Category: Musings

A recent Economist article queries the simultaneous increase in general happiness and increase in votes for populist parties. How can people who say they are happier, and who have better jobs and better lives, vote for parties that vow to destroy current systems and cause massive disruption? It seems counter-intuitive. Doesn’t history tell us that it’s the misery of people, it’s Germany in the 1920s, that leads to the rise of dictatorship and the undermining of rights? Why would anyone benefiting from a system vote to overthrow it?

I would like to suggest that the issue is virtuality, and the gaming mentality engendered by virtual activities.

In a world where you contact your friends in a virtual space more than in reality, where your car beeps because you are too close to another car, where Alexa reminds you of your appointment at 10, and where you can use an app to get your groceries delivered, the virtual nature of life has become immersive. It is not simply a matter of too much screen time. It’s the transition to perceiving the real world like it’s on a screen, with you holding the controls. The virtual has overcome the reality.

I live in California, land of automobiles. As cars became more electronic, I noticed drivers behaving more erratically and aggressively. I saw people driving as if they were in a video game, where the other cars were merely obstacles to their goal. When cell phones became a distraction, the self-centered driving behavior became even more marked. It wasn’t just more erratic and dangerous due to the distraction — with or without phone in hand, drivers took even less notice of what happened beyond their own vehicle. I’ve seen driving behaviors that demonstrate a disregard of the fragility of pedestrians in crosswalks, intolerance toward disabled drivers, frustration at people who don’t get out of the way quickly enough. In this state, where turning right on a red light is legal if conditions are safe, you’d better do at or you’ll get honked at whether conditions are safe or not.

These kinds of behaviors are what we see in games. When you know you are secure, you take more chances, and behave more aggressively. You stockpile your money and weapons in Assassin’s Creed, then you go on your hunt. As far back as The Oregon Trail, the idea was to get set up properly, then begin your dangerous journey, and take your chances. You are encouraged to think you’re living your own Odyssey. The other characters in the game are only there as foils to your individual character. They were created only to make your goal more difficult to obtain. Of course you honk at them.

As one sits at the computer interacting in virtual space, the people with whom one interacts also seem virtual and unreal. They aren’t really in our space. We can turn them off by turning off our computer or our phone, and go do something else. Politics comes to us in a 24-hour news cycle that tends not to distinguish between the significant and the irrelevant, and it often comes to us online, on a 2-dimensional screen. The party debates, for example, can seem like a TV show, sometimes interesting and other times worthy of the Off button. But they don’t seem like anything very important.

So now people are interviewed, and say they are happier and more employed. Yet they are voting for populist parties that channel anger and aggression against others. These aren’t opposites: they are normal gaming behavior.

It’s more fun and more dangerous to join angry groups on Facebook, especially those that provide a sense of belonging at the same time. And one can happily support populist parties because it feels like taking a chance, doing something risky — that means you earn more points. It’s similar to the increased disconnect between your car and the environment surrounding it. The perceived distance between the individual and government combines with the actual distance between oneself, sitting at a computer, and the reality of how that government affects your life. Politics is just a game you play in groups, the ultimate MMPG. It’s why it makes no difference whether the current government is fulfilling its promises or not — you support it if that’s the team you’re on.

We feel empowered sitting in our captain’s chair, the computer under our control. We can help our team. Click! I can post an outraged comment. Click! I can answer a poll. Click! I can make a small donation to a party that says they’ll give people like me an easier life. I don’t click because I’m unhappy, because I’m destitute. If I were really destitiute I wouldn’t have the time or ability to spend all this time in the virtual world. I click because it all feels like a game. What’s the harm — it’s just clicking things, posting words in cyberspace. That little frisson of excitement is because I know it is real, but as user7864 I don’t have to be individually responsible if I don’t want to be.

While there are articles on gamifying education, and on the effect of games on the human psyche, I’ve seen little on the gamification of social and political interaction engendered by our electronically connected world. And I realize my point of view could be seen as an argument against online voting, which would only seem to increase the disconnectedness and virtuality of political participation. Since we are already immersed, however, I don’t see the difference in voting virtually. Perhaps my click will make something better happen. At least I’ll get more points.

Those of us who recall education, conversation, and research before the habitual use of the web often wax eloquently about all the affordances the web has given us. We can look up facts in seconds, engage in research from our sofa, video-conference with people in real time. It’s amazing!

