy this book, and I agree, so far, with Cowen’s underlying thesis. I’m just not entirely comfortable with his approach so far. More on this as I get deeper into the book.

Libertarians, or folks interested in freedom broadly, often given in to despairing laments. A quick scan of the headlines should assure anyone that this is far from an unreasonable stance, it isn’t particularly helpful to add one’s personal imitation of Nostradamus to the political fire. To that end, I enjoy the antipodal tendency of freedomphiles, namely celebrating the incredible strides freedom has made in recent memory, and looking to the future with an optimism that is nigh naive.

That being said, I have no time for this kind of mauldin sentiment, from Beth Schuster in the LA Times, describing Cleveland High’s graduation:

As an education editor for The Times, I tend to see the worst of Los Angeles’ public school system. Budget cuts, teacher layoffs, high dropout rates, low test scores. The list goes on. And on.

As the mother of a Los Angeles Unified School District graduate, I saw the best the system has to offer this month.

It’s worth pausing there. Note that we’re not talking about the best that education has to offer, nor the best that students can do. We’re not celebrating individuals here: we’re celebrating “the best a system has to offer.” So, do tell Beth, what does this system offer?

Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bleachers, we cheered along with the sisters and brothers of one graduate as they held up a homemade sign: “First Male in our Family” to get a diploma. One mom said her son is going into the military. I recognized a family whose daughter is going to Sarah Lawrence College and another whose daughter is going to UC Santa Barbara. Success has many definitions on graduation day.

The evening began with a speech by Principal Bob Marks. One mom in front of me didn’t recognize him, and that was OK with her. “Thank God we don’t know him,” she laughed.

I looked over to the crowd standing next to the bleachers. They couldn’t get seats. They were my daughter’s humanities magnet teachers, smiling, talking, joking. They were cheering on these kids they had taught philosophy, art history, literature and film — all without the help of textbooks, instead using photocopied materials and a few field trips to plays, an opera and art museums. These teachers made up for a lack of resources with their determination, dedication and ingenuity.

Three students made heartfelt speeches, and another rapped his heart out. The audience roared its approval. Forty valedictorians (those with a 4.0 grade point average and above) had gold tassels hanging from their mortar boards.

This will take some parsing. First, we should apparently applaud the system because many students in it have different definitions of success? I think the credit should go to the individuals, who likely did so in spite of the system. No, that’s not just me saying that. Consider Beth’s description of the humanities magnet teachers: they did all their best work in spite of having no textbooks, without adequate funding for trips, and they did it through their personal virtue. Some system. And still it gets better.

Apparently, a system that allows parents to not even recognize the principal of the school is…well, Beth doesn’t really say what it is, except that it’s definitely a laughing matter. But that laughter carries an implication that the chuckling mom wouldn’t like the principal if she knew him. To be fair, perhaps the principal fills the role of the dean, and not making his acquaintance is the mark of a student who has dodged detention. But Beth doesn’t really permit that interpretation. She refers to Cleveland High as a family, later. What does that make the principal? The awkward uncle that no one really wants to know?

Further, what about the academic achievement being celebrated here: the graduation had 40 valedictorians. Curious. According to just about every definition I can find, and every real human being I’ve asked, the valedictorian is an individual award. In just about every case it’s an award for the best student, someone who has the highest or darn near close the highest grades (even schools that like “well-rounded” valedictory speakers demand one of the best students).

Cleveland High, however, has a different definition: anyone who gets over a 4.0. Ah, excellent. Since 4.0 used to mean an “A,” otherwise known as the highest grade, clearly they’ve been shifting the grading schedule to allow top students to feel even awesomer about themselves, and not so awesome students to still net high sounding GPAs. I can’t remember the term I usually hear when that’s discussed, but I think it sounds something like shmade shminflation. Also, since they just gave everyone above a arbitrary GPA the title “valedictorian,” why didn’t they just call it “highest honors” or “summa cum laude?” Apparently, words that have traditionally meant what they were desribing proved inadequate to Cleveland High’s administrators.

The final bit is a tearjerker:

But it was the last name called that drew tears universally. Kenza Kadmiry, sitting in a wheelchair, was handed her diploma by the principal. She had become the soul of this class, its tragedy and its hope. Kenza was hit by a car in February as she walked her bike across the street, and is now a quadriplegic. But her smile that night was huge. A fundraiser for her the week before drew about 500 friends of Cleveland. Families pull together in times of trouble, and this public school is, wonder of wonders, a family.

Kenza’s story really is heart-breaking and inspiring. And by every account I’ve read, the school came together in a wonderful way to support her and her family.

Kenza’s tragic accident, and the community that rallied in the wake, doesn’t have any clear connection to “the system.” Worse, shoehorning it into a piece lauding “the system” seems a little cheap: how exactly did Cleveland High’s status as a public school facilitate the response to Kenza’s accident? What about Principal Nemo’s public family made a difference in how the community came together?

The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. What Schuster describes is a beautiful example of community that owes nothing to the system. Every ounce of credit should go to the individual families and students of Cleveland High, whose exact composition was merely the artifact of bureaucratic fiat and district lines. I don’t doubt for a minute that the administratio did everything it could to bring people together after Kenza’s accident, that the teachers played a vital role, hell, I bet the janitors got involved. But “the system” Schuster describes is not merely the sum of the people subjected to it.

Schuster closes on a line that cemented the deeply troubling feeling growing in my gut.

The troubling stories that I had edited that week vanished from my mind as I finally found something to celebrate: a public school that worked.

Bingo: a tale of heroic individuals and inspiring charity is reduced to an band-aid to conceal the gaping sores of the public school system. The graduating class survived misallocated funds, resource-deprived teachers, redefinition of academic success, and the traumatic crippling of a beloved student. The lesson Shuster learns? Public schools can work.