Reading Break: can't get away from AmCon

Jake's AmCon Blog: Reading Break: "Spring 2011 was looked forward to for two reasons. First, it was to be spent in Cabo, Mexico. Second, I finally had some free ti..."

Another student blog entry about spring break.  This one spent in the south land, away from winter and school, but still engaged in the life-long enterprise of learning.  Jake does a lovely job of bringing the two books he read (David Brook's new one and A Rand's classic) into conversation with each other and with our pre-break concerns.  (To AmCon Students: remember that Brooks is the one who urged Whitman's essay on us as "the most important political sermon.")

Hope in Wisconsin

From Religion Dispatches

We begin this semester looking at religion (specifically particular articulations of Protestant Christianity) as a sources of expectations about the future in the USA: millennialists with apocalyptic visions; Walt Whitman's call for a religious spirit to animate democratic vistas, etc.  This calm, measured piece by a UCC pastor in rural Wisconsin  takes up similar themes relative to recent conflicts in his state over collective bargaining.  He is slow to make theological "hay" out of the situation while clearly pointing to a sort of political awakening.

Ole Spring Relief 6

Paige D Ole Spring Relief 6: "Go bus 2! (Our group at a service site in Kansas City, Missouri.) Last week I got on a bus with 35 other Oles and embarked on a 9 day jour..."

Thanks to Paige for an inspiring account of classroom learning yoked with experience during her spring break.  As the number 6 may suggest, Ole Spring Relief was instituted in response to the need for physical labor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  That it continues is a hopeful sign that matches the suggestion that the "post 9/11" generation is willing and eager to get involved.

writing and reading good writing

New Yorker, Talk of the Town
When Gary Gisselman was my teaching partner for AmCon 202 he told the students about advise about learning to write that he had received as a younger person than we are now.  Someone, I don't recall who, told him:"Read 'The Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker every week."  I don't know if every week is necessary, but it is true that the prose is crisp and worth imitating for the craft.  Having remembered this suggestion, I now offer the link to make the pleasant discipline easy.

Free plant

Chicory

by John Updike

Show me a piece of land that God forgot—
a strip between an unused sidewalk, say,
and a bulldozed lot, rich in broken glass—
and there, July on, will be chicory,

its leggy hollow stems staggering skyward,
its leaves rough-hairy and lanceolate,
like pointed shoes too cheap for elves to wear,
its button-blooms the tenderest mauve-blue.

How good of it to risk the roadside fumes,
the oil-soaked heat reflected from asphalt,
and wretched earth dun-colored like cement,
too packed for any other seed to probe.

It sends a deep taproot (delicious, boiled),
is relished by all livestock, lends its leaves
to salads and cooked greens, but will not thrive
in cultivated soil: it must be free.

How many steps removed?

Clara posted this photo of her friend at the Art Institute of Chicago, next to a Thomas Cole painting of Niagara Falls. 

This gave me another opportunity to think again about the differences between "in-person" and "on-line" because there are several layers of that here.  I am looking "on-line" at a person looking "in-person" at a painting of a place, which means that he is not there "in-person," although Thomas Cole may well have been there "in-person" in order to paint Niagara Falls.

So, how many steps am I away from the water?  And, how close can I come to it by using my eyes to travel from March 29, 2011 in the basement of Boe Chapel to February 2010 in Chicago to some other day in the 19th century in New York?  I won't get wet; I won't hear the sound; I won't smell the water. . . but I will see something I would not with out the mediation of computer, photography, and paint.

American Dream in (a few) photographs

again from the BBC series

Interesting feature.  I'm not convinced that these are THE photos for the task.  But, the effort gives me an idea for 202 assignment!  Shall we assemble our own set of photos, using quotations from our readings as captions?  Start collecting images and quotations now.  There are some iconic images that are used and reinterpreted over and over: the statue of liberty (AmCon201) and American Gothic, for example.  There are stereotypes such as the house with the picket fence or, perhaps, those Rockwell posters.  But . . . I'm sure we can do better.  Here is my first entry, still without the telling caption.