We also know that things get lost with any new technology. It’s one of the major themes (well, the major theme) of my History of Technology class. We’ve seen that everything from real-life conversation, to civility, to shelf-browsing has suffered in ways connected to the advent of the web. I am considering examining these in some posts.

So here’s one. I have a colleague who researches American patent medicine in the late 19th century. Today I’m on Twitter, and see that A. J. Wright has posted a patent medicine advert. I’d like to share this with my colleague. In the old days of email, I might have sent it to him in an email. But now I won’t share it with him at all.

Why? Because the likelihood of it having been shared a zillion times, and him having seen it already, is very high. If I put the name of the product (H.R. Stevens’ Family Balsam Familine) into Google, I get some right away:

And there are more links below to sites like Rochester University, the Smithsonian, even eBay. My mind conjures up a Pinterest page of bunches of similar ads, and a quick search proves that yes, everybody and their mother saves images of patent medicines.

I am intimidated by the ease of finding more examples, so I’m less likely to share one. My “discovery” has been diffused by the commonality of the find, by the ease of access. Despite the fact that there are still areas of mystery (what is Familine made of?), I’m too deflated to care. It’s like that scene in Summertime where Katherine Hepburn discovers that the supposedly unique Venetian glass she’s been sold is just a cheap souvenir. In her case, she later discovers that hers is an original and the others are copies, but in my case they are all cheap souvenirs of a few minutes web searching. Hardly something one would share with a respected colleague.

It’s odd that in the web world, which seems so to value “sharing”, something can so instantly become not worth sharing.

I read in The Economist, in an article called “Will Europe’s Green parties be the new leaders of the political left?“, a helpful way to view contemporary political polarization. Here’s the section:

If I’m understanding correctly, the reason that the far-left and far-right are becoming popular is because both are founded on these “post-materialist values”.

I understand that postmaterialism emerged in the 1970s to help explain the self-actualization of the younger generation, who valued personal experience and happiness over economics (because they could afford to). It just had never occurred to me that such values were the foundation of thought for the current political edges. The far-right is post-materialistic in that they value nationalism and homogeneous culture above material considerations. The far-left values environmentalism (Europe) or personal identity (America) above material considerations.

It does make sense. The conflict between Marxism and liberalism marked the 20th century. I had always thought of the two philosophies as diametrically opposed. At the same time, I teach that there are historically two forms of liberalism: the political (Locke, Jefferson, et. al.) and the economic (i.e. free trade). In contemporary times, it is possible to see globalism as the updated form of economic liberalism. But what is the updated form of political liberalism?

It’s not what is called “neo-liberalism”, obviously — that is also primarily economic, and retro because it brings back the initial forms of liberal capitalism that treated workers like dirt and believed in a nasty form of natural selection that sacrificed humanity.

There’s a gap here that is neither right nor left, but is more basic. I’ve said for years (to anyone who would listen) that if liberal democracy is to survive, it needs to come up with a damn good argument as to why it’s the best system. It’s rested on its laurels for fall too long, to the point where during my own lifetime it was just assumed as best, the system that other nations would implement if they could just get more advanced. It’s time to think like Jefferson and, as he said about the Declaration of Independence, “place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent”. If liberalism is materialistic, someone better justify what materialism is important. If democracy is good, someone must tell us why.

In the absence of a proper, cogent, meaningful, and plain argument for liberal democracy, the fringes have more space. And these fringes don’t even acknowledge arguments for liberal democracy or Marxism, because both are based on materialism.

Certainly Tr*&p voters know want material things (jobs, money). Tr*&p’s government is not only reneging on its promises to provide material prosperity, it is actively making the finances of poorer people worse, and yet his supporters won’t hear a word against him even as he steals their food. That can only mean that a deeper philosophy is at play which is post-material. The wall (as a symbol of these values) matters more than food and money.

That may seem strange except for a 2011 study by Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University. I’ve been thinking about it for years. In 2008, 1,400 people were asked whether they had ever used a government social program. 57% said no. Of those, 94% had. They’d received food stamps, social security benefits, unemployment compensation, student loans, etc. This gave me the idea that many people do not understand the role of government at all, much less how they benefit from it. It may seem illogical that people would, for example, push for budget cuts to programs that benefit them (the original focus of Mettler’s study). But it makes more sense if the problem is principle rather than facts.

