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Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion on Walker Percy

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  • From: "Beck, David A" <dabeck AT iupui.edu>
  • To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] College Essays
  • Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:35:45 -0400

Bob,

Maybe it is because I have stack of freshman comp portfolios leering at me, I tend to agree with Pirsig. I know my "creative" writing has diminished to near nothing. I somewhat jokingly tell my students, "Those who can't make it as fulltime writers, teach writing." (I remember Jackson Browne's lyrics about the Pretender "who started out so young and strong/Only to surrender.")

In our defense, I do think, however, that freshman comp does teach more than writing: i.e. critical thinking and evaluation of sources. But, believe me, the reason I teach writing is because freshman comp is the only way to keep a job here. My favorite class to teach is Sin and Redemption in Fiction. In order to keep that gig, I teach writing. Freshman comp is the money-maker. ALL freshman have to take it. The second half (of freshman comp) is a little more rewarding (some of them can actually fog a mirror).

Well, back to the pile. Wish me well!

-David


Quoting "Eckert, Robert G SPC MIL USA FORSCOM" <robert.g.eckert AT us.army.mil>:

List

This exchange has made me think of Pirsig in ZMM:

"The school was what could euphemistically be called a "teaching
college." At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach
with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for
participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach
until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you
become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to
endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are
so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community.
The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a
very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a
false appearance of genuine education." (Part II, Ch 13)

Bob Eckert


PS

Cash, or gold?



----- Original Message -----
From: Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008 16:04
Subject: Re: [percy-l] College Essays
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
<percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>


>Peter and Rhonda,
>
>I too sympathize. I normally stagger my assignments, but I messed up
>with my cut and past job on my syllabi. All four classes turned in
>their work this week!

If I could chime in my two cents, the decline in reading and
writing that's
occurred in American society across the last fifty years has had a
verydeep and detrimental effect on our collective capacity for
independent,critical thought. As life and our understanding of it
grows increasingly
complex, it's all-the-more crucial that we hone our analytical
skills; I
don't know how we do that if it's not writing and grading essays and
tossing around ideas in seminars. Instead of investing in the
developmentof these faculties, a variety of political choices has
made teaching this
sort of reflection more expensive and out-of-reach for the average
citizen.
If you or your students doubt the benefits, then let me simply say
this. I
doubt I would be alive today if I didn't have a degree in English and
graduate classes in microeconomics and statistics under my belt. The
amount of bullshit that masquerades for scientific truth in
medicine today
is truly staggering - and deadly. I didn't just encounter potentially
fatal misinformation from one doctor; I got it from almost every
corner.
For example, I brought in research published in scientific
journals linking
gut bacteria loss to autoimmunity and one gastroenterologist told
me he
didn't "believe" it - as if personal "belief" is supposed to be a
measureof scientific proof1 - and then he referred me to the local
doctor who had
first pointed me to the theory saying, "She has a good reputation with
problem cases like yours."

I understood instantly from game theory that he was relying on a
reputational effect as a cognitive short-cut for his decision-
making. But
he didn't need to. All he had to do was stay current with the
literatureonce he got out of medical school - you know, do what
he's required to do
by law. He believed Dr. Cave could help me because she had a
"reputation"for helping problem patients no one else could deal
with. What was she
using? Magic? In his mind, what was her "reputation" supposed to
be based
on?

In a competitive marketplace, economically useful information is
supposedto be disseminated. If a doctor does something better
than you do and
you're in competition with him, you're supposed to study what he
does. How
does that information travel? The only source of new information
for the
average doctor these days seems to come from drug company reps who
haveeconomic incentives to skew their spiel. And if it's not
covered by a
patent, they have no incentive to discuss it.

If you haven't been trained to spot subtle lies, you can't get a
clear view
of reality and you can't help your patients. It's like
deconstruction.How do you understand what's not being said? How
do you understand the gap
between what is said and the underlying reality those symbols are
supposedto represent? How many doctors get the kind of liberal
arts education we
did? For that matter, take a look at the stock market slide and ask
yourself how many businessmen could benefit from a few history
classes.
Our economy brims with specialists who know very little about reality
outside their increasingly narrow field. They cannot integrate
what they
know with information from even closely related fields - even when
livesdepend on it. The result is a comedy (or tragedy) of
ironies. You see
this when a rheumatologist tells patients to eat foods that make their
inflammation worse because he thinks of it as a "nutritional"
problem and
that's beneath him.2 You see this "semiotic bubble" when the
executivesrunning A.I.G. and listening to their investment
products division didn't
understand the basics of forensic accounting, fraud and Ponzi
schemes (or
worse; perhaps they did).

It's easy for the sign to drift away from the signified. Perhaps
we all
need a little shock every once in a while to prick the inflated
bubble and
shake loose the light - or, as Albert Gore, Sr., put it, "Defeat
may serve
as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out."

Having said that, when I consider the current socioeconomic and
technological trends, I can't help but worry that our capacity for
independent thought and collective judgment is in decline.
Perhaps this
upcoming political realignment will prove me wrong or at least
reset the
clock. I certainly hope so.

If the medical examples don't stir your soul or bother your
students then
consider this: I've been in cash for several years now. Like Warren
Buffet, Paul Krugman and a lot of other contemporary critics of our
capitalism, I knew our economy was tied together with bubblegum and
shoestring and Bush was running short on shoestring.

Wade Riddick

1. I think T.S. Kuhn would say it is and I would agree with him; but
that's entirely the problem. We don't train people to understand that
their grasp on rationality is essentially a "belief" that we need to
constantly question in light of new evidence - particularly in the
sciences. Yet as we need more of this as scientific knowledge
multiplies,we're getting less of this.

2. It's not a bad choice economically since it does make the patient
sicker which then sends them running back to the rheumatologist
for more
medicine. Of course, it's hard to construe this as good behavior
in the
context of the Hippocratic oath. For another example of bad medicine,
consider how many rheumatologists think it's acceptable to
prescribe COX-2
inhibitors like celebrex to arthritis patients despite the fact
that it
makes autoimmunity worse and degrades the formation of new
collagen in
joints.


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--
An archive of all list discussion is available at
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/percy-l/

Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy








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