What you said about Putnam

In the four (out of seven) group responses to Putnam and his conversation partners that I read I found these common clusters of ideas:

1. Even those scholars who disagree with RP acknowledge that he launched an important conversation about an important topic: namely how Americans interact with each other and contribute to their shared public life.
2. Some years have passed since his article was published in 1995 and the book came out in 2000; moreover, in those years there have been some significant changes that effect the continued validity of his findings.  
• The advent of electronic communication as a mode of social interaction is important and not yet well understood.  
• And, 9/11 may have stimulated a reversal of some of the trends he identified, at least among those Americans who were of an impressionable age.  (I would also be interested in the effect of Katrina.)
3. Putting aside these developments which RP could not have anticipated, criticisms of his work fall into a few types: 
• dissatisfaction with RP's definition of social capital; 
• disputes about the validity of the evidence he uses to demonstrate its decline and thus with his conclusion that there is one; 
• disagreement about the causes of that decline and about its consequences; 
• and assertions that rather than declining social capital is being generated by different sorts of engagement.

140 character dream

BBC on The Amreican Dream Today

Buried in this British Broadcasting Company report on the current state of the American Dream (worth a look) is an invitation to articulate that dream in a tweet.  This is a time-limited opportunity, so if you are interested in giving it a try do not delay!

Tweeting the Dream

Can you define the American Dream in 140 characters or less? Send BBC_WNA a tweet and include #americandream - we'll publish the best at the end of this week.

Difference and civil societiy

Sidling up to Difference with Kwame Anthony Appiah

This morning's installment of Krista Tippet "On Being" features her conversation with Appiah, a wise philosopher who has written Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.  He helps us go beyond superficial infatuation with novelty to think deeply about how to bridge real differences between people. 

Here is a tantalizing bit in which Appiah responds to Tippet's request that he define "conversation" and ends up discussing democracy.

Mr. Appiah: Exactly. Well, those sort of — you know, you're sitting down with a friend in a bar and you're chatting and it's about the Super Bowl or it'll be about Egypt. You're not talking to your friend about the Super Bowl because it makes any difference to what happens. The Super Bowl is over. You're not trying to — you know, you're not changing anything. Nor — I came into this studio with a Steelers cap on, as it happens, which I confess before the nation. But I'm not going to have — if I talk to somebody who's a fan of those other guys from Wisconsin, I'm not expecting them at the end of the conversation to say, "You're right, you know, the Steelers are definitely the team I should follow. They're definitely the better team." Obviously, they discuss it, talk about it, not to come to some kind of agreement, not to change each other, just to be together, enjoy one another's company.
If you have that background of relationship between individuals and communities that is in that sense conversational, then when you have to talk about the things that do divide you, you have a better platform. You can begin with the assumption that you like and respect each other even though you don't agree about everything, and you can maybe build on that. And you can know that, at the end of the conversation, it's quite likely that you'll both think something pretty close to what you both thought at the start. But you might at least have a deeper appreciation for the other person's, um, point of view, and that turns out to make it easier to accept the outcome, whether it's the outcome you favor or the outcome the other person favors.
People who've been heard and whose position is understood — this is one of the great virtues of democracy when it's working — tend to be more willing to accept an outcome that they wouldn't have chosen because they feel they've had voice; they've participated in the process. One of the reasons why those who say that we might have done a better job with abortion if we'd settled it through the legislature rather than through the courts is, I think, because if we'd settled through legislatures, we'd have had to have kept, as it were, talking to one another. Whereas, if you declare something to be a constitutional right, that's sort of a conversation stopper.

 That bit I put in bold reminds me of a reason that democracy as a system of decision making by voting requires democracy as feature of social life: because voting is not an essay question.  When we vote, we strip the decision of its reasons and its complexities and sometimes even of its consequences for both winners and losers.  Appiah's approach to difference calls for us to meet as people who have ideas and commitments rather than to allow ideas and commitments to prevent us from meeting.

He also addresses the persistent issue of how electronically mediated social contact effects the quality of our interactions.  (See the transcript or listen to the pod-cast.)

How many of us are there and where are we now.

