Sunday, August 17, 2008
Here's to three experts!
A fabulous thing! Jamaica just won one, two, two in the women's hundred metres at the Olympic Games in Beijing! Shelly-Ann Fraser took Olympic gold, leading home a clean sweep for Jamaica. (I said it just before the race: “One, two, three, ladies! One, two, three!” And so it was. Selah!) The gold medalist finished in a time of 10.78 seconds, with fellow Jamaican sprinters Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart sharing the silver medal after a dead heat. I’m a writer committed to re-associating sensibilities, and in that spirit, I offer the following observations. Being an athlete in competition is a harrowing business. When the gun goes off, you’re out there, in the spotlight, and it’s sink or swim, run or bruk yu foot. There’s no mediation time; no chance to go back and review what you did to see what went wrong, and where and why it went wrong, if it did; no opportunity to do it over. You invest enormous effort, ahead of time: research, rehearsal, review; then repeat the process. But it's slog, slog, slog, up ahead if you are to bring off the final, brilliant performance. Over to beating books… I'm not an academic nor a scholar, but I know a little about editing and publishing. Having edited an academic journal for fourteen years, I know that there are checks and balances, ways of making reasonably sure that the facts in an article or essay are correct – like three peer evaluators, four if need be, the perusal of the editorial board, the editor’s final review. If you write as an expert, whatever the discipline, the sensible thing to do, before you send what you write off to an editor, is have at least one other person in the know read it. Then you revise, and if necessary, send it off to some other expert for comment. That's the first line of defense. If you edit, in the sense of put together, a collection of other scholars' writings, it is your responsibility (1) to your eventual audience, (2) to the scholars whose work you bring together, and (3) to the press that will publish the book, to 'do your endeavour best' to ensure the correctness of what goes out between covers. And writers, editors and publishers are lucky: they have mediation time, the opportunity, up to the stage of final proofs, to make corrections before the book is printed. I am hard put to believe that any experts read Professor Baugh’s essay, because were that the case, these errors – and any others, because inevitably when there are some, one thinks there may be others – would have been caught. I am afraid that, true as fsjl’s assertion that "We all make mistakes" may be, I'm not wholeheartedly with him this time. If one accepts the designation "expert", then willy-nilly one removes oneself from the category of "We all..." That belongs to us inexpert common folks. And so, in sum: those three ladies barreling through to that splendid display just now had clearly done their 'utmost best' to leave as little as possible to chance. I submit that they are not just superb performers, but experts, by any yardstick. More of that expertise, please!
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13 comments:
The young ladies deserve congratulations on their magnificent feat! They certainly outstripped the young men.
Expertise, my dear Dr Mordecai, does not mean perfection. None of us are perfect, and even experts make mistakes (where are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?). Back when I was more rude and brash than I am today, I pointed out to one of my instructors in graduate school that he had misattributed Jamaican nationality to Sir Arthur Lewis in a paper. He told me that he'd delivered the paper in Barbados, and none of the assembled Caribbean political scientists had corrected him. If I hadn't been facety and opened my mouth a major textbook today might contain that rather glaring error.
Practice doesn't make us perfect, contrary to the proverb, but it does make us as good as we can get to be.
fsjl: Yes. The ladies are to be resoundingly cheered! I don't know what's with the Dr Mordecai bit. All it means is that I know a little bit about the poetry of Walcott and Brathwaite. And that I can be determined, for I won't tell you how long it took me. It doesn't make me either an expert or a scholar. Do I see a tongue poking out a cheek in respect of your question concerning the WMDs? I can't think why any of those assembled political scientists didn't correct your instructor, as I can't think why you should not have. Maybe they just didn't know. I remain glad that there are rude and brash scholars-in-the-making, and that practise can make us 'as good as we can get to be', witness those three brilliant ladies. Being a backward person, one deluded by the opium of the people, I have always believed that the Spirit of Wisdom honours any person's genuine desire to discover the truth. So we have this medium of discourse, an online community where anyone with access can communicate – a Common Folks' University in the sky, if you will. That makes me very glad too.
You know far more about the poetry of Brathwaite and Walcott than I do, ma'am. I mean by that, you've spent more time analyzing their work than I have. All those years count for something -- for you are a scholar, whether you admit to it or not.
I can think of one good reason why the assembled experts didn't correct my instructor; he was the visiting big shot (very big shot, in fact), and they didn't want to be unmannerly.
Marx, by the bye, did not mean by the phrase 'opium of the people' that religion was used to delude the people, but that people turned to the false consolation of religion to relieve themselves of the pain caused by the inequities the experienced in the world. I have been chided by Bertell Ollman (and others) for saying that had he lived a couple of generations later he might have called it 'the aspirin of the people'. The 'Spirit of Wisdom', by the way, sounds positively Hegelian.
fsjl: You and I figure scholar differently, I guess. The manners business is hardly a sufficient explanation for the experts not pointing out their visitor's error. Scholarship, the pursuit of knowledge, is supposed to be a communal effort, is it not? And really big shots don't usually mind being corrected. Just to reiterate, the concern at the bottom of all of this is: How will the people who are under forty manage the dangerous world that we're handing on to them? It seems to me that it will only be possible if they have the highest ideals, the best attitudes, the most unswerving commitment to struggling to get it right, an understanding that the effort has to be all-a-we-togyadda, and, yes, you are right, an unremitting sense of humour. Young America's response to Barack Obama gives me hope because I see it as evidence of some of these things. And I need hope. I have this little granddaughter. As for the opium of the people, having turned to it for solace, I am deluded, am I not? Me no know bout Bertell Ollman et al, but opium ain't aspirin! I ain't neva got no high from Bayer. As for the Spirit of Wisdom, what matters over whom she broods? Me, Hegel, any and all of us, under her bright wings... Have a good week, fsjl, and thanks as always for the conversation.