This post-material focus also helps explain the tendency, noted in this piece in the Washington Post, for people to believe untrue things. It’s confirmation bias gone amok. The woman in the story believes the “fake news” about the two women in red because it “was true to what she knew of their character”. The overall idea is far more important than the actual facts because it’s the principle that matters, rather than what happened. Facts carry the taint of the material.

So if Emilie van Haute is right (and I suspect she is, since she’s studied this stuff for years), there is no way to get everyone back together and stop the polarizing forces that are at play. It might be better to acknowledge the deep attachments people have to things other than money and goods, and work from there.

I wish I could recall where I first saw the idea that reading a Victorian novel is really binge-reading, since many were first published in serial form. I’d like to “unpack” this idea (as they say) by comparing literature and television.

Amber Regis, of the University of Sheffield, counters the idea that Netflix is today’s version of Victorian serial stories. Victorian readers couldn’t binge; sometimes Dickens himself didn’t know what would happen in the next installment.

So one needs to go back to television in the 1950s and 60s, and comic strips even earlier, to experience Victorian serialization.

When I was a kid, there were comics I never read, because I didn’t know what had happened before (Mary Worth and Prince Valiant come to mind). Some television programs, like soap operas, were so inherently episodic that to miss an installment was to get hopelessly behind. Those with discrete episodes (Star Trek, Twilight Zone) were the short stories of the genre, and were self-contained.

Today’s scholars, at least those interested in story-telling, could likely explain to me the creative impact of knowing that binging will occur. When Netflix releases a whole series at once, surely the writers are aware of this and create the story accordingly. Quite a few (Riverdale comes to mind) continue with the cliff-hanger habits of serial episodes, but there is an awareness that the whole series may be viewed in bulk. We no longer need to remember whether that starship had a particular capability from last year’s episode — we can go back and see. This must make it hard for writers to change things. Perhaps that’s why serial shows like Riverdale and The Bodyguard have taken to killing off central characters, just to create surprise. Bodyguard creator Jed Mercurio even referenced the old TV shows:

“I remember watching TV as a kid and, whenever there was some sort of jeopardy involving the hero, I could reassure myself that they were what I’d call a ‘can’t-die’ character, so everything would be OK. Even though you’d just seen a completely crazed Mr Spock strangle Captain Kirk to death [in Star Trek], you’d know that a few minutes later there would be some bizarre twist involving the timespace continuum and Kirk would be alive on the Starship Enterprise.”

Can’t-die characters, of course, do die in novels (for which I will never forgive George Eliot, although she certainly wasn’t alone). I remember crying when I first read Little Women. But here the killing off of main characters is, I think, connected to the problem of the 21st century serial program. But, as with Victorian authors, the creators of the works make the decision to do this (except, perhaps, for a grumpy Arthur Conan Doyle, who was forced by the public to revive Sherlock Holmes).

In reading Victorian novels that were serialized, however, we are defying the intentions of the creator of the work. I am currently listening to the Librivox audio book of Dickens’ Hard Times (beautifully read by Librivox volunteer Phil Benson). It is the version that appeared in 20 installments in Household Words in 1854. I didn’t know this when I downloaded it, but it has turned out to be a good mode because I listen to it on my morning walk, which takes about 25-30 minutes. The result is that I’m getting the work in approximately the way it was intended.

So why is any of this important? To me it has to do with the “white space”, or thinking time, of the reader between episodes.

Truly episodic or serialized stories assume that space exists between the installments. This space could be used in several ways: to think about the previous episode, to form judgements, to talk to others about the story. I recall people watching Days of Our Lives before calling each other on the phone to discuss it, hallway conversations at school about last night’s episode of Dallas, even DJs on the radio mentioning a recent M*A*S*H episode.

Such processing space would be assumed by the author of a serialized story (and in the case of those writing as they go along, perhaps even necessary to the story itself). So when we binge-watch a series on Netflix that was not intended to be seen together, or when we read a book in novel form that was never intended to be read as a book, to what extent is the viewer/reader changing the work itself?