NYT Census Map

In the second half of the semester our focus shifts a bit, away from discussions of democracy (more as a societal characteristic than a governmental system) toward the "vistas" of the 19th century.  This will include what people looked at and where they were.  I admit that the connection is slender, but it is the case that in these decades the American population grew and shifted westward, so this map presenting data from the 2010 census is of interest.  It allows the viewer to see, at a county level, where the population grew in the last decade and where it declined.  It also breaks down the changes into several ethnic/racial categories including Native Americans. 

Our county, Rice, has grown just over 13%.  Whites are 90% of the total; but that population has grown only 6%.  Native Americans, who are 0% of the total, have grown more that 30%.  The largest increase is among Blacks: +183%

How very interesting it would be to see this same information for each decade of the 19th century and to trace the population changes with such things as the expansion of the railroad, the homestead act, and immigration.

High school civics class

Clara's American Conversations Commonplace Blog: Democracy in training: "Today, I am very proud of my little brother. He's a freshman in a school district that is facing some very, very painful budget cuts for the..."

Thanks, Clara, for this posting about your brother's action at his high school and the conversation the two of you had later in the day.  You've given us a vivid, specific example of the intersection of civil society and government as the students expressed their interests and needs to the decision makers by exercising their freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.  I'm reminded of Mary Ryan's article and of her analysis of the ways persons without "the vote" nonetheless have been able to influence legislation.  I'm also thinking that this event may teach the students as much about being citizens as they would absorb in several days sitting passively in an old-style high school civic class.

bridging = making contact with "other" than self

Putnam distinguishes between bonding (with in groups) and bridging (between them).  That is probably too simple a way of putting it, but the point holds that a democracy needs ways to link together people who are not already in sympathy with each other so that we can see the larger needs and so that we can become willing to make the adjustments required to get those things accomplished.  Being in touch with "others" gets us (me) outside ourselves; and sometimes it expands our sense of who is included in "we."

Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on this, though in the context of neighbor love rather than of democracy, in her book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

Contra dancing

Of course, religious communities are not the only communities in which neighbor love is practiced.  In the small rural community where I live, people also count on community theater, contra dancing, quilting circles, book clubs, singing groups, Rotary Club meetings, and even a cockfight or two to keep kinship bonds strong.  The only problem with any of these groups, as far as I can tell, is that they  tend to attract like-minded people, the same way most churches do.  However different the people in them may be, and however often they may tangle with one another, they still share central convictions, commitments, values, or disciplines.  On the one hand, this is what keeps them together.  On the other hand, this is what keeps people out.

at the grocery store

Meanwhile, there are people in all of our communities who do not belong to any of the same groups we do.  They do not live thirty-two miles away, either.  Some of them live right down the street.  Some of them stand right in front of us at the gas station, the post office, or the grocery store, where they remain largely invisible to us.  Our community with them is human community--such a broad connection that it is easy to overlook--and yet who could be better equipped to pop the  locks on our prisons than people in whom we see nothing of ourselves?  (pp. 93-94)

Hope and history (to be made)

The news tells us of protests in Egypt and conflict across North Africa, of earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, of nuclear accidents and intentional gunshots, of laws passed, protests made, and elections to come close to home.  We have read Tocqueville and Bellah and Putnam and Stout.  We have thought about habits and ideas and laws and mores.  We have considered the structure of government and the necessity of engaged citizens whose collective self-interest leads them to action in civil society.  All good; all important; and yet, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, more is needed.  That more is not merely longing for the millennium, a sort of apocalyptic expectation.  It is a sort of virtue, the excellence of hope.

These paragraphs, published in 2003, continue to be relevant.  From Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army.  It is is crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.  Sometimes one person inspires a movement, nor her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a  mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and changes comes upon us like a change of weather.  All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.  To hope is to gamble.  It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.  To hope is dangerous, and yet its the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.  I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.  Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.  Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.  (pp. 4-5)

new technology changes Americans' lives

Really just a teaser here.  I'm reading madly about trains in the 19th century and the many way that the advent of train travel changed Americans' lives.  The idea is that this new transportation technology can stand for industrialization as well as shifting relationships between people and their physical environment in the 19th century.  Today many Americans may regard trains as toys or a diversion, but once they were as transformative as the internet: allowing travel in all seasons, requiring standardized time, contributing to the demise of the buffalo, reducing the operative size of the nation.