What I figure is that if you do the work, you deserve the title.
Every generation has worried about the general worthlessness, fecklessness, and inability of its successors. We have to do our best, and hope that we provide the best examples we can to our children and grandchildren, actual and notional (in my case, though, my older son does seem to be in a stable relationship).
My point about opium was that it was the only effective painkiller known to nineteenth century Europeans (herbal remedies such as willow bark were quite dangerous and not very effective). It was used for a variety of ills, including menstrual cramps, in the form of laudanum. The advantage of Bayer's wonder drug was that it didn't have side effects like hallucinations and addiction. Marx's point wasn't, I reiterate, that people took to religion as a delusion but as pain relief. I find poetry a better solace myself. Perhaps that's my delusion.
It's always good to talk with you, Pam. You have a good week up there in the Frozen North.
great work by the ladies!
fsjl: I'm not into the titles thing, really. I enjoyed the process but it ended badly, leaving an awful taste in my mouth. I agree about doing our best, etc., etc., but I don't think any generation has ever before faced a situation like the one we are handing on. Some much-much-much bigger heads than mine agree. A while back there was a news item about the USA not policing its nuclear warheads adequately – not to mention five or six bombs that have gone missing. The environment is in grievous trouble. We're losing species at an extraordinary rate. People are fighting for food. People are shipped off to fight wars on the merest whim of politicians. People are dropping dead of HIV-AIDS, environmentally created diseases, stress, etc., etc. I needn't go on. I'm not worried about feckless successors in the next generation. I'm worried by the worthlessness, fecklessness, greed, dishonesty, self-delusion, vanity and irresponsibility of the one I'm part of! The next generation, had better be keener, wiser, more committed, more generous, more honest, more decent, more peaceable than this one if they are to stay alive. I'm anxious that they realize that, and gather the courage to do what they must to survive. Finally, though I don't have the time to rush off to read Marx immediately, I'm not buying the pain relief version. I do know a little about opium, its effects and its uses, and I know a lot about about religion as an opiate. If the masses could have had their pain assuaged by aspirin, they can't have been hurting much. The things people like me turn to the religion opiate to cure are far beyond the ministrations of aspirin... And "Religion is the aspirin of the people" simply doesn't have the gravitas of the other thing. On that (irrational) basis alone, I'd refuse the analysis.
If every member of your generation was as honest, thoughtful, and self-reflective as you, Pam, we would have fewer worries. As we can see every time the president of the United States (an online friend of mine, a Scotsman whose clan chief is a Jamaican, calls him 'il Buce) opens his mouth, unfortunately that isn't the case. Every one us is an individual, and unfortunately, too many of us are idiots -- and too many of us believe that the solution is not in our own efforts but in the hands of your invisible friend who will inevitably step in and take charge and save us from the mess we've made. Opium isn't aspirin, true, and a metaphor's a metaphor; the point is not that it takes us into a realm of dreams, but that it relieves pain. And pain is a part of the human condition as long as some of us exploit others. Religion projects onto the heavens the conditions of this world and proposes solutions that transcend the world, for a pain that is real and deep. Aspirin is a weak metaphor, but it does reduce fevers and banish pain.
And what Marx wrote in 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right' was 'Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.'
fsjl: I'm hard put to believe I'm such an aberration. If a person's life is hard, or if they see their loved ones in pain, or if they watch those near and dear die, and struggle before they do die, it's hard to avoid being reflective. Of course, by those criteria, most of us should be deeply thoughtful! I don't think we are idiots as much as we are misled. There is a great Machine of Misleading in North America that's called the Media, there's a spurious Comfort Machine called Consumerism, and there's a machine that prepares people to be fodder for those first two that's called School. I believe in education as a potentially great renewer of community, and as a way to make us wise, though I don't know that I've seen it function that way too often. Actually, religion (for want of a much better word) is for me a very practical thing. It does make the corn grow higher. Thanks for going to the trouble of finding the quote from Karl. He speaks of something called "real happiness". Seems to me to be a bit of arrogance (very male?) to presume that he can say what that is – and is not. That said, I freely admit that there's religion – and there's religion. A handy rule of thumb is that if it points fingers, it's not the genuine article.
I'd say that was the arrogance of youth, rather than that of masculinity (Marx was in his twenties and living in Paris when he wrote those lines).
fsjl: What more arrogant than the bright young male? Remember your erstwhile comments about being rude and brash once?
Occasionally the brash young female, believe it or not. I've come across a few samples of the breed, and they give brash young men a run for their money. It is true that girls mature before boys, but I've come across a fair range of the vapid of both sexes,the unduly arrogant of both sexes, and the stupid of both sexes. I am in favour of the human race, by and large, but occasionally wish to apply for membership in an intelligent species. (If you want more elucidation, search on my blog for 'student errors'.)
fsjl: Oh, I believe! I am myself often amazed at the female of the species. Of course, the brighter they are, in my experience anyway, the less boldface. Yes, sometimes you wonder about their intelligence and its often inverse relationship to their brass. What to say? They live in hard times... I will go to your blog and search as advised.
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