Binge-watching means that the “consumer” of a story is impacting the story, but surely this isn’t new. Even when people read the whole novel Hard Times, it’s unlikely they do it at one sitting. That’s what bookmarks are for (the tangible kind, not the web kind). Books are written not knowing when the reader will pause. Television used to be more predictable: the show was 7-8pm on Thursday, so that’s when everyone was watching. Networks are currently trying to create a similar experience, even in a market with so many options.

So perhaps Netflix’s series are inherently more like a novel than a serialized story. Viewers can binge, but they can also “bookmark” whenever they want, pause and have a meal, or take two weeks off, or not finish at all. Perhaps there’s no need to experiment with book publication in response to Netflix binges, or make comparisons between the two eras, or write scholarly articles on the revival of the serial novel. But we should consider the white space: is it good? is it necessary? is it social?

In today’s theoretical constructs, objects (like books or programs) are often given a sort of “agency” — scholars focus as much these days on how objects create “causes” as they do on how the objects reflect social, political, or economic trends. We know that novels and programs have an impact on people. It’s likely that the reaction to a work also influences it, particularly with serials. If people were begging Dickens not to hurt Little Nell, and Doyle not to leave Holmes dead, then the “audience” influences the work that follows. (Of course, if George R.R. Martin is right, it doesn’t always.)

Media scholars probably spend a lot of time studying the interplay between the media and the audience, and I suspect that’s a lot of fun (after all, I’m doing it now instead of writing about H.G. Wells or planning my spring courses).  Even though I’m exploring Victorian periodical study at the moment, I don’t know much about the interplay of text and audience, but I’m certainly interested.

In recently submitting an article for publication, and in writing my paper for presentation in October, I am reminded of the importance of organization, and the ways in which I am clumsily trying to accomplish it.

The article I submitted was missing various parts in the footnotes, as was noted by the editor. Several were lacking the volume number of the journal. I have been using Paperpile as my bibliographic program, but I knew this was not the program’s fault. Being sloppy, I had only entered the volume number for items where I had held an actual volume in my hand, issues bound together into a book. The ones obtained from Hathi and Internet Archive and elsewhere, being separate pieces, did not usually include the volume number. Luckily, these were the easy ones to find again.

Clearly, this is an organization problem. As noted when I set up my system for this project, Paperpile is extraordinarily useful for storing books and articles, and for tagging and organizing them. Of the system I originally set up, I have ditched the wiki, using Google Docs (linked to each other) instead. It is functioning, but barely. I still can’t find things or figure out exactly where/how to write. I’m not sure where it’s best to store images, nor how to retrieve them.

It was nice to discover I am absolutely not alone, and that historians have always had issues with organizing notes and evidence. I enjoyed Keith Thomas’ diary from 2010, which points out several methods that have been used, including a 17th century version of sticky notes. I do always carry a notebook (my commonplace book), but am never sure how to create proper entries for it; my current notebook has a page for each day I’m in the UK, with handy things like where I’m staying and which museums are open late. But after those date pages I just dog-eared a page, and beyond that dog ear is a mish-mash of pages of notes. I’ll likely not be able to find these notes again. I can’t imagine tracking a double-note system like the one Francesco Sacchini developed – taking notes in notebook and again on slips of paper, so they can be reorganized. But I’d like to read him – is his Ratione Libros Cum Profectu Legendi Libellus available in English?

I also get impatient with handwriting notes when I know I could type them faster, but don’t have the means (that flat thing they have on my mobile phone is NOT a keyboard, no matter what they claim). Electronic annotation of articles, a feature of Paperpile, didn’t work for me. And when I take clear photos of documents in a library, many times Optical Character Recognition programs can’t translate them into usable text. Then I can’t copy a phrase easily to comment on, or use in my work. Google Keep looks nice, but it’s hard to find things. It would be better to store articles and images (Paperpile isn’t good at the latter) somehow within a program wherein I can also write. Instead I’m going back and forth between tabs.

I crash my computer with so many tabs open (well, OK, watching the Dodgers while I work doesn’t help), and I keep getting the strong sense that I don’t know where my notes are. My best results have been achieved by downloading articles, putting them in Paperpile, printing out pages, marking them up, and putting them in file folders. Hardly ideal for the 21st century, and useless for traveling.