Pew Internet and American Life

Link the their site

We're had enough conversation about this topic that a direct link to Pew's site seems in order.  Lots of information and pondering here about how the internet effects various aspects of American life today.

virtual voluntary

From the Atlantic re: Pew study
"The Pew Internet data essentially reinforces Clay Shirky's thesis in Here Comes Everybody (2008) on organizing in the digital age: As new innovations in media and information technology make communication infinitely more efficient, the costs of organizing plummet, creating more opportunities for collective action in the digital realm. Communities like Reddit and 4chan, for example, do have a "home base" on a particular website, yet have no need to deploy firm-like systems of complex rules to reduce the costs of engaging in communal activity; they simply act, with minimal direction." 

Along with our speculations we can consult some real studies of ways that the internet effects social capital.  I recommend this short piece which helps move the conversation from the anecdotal to the aggregate.

And the truth is...... it is just not simple, even if different than before and largely more positive than negative.

My questions remain however.  I'm wondering about the fundamental difference between being in the same space with other people, being able to see their expressions, smell their sweat, touch the texture of their clothing, share the same cake with them, and merely watching them on a video-link.  This is a basic matter of how we understand our selves as human beings, embodied spirits who take up space and who have several senses.

group work

When I was a student I did not like group work.  I preferred to take responsibility for my own efforts rather than rely upon others, even if they might have offered me resources I did not have myself.  Even if they might have....but of course I rather assumed that they would not and that the bother of negotiating the group dynamics would still have out weighted whatever paltry benefits might have come from that unlikely contribution.

Cyprian of Carthage

(In fairness I must mention one graduate school project for which my partner was far more prepared than I.  The topic was a Latin speaking North African theologian.  I was able to look up citations in the indexes and run to the stacks to retrieve the publications.  Beyond that, much of the work was Jane's.)

Now, as an instructor, I find myself using class time for small group discussion and assigning group written work.  Why?  Because experts in student learning have convinced me that we (we are all students) learn more in the midst of those social interactions.  The necessity of articulating our ideas and communicating with each other increases our understanding and our retention of both information and wisdom.  The interaction generates new insights and ideas.

And . . . .. (drum-roll) I'm relatively sure that the often frustrating and sometimes exhilarating practice of  working with one's peers is an important exercise in democracy.

Bowling in Iowa and at St. Olaf

In class I told students about my father's family and their bowling activities.  This photos in not of any of my relatives.  Nonetheless, it does portray in real people the larger cultural phenomena of bowling leagues in the mid-20th century and does so in the town my relatives lived in.

In that discussion we failed to mention that when the previous student commons was built at St. Olaf (Ditman now), there was a bowling alley in the lower level.  This photo is of those very lanes.  Ask alums from the late 1960s through the early 1990s if they bowled there.

Democracy FROM America?

While I have been snowed under by a three-prep semester and three weekends in a row out-of-town,  I have been thinking about democracy.  Who can avoid it as North African people and Wisconsin residents have been daily seeking it and engaging in it.  Certainly I can not since I have also been reading Democracy in America, and "Bowling Alone," and some Bellah, and some Jeff Stout with AmCon students.  So, even if I have not been keeping up with my blog, I have at least been thinking about and talking about democracy, freedom, and other precious concepts.

One topic to which our class conversation often returns: what role should Americans in the early 21st century take in "exporting" democracy?  Are we really good enough at this to be able to teach anyone anything?  Is it really our place to even suggest that democracy is the right system for others?

While we have been reading and thinking and talking about the idea of democracy, Beth Linn -- Ole and Peace Corps Volunteer -- has been daily engaged in the work of democracy and building social capital.  This posting from her blog offers a realistic and hopeful account of how one American is offering her fierce commitment to democratic citizenship in a far away place.