Political correctness, politeness, and the Persianate concept of "adab"

I've got another article in Slate. I argue that Americans fear so-called "political correctness" because they imagine it as a system of thought control that harshly punishes people who get their words wrong. In fact, the idea behind what I would instead call "inclusive language" because that's a more neutral term is that if you want to be polite you have to learn about people's preferences in communication and so get to know who they are. Showing this kind of respect is an affirmation that the people having the conversation are part of the same community, e.g. a nation. Because I couldn't help myself, I brought in the Persianate idea of adab ("good manners"), which has at its core the idea that respectful words and deeds are important because they connect everyone in society.

What I was thinking about a year ago

5 June 2017 - It is Monday, the day after the day after. I am alone in a gallery in the British Museum with the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. It is late afternoon and rain is battering the glass panels in the ceiling. The fine weather of the past week is already a distant memory, but that’s how summer works in England. The cuneiform inscription around the king reads, among other things “I am important; I am magnificent” before describing how brutally he used to kill his enemies. He has the best brutality, everybody says so.

Before coming to the museum, I had spent the day up the road at the British Library reading eighteenth-century manuscripts. On Saturday night, three terrorists had driven a van into pedestrians at London Bridge and attacked people with knives at the nearby Borough Market. As I went about my day, reading in the library and meeting with colleagues also going about their day, I followed the thread updating on The Guardian’s website, learning more details as the authorities released them. Mostly though I was concerned with honing an argument about whether comical poetry written in Delhi three hundred years ago was a social critique or just harmless fun. Armed police had shot the terrorists dead in eight minutes. I am not a callow, out of touch academic. I am fighting back.

"This light and darkness in our chaos join'd"

I re-read Alexander Pope's longish poem An Essay on Man after a decade and a half. I know the world hasn't stopped long enough for us to give poetry its due (murdered cartoonists in particular are weighing on my mind though I could choose from half a dozen other world events that make sitting down with a poem feel wrong). But let me quote the second section, which begins:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great

They don't write like that anymore. The critic Harold Bloom hated An Essay on Man (calling it "a poetic disaster"), which is probably in itself a good reason to have a read. Various other great thinkers through the centuries have either adored or hated the poem.

Didactic poetry, whether the underlying philosophy is solidly formed or shaky, is a genre I have always loved. Pope's expressive power is at its peak ("darkly wise" and "rudely great" are phenomenal turns of phrase), and yet he is presuming to think through the meaning of being human. We haven't solved that one yet, but would someone dare to write a poem of that scope today with such a direct engagement with philosophy? Literary fashions have changed, of course, but the reason is deeper: Our thought is too compartmentalized. 

Indian Higher Education follow up

As I write this, there are forty-six online comments on my Outlook article on education and it’s time to reply. The comment I expected above all was a variation of what commentor Varun Garde declares,

Liberal arts education is about people who dont want to work hard or who dont have intelligence required to do real work. many of these lazy low IQ people become Politicians, Journalists, lawyers and even worst civil servants.

I think this is the greatest fallacy in the debate and I’ll refute that general claim in a moment. But let me discuss India specifically and put my cards on the table. I am asserting that what I would define as a “liberal arts education” does not exist in India today. This is not just my argument but one that I have heard echoed by dozens of friends and colleagues. The “Arts” stream in Indian higher education does not provide a liberal education but rather a narrow humanities education, which I am not advocating. It is a huge mistake to conflate the humanities and the liberal arts. Therefore, claims such as that stupid people in India get a liberal education while clever people become engineers cannot be sustained, because these so-called stupid people are not getting a liberal education in the first place.

One critical passage that I had to cut from the final article—as it went from 2,500 words to 1,700 words—was to define what a liberal education is and isn’t. It is “broad-based”, as I wrote in the article, but that does not mean unstructured. Let’s take as an example my alma mater, Princeton University. At Princeton all undergraduate students studying for an A.B. (bachelor of arts, what most universities call a B.A.) must take a writing seminar and a foreign language as well as classes chosen from seven categories. (Students in the sciences have a similar list.) This is the chart from Princeton’s website, which is worth visiting to read in full:

General Education Requirements for A.B. Students

• Writing Seminar—one course
• Foreign Language—one to four terms to complete, depending on the language students study and the level at which they start
• Epistemology and Cognition (EC)—one course
• Ethical Thought and Moral Values (EM)—one course
• Historical Analysis (HA)—one course
• Literature and the Arts (LA)—two courses
• Quantitative Reasoning (QR)—one course
• Science and Technology, with laboratory (ST)—two courses
• Social Analysis (SA)—two courses

Now the names are misleadingly complicated (why did they have to choose a name like “epistemology and cognition”?), but the philosophy is clear: all students need to take a wide range of courses. Some of these count towards the requirements set down by a student’s department but others are for general knowledge. I got a degree from a literature department but I ended up taking Multivariate Calculus and two chemistry classes to satisfy the QR and ST requirements. These were challenging classes that tested my limits, and they changed my outlook on the world. One major success of the system is that I was able to take them and not fear for my marks: We were allowed to designate a certain number of classes as “pass/fail” courses, meaning that the course would appear on our transcripts but without a final mark. (I turned out to be a terrible mathematician so this was very good for me.) In India I’ve never come across a similar system to allow students to study things that they cannot be confident about mastering.