Going back a few hundred years I find that the difficulties are quite the same, but the indexing systems were better. I had never heard of cards with holes that, if you put a knitting needle through, shakes out the ones you’re looking for (the notched edge card system). While I don’t want to go back to 4×6 notecards, I do see the advantage.

A recent story about college students in the San Diego Union Tribune was pretty interesting. Here’s an example:

Students want schools to adjust to their needs, interests and lifestyles, and to do so quickly.

“I’m always having to adapt to education rather than having education adapt to me,” said Ella Chen, a sophomore at UC San Diego.

The restlessness is widespread. Nearly 40 percent of the freshmen surveyed by the university in 2016 said they were frequently bored in class.

The article goes on to say that students want “more hands-on, experiential learning”. (I have this for history: my students interpret primary source documents like historians do. But I think what they mean here would require a TARDIS.)

One of the main purposes of education, especially the education of young people, is to acculturate the student into the broader society. You can change the processes of formal education, but the motive for these systems is the same. In the case of university, there is an additional set of purposes having to do with the development of the intellect, particularly in connecting fields of knowledge (à la Cardinal Newman).

I was bored in a number of my classes, at all levels of my education. The solution was to extract from the class what I could, and supplement its content on my own. That’s a life skill. I was also in a number of classes where I wasn’t bored, but other students were. An old saying goes, “this isn’t boring — you are bored”.

While I spend a whole lot of energy making history exciting for students, but the fact is, some are bored. I share my passion for the subject, but that isn’t enough for some to get engaged. Once could understand this through research on student character traits (persistence, resilience, grit), and respond appropriately. But it is so much easier to blame teachers, and the system. I recently saw this dissertation online: Understanding Disinterest: How Online Undergraduate Students Perceive And Respond To Disengaged Faculty Members. Setting aside the improper use of the word “disinterest” (it means lack of bias), here is another low-sample study (N=8) claiming a larger significance. It assumes a gap in research on how students perceive online teachers (a gap I believe is filled by faculty evaluations). The study uses transactional distance theory, or rather the parts of it that fit the argument, to conflate teaching skill with enthusiasm. It shows low student success for professors who don’t demonstrate the kind of actions that will motivate students.

It is obvious that the problems of the customer-service model of education continue to expand. The larger question is how it has become accepted wisdom that students require motivation in the form of entertaining behaviors on the part of instructors, that not to do so means being boring, and that boring is not OK and needs to be fixed. Regardless of what a student may need in terms of acculturation, self-direction, and scholarship, it has become more important that they be entertained into learning, then get a degree as quickly as possible to avoid wasting public monies.

Education should not adapt to such support goals, nor adapt to fit what students say they want.

Many years ago I was in a group of “stakeholders” choosing among Course Management Systems for the college. We had a student contingent, and they were most insistent that they wanted just one thing. They wanted all their professors to input all the deadlines for all assignments into one central calendar system, so they could stay on task. At the time, this would have been daunting for faculty, and would have massively increased their workload. Nowadays, the adoption of the college-wide (state-wide if you’re a community college) LMS insists that this be done, and professors do it. And yet, despite answering what students said they needed to be successful, so many are not successful that we need massive state-wide student success initiatives.

While I have no problem adjusting to student needs (cogent information, skill-building assignments, fair grading, access to help) I do have a problem adjusting to their wants. Diagnosing their desires as a social problem that needs to be solved degrades the purpose of college.

You automatically look the correct way first before crossing the street.

You are told your room is on the first floor, and you don’t have to think about it before you get in the lift.

You get out correct change from your wallet without having to translate the currency in your head (you also stop looking in your wallet for £1 notes).

You get on the hiking boots for what locals describe as “a short walk”.

You chat about the weather immediately.

You say hello first, rather make a request.

You start thinking of the sidewalk as the pavement, the chip as the crisp, the sparking water as the fizzy water, the arugula as rocket, and the “pausta” as “paasta”.

You don’t expect Mexican food to taste like food from Mexico.

You say “sorry” every time you ask for something.

You are happy to take advice on visiting California sights from a London cabbie.

You are SO grateful for a cup of tea (actually, I do that at home, too!).

In my researches on H.G. Wells, I have discovered a field dominated by English Lit types and those who love his science fiction. Likewise, Steampunk is not really a place for historians, but rather a place for imagination, for “alternative history” (which, of course, isn’t history at all).

