Darkness and KAOS

The same day as my last letter, which mentioned Nike, Coca-Cola, Disney and Mattel, the New York Times presents a piece on the movie industry. Hollywood producers, writes film critic Caryn James, aware that "most of what they churn out is junk," are now trying to make cerebral movies that address social issues:

It's as if Hollywood is finally catching up with a country at war and a world in turmoil, reflecting a cultural mood less about post-9/11 terror than about a general, persistent sense of social crisis.

Just like the marketing-savvy, opinion survey-wielding Sarah Ormrod, however, Hollywood respects audience sensitivities:

Because these movies are Hollywood products, they need to navigate between inoffensively pleasing a mainstream audience and actually saying something. What results is a genre of timid films with portentous-sounding themes, works that offer prepackaged schoolroom lessons or canned debates. Hollywood may be drawn to Big Ideas, but it is always more comfortable with sound-bite-size thoughts.

"Good Night, and Good Luck," Mr. Clooney's hero-worshipping film about Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy, exemplifies the Big Thought movie, in which powerful filmmaking masks a pedantry just below the surface. Murrow is the crusading hero, McCarthy the red-baiting villain, and the film a potted history lesson about their showdown. The contemporary resonance is spurred by Mr. Clooney's off-screen remarks as the film's director and co-writer. "I thought it was a good time to raise the idea of using fear to stifle political debate," he said at the New York Film Festival news conference, an idea he echoed in other interviews.

But that comparison ignores the differences between politics then, at the dawn of the media age when both Murrow and McCarthy were just learning how to exploit television's power, and now, when politics is driven by 24/7 media- and image-spinning strategists. When Murrow and his CBS colleagues take on the powerful senator, the event may be emblematic, but that emblem is too simple and nostalgic to apply to reporters reluctant -- especially post-9/11 and pre-Katrina -- to cross the Bush administration. Wholesale reverence, like the film's toward Murrow, is always the antithesis of complex thought.

And the film's beautiful direction and acting deflects attention from its lack of context. Why did McCarthy and his scare tactics about Communists have such power?

In "North Country," Charlize Theron plays the woman who brought the first class-action sexual harassment suit. While "North Country" seems to be a film with a cause, it refights a battle that took place long ago. As one of the few women working in a mine, Ms. Theron faces insults and discrimination in a role that seems conceived with the Oscar campaign in mind. Women still suffer in jobs that have traditionally belonged to men, but the blatant discrimination her character faces -- her boss flat-out says she has no right to take a job away from a man -- has no vital connection to the present. A truly provocative film would deal with the backlash against sexual harassment laws, the contemporary sense that political correctness has gone too far.

[Edited excerpt from "The Trouble With Films That Try to Think," by Caryn James, New York Times, October 11, 2005.]

Sure, "a truly provocative film" would do all that. But the trouble with being "truly provocative" is that it's provocative. Which means it might offend; intrude upon zones of sensitivity; call into question false memories. It might challenge opinions to which everyone is fully 100% entitled!

Which would surely piss off any marketing-savvy director.

But here's a thought: Might there be connections between (1) our "general, persistent sense of social crisis"; (2) the widespread view that it's futile or meaningless to seek the objective truth about something; and (3) our increasing addiction to delusion?

There's little doubt about the sense of crisis, anyways. The Times letters column of the same day offers, by way of example, this comment on a news story^[1] about the disappearing Arctic ice cap (the story reports "a great rush" to exploit newly accessible territory and resources, now that the ice cap "faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded" and is expected to disappear altogether in summers to come):

I cannot believe what I am reading. The Arctic ice cap is melting from global warming..., and entrepreneurs, rather than rushing to find solutions, are rushing to drill for more oil.

I feel that I am going insane in an insane world.

Another, responding to an opinion column on U.S. politics^[2], says:

Now more than ever, I feel completely alienated from my government.... The Republican and Democratic Parties have gone off the deep end, and we the people need to take back our country. [Columnist David] Brooks says it's time for an insurrection. Where do I sign up?

On the link between our sense of crisis and delusion, here's my theory: Places like Cambridge abdicate the responsibility to furnish "light and sacred draughts." This helps preserve darkness and promote intellectual chaos. And this chaos, in which critical checks on deceit are absent, permits evil to flourish, leading to an actual state of crisis (which is the perfectly sensible basis, after all, for our "sense" of crisis).

Sometimes -- is this crazy? -- current events seem to interconnect with the story I'm telling. Did you notice this item:

Don Adams, the wry-voiced comedian who starred as the fumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s TV spoof of James Bond movies, "Get Smart," died on September 25.

[Don Adams of 'Get Smart' dead, cnn.com, September 26, 2005.]

The evil organization against which Mr. Smart continually battled? KAOS was its name. Maxwell Smart understood decades ago how chaos and evil go hand in hand.

The panderers of Cambridge would have much to learn from even the bumbling Maxwell Smart.

Does this count as a digression? Not really. My underlying theme all along has been how Cambridge and the surrounding world should get smart.

A correspondent in Cambridge draws my attention to Global Study Magazine. The magazine is aimed at students looking to study abroad, and estimates its readership at 100,000.

An article by Gary W. Penders, Director of Summer Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, declares:

As the head of summer programs for the past twenty-seven years, I have spoken to thousands of visiting students about their experiences at a U.S. summer school, and I can identify four characteristics that you will find if you attend summer school in the U.S. that you can't find anywhere else. Here they are, in order of importance from my point of view.