However, in a literary sense, I find Steampunk appealing. My first foray was a wonderful book, Steampunk: Extraordinary Tales of Victorian Futurism  (2012). It was not what I expected. Indeed I now realize it was not what any Steampunk aficionado would expect either. Instead of contemporary fiction set in the Victorian era, the stories were written by Victorian authors in the 19th century. As Mike Ashley says in his “Introduction: When Steampunk was Real”: “I would argue that steampunk was well under way by the 1880s but came into its own in the 1890s”. The dime novels and stories of this era contained visions of the future, automatons, interplanetary travel — all the steampunky stuff. Steampunk did not begin, as I had imagined when I bothered to think at all about such things, with Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen (1988).

About the same time I read Ashley’s anthology, I began reading H.G. Wells’ short stories, then Jules Verne. I read and saw the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A bit later, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft (yes, I know, he’s later, in the 1920s, but his work is a staple of Steampunk anyway). I began to understand the idea and the aesthetic. As a historian, I see so many commonalities between our current age and the Victorian age: the fascination with gadgetry, the naive hope of technology and science solving all our problems, the horrifying division of classes between the haves and the have nots. The middle-class guilt, the compulsive acquisition of household goods, the energy infused in politics, the trappings of celebrity – I’ve seen all this before.

So this weekend there was a Steampunk Expo here in San Diego. Now, again, keep in mind – I am not an SCA or Renaissance Faire type. I enjoy dressing up only very occasionally. The anachronisms inherent in contemporary events pretending to take place in the past cause me extreme annoyance (no one watches historical movies with me either – I ruin them). But in the case of Steampunk, the desire for “authenticity” is not really there. It is already imaginary – 21st century people living an alternative history that never happened, based on a fascination with Victorian thinking.

And it’s the thinking that brings me back to the literature, and the writing. The expo had panels, and one was of steampunk writers: “Fantasy or Science? Does Steampunk Literature Rely More On One Or Is It A Combination Of Both?”, with Tim Powers, Vernor Vinge, Erix Hendrix, Madeline Holly Rosing, and Dru Pagliassotti. I do not know their work, but the discussion was fascinating. I learned that the bible for understanding the Victorian underworld is Henry Mayhew’s volumes, London Labour and the London Poor (1851), which I know as a primary source for history.

But on the nature of writing fiction, and the complexities of writing Steampunk in particular, some interesting topics were tossed around by the panel:

The idea that 19th century steam technology made it impossible to justify slavery, because brute force was no longer as necessary. I have to think about this, because one could argue that the children put to work were enslaved to the machines.

The paucity of female heroes in steampunk works, a motivating factor for Madeline Holly Rosing. I find myself disillusioned with this one – there were new books on display in the vendors’ room that featured heroines in bustiers and stockings, looking like streetwalkers. I met a woman in the bathroom who was dressed in suede and carried arrows to rescue fairies. And yet I know that women had quite a bit of power during the Victorian era. Even though it was often wielded in private venues, it could have devastating effects. Educated women were at an advantage here, rather than those who could fight monsters. But I do understand that in science fiction in general, and steampunk in particular, most of the characters have been male.

The conflict between science/technology and magic, and the difficulty of determining genre. When there is greater technology, there appears to be less need for magic, and vice versa. However, one can gain social insight by putting one tool in the hands of elites, and the other in the hands of the masses. Magic, at first, was discussed as being something not everyone has. But the same could be said for technology. So an interesting framework can be created by having the elites control magic, while the masses rely on technology and have to seek the elite oracles and mages for help. Or, conversely, the elites control the technology, while the people have only homespun magic on which to rely. This idea certainly makes the genre of fantasy more interesting to me.

The ways in which Steampunk can be kept “real”. This came up several times – an effort must be made to imbue a fictional work with enough veracity that the reader accepts the premise and actions. Science plays this role – even if the author doesn’t get deeply into the science, a bit of scientific justification can make things possible. And the reader must believe it is possible, that what they’re reading could happen, somehow, at some time, somewhere. For magic, it is necessary to show ceremonies or steps to the magic – that creates the illusion of authenticity, since we associate tradition and rituals with things that are real. Similarly, creating social myths for an imaginary society can make it seem more real. Logic, said Vinge, should be implicit – as in David Levine’s Arabella novel where ships sail solar winds. The units of measurement should be believable and translatable – then the audience will follow.

So to maintain this veracity, all things have to come from somewhere. Powers talked about a novel where anyone who lied had water dumped over his head from nowhere. The novel never explained where this water came from – if water appears somewhere, it must disappear from somewhere. Basic natural science is inviolate. And, said Powers, one must consider consequences – surely courts would not be needed if we all knew who lied the moment they were lying? Why would probate be needed if everyone could talk to ghosts?

Once could work against what we know is real, however, by placing the character(s) in an era where people didn’t know certain things (nuclear power, antibiotics, the distance between planets). Then it was OK to have things askew, because they are also askew to the character. The reader, presumably, knows better, and thus will accept a character’s ignorance of what they know to be real.

More in alignment with my own teaching and examination of history, Steampunk stories can bring up findings from the past, things that were (or in fiction, may have been) ahead of their time, but did not move forward. It was pointed out that when there was no money, no investment, innovations can die off. We can bring them back in fiction, or they can be rediscovered. I am continually discovering things from earlier ages, where they were thought not to exist yet. We tend to assume the past was more primitive than now — often it wasn’t.

And yes, I dressed up, in a Victorian ball gown, decorated hat, gears on my earrings, cameos and watch face necklaces. But this one session made my day.

There are currently discussions (a recent one at Hybrid Pedagogy comes to mind ) about being open with our students about ourselves in order to encourage tolerance, particularly of sexuality. To me, this is part of a much larger issue about values and responsibilities, and it is broadening the list of trends with which I, respectfully, disagree.

The sexuality issue connects with similar lines of “equity” that I’ve been struggling with in recent years. According to contemporary cultural norms, I have to be X to understand what it’s like to experience discrimination about being X. I receive social messages implying that whatever labels I apply to myself, or that society applies to me, should be made public to encourage tolerance (except that tolerance is now a bad word because it implies denigrating the ideas we’re supposed to be tolerant of). My own ideas are dismissed because I am what the culture now calls “privileged” — I am told I don’t understand, because my understanding is not the same as someone else’s.

Lately, people I admire try to tell me what to do and think. I am told that All Lives Matter means that Black Lives Don’t, that I can’t understand anything because I’m white, or female, or middle class, or whatever sexual orientation, or religion, or culture, that other people think I am. I was told by Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright that I couldn’t support Bernie Sanders because I am female and he isn’t, and that I’m betraying my sex to not like Hillary Clinton.

A year ago, I saw a sticker on an office window at my college. It was triangular and featured a rainbow design with  “Safe Space” written on it. Thinking I understood (this is a safe space to be who you are), I asked how to get one, and was told to attend a training. So I did. And during that training, I was told that as a teacher it is my job to shut down intolerance in the classroom. That if anyone says anything anti-X (gay, trans, etc) I am to indicate that is inappropriate, and that people in the room might be X and be offended. I was further told that I should say that such views won’t be allowed in my class.

I raised my hand and pointed out that I want the bigot to speak, that I want him or her in my office speaking their mind. How else could I talk to them and convince them of tolerance? I was laughed at. People thought I was joking. Instructors whom I respect and like chuckled at my comment. At the end of the session, I thanked them and refused the sticker, saying I don’t stand for these values the way they are being told to me. I bought a rainbow flag and put it on my office window.

I have always been a proponent of teaching tolerance. The question is, how do we do it? Does revealing our sexuality, or religion, or culture, to our class teach tolerance and appreciation of difference? Does shutting down diverse views, especially those we find abhorrent, correct a problem? Or does it just use our authority, and our supposed role model status, to enforce a particular view of what constitutes tolerance?

My preference is for modeling tolerance rather than “teaching” it. I refuse to shut down conversation in my classroom, because my goal is critical thinking as well as an open mind and freedom of speech. My own speech tends to be egalitarian, and I always point out that what I say is my interpretation of the historical and scholarly sources. When I speak about anyone whom mainstream culture might consider unusual, I talk about them as if they aren’t unusual at all. And as a historian, I’m interested in understanding diverse points of view, because conflicts among them create not only our history, but our perception of our history.