1. THE AMERICAN APPROACH

A friend once described the rather formal university experience in his home country as follows: he sat at attention while the professor read a lecture which the student had in written form in front of him. The U.S. process could not be more different. In a U.S. college or university classroom, students participate in the work of learning by reading and thinking about the material ahead of time and joining the discussion led by the professor after presenting a short lecture.... This combination of participation and research makes the U.S. approach far from passive, and generally means that boredom is simply not an issue.

[Excerpted from University Summer Schools, by Gary W. Penders; undated.]

An accompanying article in the same magazine, by a certain European colleague of Mr. Penders, takes exceedingly courteous umbrage at this exhibition of Yankee exceptionalism:

Do European Summer Schools differ so very much from American ones? I agree with Gary that not all travel experiences are the same, but can I agree entirely with his claim that the USA offers something you can't get anywhere else? Dare I speak for all the other programmes, or can I be forgiven for focusing on the programme I know best?

Gary's first point, the 'American approach', sounded so very similar to the way we run the Summer School classes at our own Summer Schools in Cambridge that I could use it in our publicity! So, either we're doing it 'the American way' already, and have been for many years, or else that's a way of doing things that isn't exclusively American!

The regular Cambridge students attend lectures but then at the core of their studies is the supervision system: one-on-one or small group discussion sessions between student and supervisor. There is no way those students can just sit and listen: they have to interact from start to finish. Many of the people who teach for us in the summer have been running supervision sessions all year long, and they are used to reaction and discussion from their audiences.

A set of 10-18 weekly lectures [prepared for use in the regular academic year] can quite easily be transposed into a set of 10-18 daily Summer School sessions, on the understanding that there will be even more discussion-time than during the year. But as with all short courses there is a need to allow for less time to digest and read in between each meeting. The benefits, as those of us running or teaching short courses know well, include the chance that animated conversation can be picked up and run with into the next morning's discussion, whereas a point can be lost from one week to the next.

[Edited excerpt from Another location, another choice, by Sarah J. Ormrod; undated but apparently written in 2003.]

Penders's piece stated:

In a U.S. college or university classroom, students participate ... by ... joining the discussion led by the professor after [the professor presents] a short lecture.

"Short" cannot mean 60 minutes in a class whose full duration is 90 minutes. Yet that was the length of Alex Lindsay's monologues in several classes, and the length he explicitly told me^[3] was his normal practice. (Adrian Barlow also dispensed lengthy monologues on several occasions.) And Ormrod, when I mentioned the monologues and inquired about the schools' expectations, was not in the least concerned, telling me that the summer school generally liked to let instructors teach according to their own style.^[4]

So Ormrod's response to Penders's piece ("I could use it in our publicity!") is factually false.

Letting teachers teach according to their own style, moreover, conflicts with claims Ormrod makes elsewhere in her piece:

[W]e cater for students of 60 or so nationalities. Admittedly, in some classes, up to 50% can be American, so it's not surprising that we have needed to develop a system that keeps them -- and everyone else in the class -- engaged and alert.

Have "we" (the summer schools) developed a "system" of teaching? Or do "we" generally like to let instructors teach according to their own style, without administration interference?

Of course, Ormrod's claim about a "system" is unadulterated bullshit -- the reflexive bullshit of the marketing type, which should be anathema at any self-respecting educational institution.

As for the claim that this "system" keeps everyone "engaged and alert".... Why, let's not even pause to laugh.

But Ormrod's bullshit reaches almost farcical proportions:

An example of our classroom breakdown would be 25 students, of whom fifteen or so would be aged 19-23 (current undergraduates), while the rest would be graduate students, lecturers, teachers, home-makers, or representatives of almost any background you can think of -- from sheep-farmers and painters to hair-dressers and members of parliament.

The piece also features a marvellously cheery concluding paragraph:

So, do I think the USA offers an experience in its Summer Schools that you can't get anywhere else? I'd agree that every Summer School experience is different and that the flavour of an American Summer School is probably different from the range of 'flavours' of European ones. It's tough to try and compare attendance at an American Summer School with participation in Czech courses at the University of Western Bohemia or Norwegian ones at the University of Oslo. I've argued that there are many similarities, but perhaps it is the search for the differences which is most exciting!

Penders's piece, to be blunt, claimed that the U.S. summer school experience is superior. Ormrod agrees ... no, wait! ... she agrees that "every Summer School experience is different." And she follows that up by delivering a heap of blablabla to underline how yes, really it's true, they're different, quite quite different. And that's what's most exciting! (Show teeth.)

In our meeting too^[5], Ormrod delivered an oration about how different and varied the students' backgrounds were -- which went to prove how they all had different opinions, and therefore my different opinion could hardly be expected to count for much.

The saddest thing is how brilliantly these tedious, tiresome, empty rhetorical devices succeed in our world.

And why do they succeed? Because people are inadequately educated. Vicious cycle.

And since they succeed so well, they are of course prevalent. That's the magic of the market. In the corporate world, bullshit is probably even more prevalent than PowerPoint (though they often work hand in hand).

(Continued....)

[1]     "As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound," New York Times, October 10, 2005

[2]     "As Parties Grow Weary, Time for an Insurgency," by David Brooks, New York Times, October 9, 2005

[3]     letter #12, Rethinking Cambridge

[4]     letter #11, The Progress of Communication

[5]     letter #3, Polls versus Thought