I didn’t realize until recently that the trends I oppose are connected (call me naïve). I have long been against trigger warnings, except for blanket ones (i.e. you will encounter disturbing ideas because college is supposed to do that). I oppose adding my “pronoun” to my professional signature, because I believe such things divide us all even more, into smaller and smaller stultifying categories. I think that safe spaces, trigger warnings, shutting down the opposition, and latter-day political correctness are all manifestations of limitations on speech and academic freedom. These ideas about equity and safety were intended to do right and be inclusive, but in practice have become exclusionary.

Until recently I’ve felt quite alone in this position, as formal manifestations of the popular viewpoint emerge, fill up my college email, and are financed by my tax dollars. This week, however, The Atlantic published this article on How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students. Don’t be fooled by the title – it isn’t so much about religious students as about the appreciation of all points of view, not just the current set of what is accepted. And now I read that the University of Chicago agrees, and is telling its entering freshmen there will be no trigger warnings, that they will be exposed to, and expected to engage, diverse ideas.

And for those who think I’m a nihilist, I’m not. This is not cultural relativism. I don’t believe that all points of view have equal value, or that ethics are arbitrary. Rather, refusing to disallow objectionable speech is putting ethics into the context of civil discourse, rather than promoting a set of norms that can be used to exclude people. I agree with those who say that the extremities of our current national discourse are caused, in some part, by dismissing other people’s points of view as stupid, and by liberals (myself included) being smug.  It is entirely possible that the refusal to discuss objectionable ideas has led to the increase in the frequency and volume of those ideas. If we do not value civil discourse and actual inclusivity, we undermine the most precious values of our civilization.

I can only hope that my views will be…tolerated.

I wrote last year about my concerns that instructional design (with all its newly-minted PhDs) is taking over teaching, even to the extent that teachers doubt themselves. In 2013, I worried that market forces were undermining the independence of faculty to choose tools for their pedagogies. Way back in 2008, I said I would look into how faculty are becoming content experts and having design taken away from them. In the current iterations of large schemes to standardize online education through “best practices” and “instructional quality improvement”, I am watching it all come home to roost as our roles are forcibly shifted.

Roles shifts for teachers, of course, are not new. For some time, research has indicated that instructors should consider shifting roles from “sages” to “guides”, using the affordances of the web. I have various concerns about this, and tend to prefer an approach which balances instructivism with constructivism. So far I’ve had that freedom. But this current role shift is more insidious, because it assumes that we do not have the knowledge to teach at all. As our courses are assessed for “quality” by outside teams of instructional designers and instructional administrators, the rubrics they apply enforce self-referential norms developed by those fields. If their research indicates that collaboration among students is good, then collaboration should be part of every class. If the presentation of course objectives are seen as being important, they must be clearly articulated and appear, preferably with specific “outcomes”, at the beginning of the class. If it is determined that “content” should be “chunked” in manageable segments, then all classes must do that.

What if an instructor decides, however, based on his own experience, that these rules are not right for his pedagogy? I know an instructor who has designed her skills-based courses in such a way that collaboration is useful only to share basic ideas or final products, but not for working together on projects. I know another who reveals course objectives in a “just-in-time” way, as the students are working on particular tasks, not at the beginning in a list. I know a wonderful lecturer who puts his long, written, narrative lectures online, with no chunking involved. All of these instructors have students who do well, and some who do badly, but whether they do well or badly they tend to learn a lot.

But the “best practices”, applied as mandates, will not allow any of them to teach in these ways, ways that reflect the strengths of their own practice and their own pedagogy. They will not be respected as professionals, but rather treated as cogs of a larger machine, as mere “content experts”.

In other words, the role of teachers as instructional designers, as developers of the students’ learning experience, is being taken away. That crucial aspect of our role, the reason many of us became teachers in the first place, is being outsourced to others. And we are told that is in the interest of quality, not standardization. We are told that it is to help us become better teachers. We are told that what they want is “student success”.

We are not told that the goal is to create easy-to-administer McClasses, or to support the rise of a plutocracy, or to micromanage “course delivery“. We are not told that “student success” means passing students through the system as quickly and easily as possible, and that faculty who teach creatively are basically just in the way of the goals of administrators and students alike.

The separation of “course design” from teaching is false. Will we be fooled as this lack of respect for our profession is couched as trying to “help” us do better?