There are some other misconceptions about the liberal arts. Someone brought up the Sokal Hoax, in which physics professor Alan Sokal sent a completely nonsensical article to a well-known humanities journal and it got published. That is not an argument for why the humanities are useless, but why a liberal education is important: If I were a journal editor, rest assured that I would not have printed that article because I’ve studied science and know its limits. Similarly, Santosh Gairola wonders “If I am correct now, ‘liberal education’ means, art and artistic subjects.” NO. This is “arts” in the old sense of "skills" rather than in the sense of “fine arts”.

And let us return to the assumption that liberal arts courses attract stupid people and engineering attracts clever people. Anshul writes

As someone else has commented it is very much necessary to liberate our civil services, politics, media and civil society from liberal arts type wallas who enjoy sprouting this or that ism and while living as parasite on public money castigate others for trying to make a decent living.

Let's pause to recognise the irony that engineers don’t feel the need to use evidence when discussing a question like this. The recent civil service examination results are out and engineers did very well. But do they make better civil service officers? Where is the evidence? One commenter went so far as to claim that when too many IIT students succeeded in the exam in 1995-6, the next year the marking system was doctored to favour humanities students. Let me call that what it is, a crazy conspiracy theory. Likewise, an MBA is not a liberal arts degree. One successful consultant recently wrote an article his thoughts on why a philosophy PhD was more useful for him than an MBA. Vivek Wadhwa's thoughts on the matter are also useful.

One commenter, Sunil, wrote something that inadvertently helped prove my point and was also very moving:

Our vernacular literature is alive, active advanced and beyond compare - and is generally inaccessible to non-native language speakers like Dudney.

First of all, I do have access to Hindi and Urdu vernacular performance because I can read and understand both. I enjoy Rabindra Sangeet but because I don’t know Bengali except for the alphabet and Hindi/Urdu cognates, I depend on translations. The vibrance of India’s vernacular literary scenes is unquestionable but where does it find a place in the classroom? Indeed, my original title for the piece—before the editors replaced it with the pithier and more controversial “Beyond Techno-Coolies”—was “The Liberal Arts in India, Everywhere but in the University”. Many of the people who are arguing for opening the curriculum up to the liberal arts are just as keen on having the vernacular represented. This is what I hinted at in the last paragraph of my article.

Some people were far less nice than Sunil about my supposedly not getting India because I’m a foreigner, but it’s not an argument to point a finger at someone with a reasoned opinion and say “foreigner!” as if that settles it. Actually, I’ve been educated in the US system, the UK system and the Indian system so I can compare the three. In any case, complaining about the US is irrelevant. One commenter wrote,

also the assumption here is that the liberal American colleges have got it right. They may have good in the past, but average graduate of a liberal arts college in the USA is very poorly educated. And for this the colleges charge $40,000/yr. Its a money making racket just like India

But, respectfully, that is not the assumption. You can get a good education in America or a bad one. However, if you compare the best American institutions with the best Indian ones, it is clear that they are using very different educational models. In the U.S., there have been years of debate over whether liberal education works while in India there has not been any such a debate and top institutions don’t provide a liberal education. Nor do the economic arguments that a U.S. education is bad value for money really hold. In fact, because of the private education model (which incidentally India is rapidly adopting), the best universities in the U.S. tend to have the most money to give for scholarships and so it is often less expensive to attend one of the top universities than a middle-ranked university. Every year universities like Princeton and Harvard provide needy students with a free education, and on average more than half the undergraduate students receive some kind of scholarships. The question of whether it is fair that donations can influence admissions decisions is too complicated to get into here, but I can say that it is not particularly common.

Debotosh Chatterjee takes umbrage at my sentence "Liberal education is not some fusty notion about reading good books, but is rather an important investment in the future" which made him “wonder whether the writer is himself really convinced. There is nothing 'fusty' about reading good books.” This again leads us to the question of what a liberal arts education is. There is nothing wrong with reading good books but opponents of the liberal arts say that it’s just wasting time reading or “talking”. But the goal is to increase people's general knowledge and intellectual capabilities, which involves a lot of reading, writing and discussion. Part of it is learning the indispensable skill of expressing yourself well. It is true that every corner of the Internet is full of bad writing but one commenter deserves special mention: He pulls off the astonishing feat of misspelling “coolies” three different ways (“collies” which are fluffy dogs, “collis” which is an English surname or a hill on another planet, and “colles” which is a kind of wrist fracture). I don't know what kind of education can explain that.

No, no, no. Islamic divorce in India gets stranger

In some interpretations of Sunni law—some 90% of Muslims worldwide are Sunnis rather than Shiites—it is permissible for a man to divorce his wife by saying "talaaq" (divorce) three times. There are various rules about how far apart the talaaqs have to be or how many witnesses there need to be, and there is considerable debate about whether triple talaaq has an sanction in the foundational texts of Islam. The practice is formally banned in a lot of majority Sunni countries, and is unrecognised by (secular) Indian courts, but every once in a while a case comes up that is equal measures tragic and hilarious.

Traduttore, traditore! More sad news about military translators in Afghanistan

An ABC News report yesterday offered damning evidence that Mission Essential Personnel, a contractor hiring interpreters to work with US troops in Afghanistan, provided the military with interpreters who have either limited proficiency in Afghan languages (Dari and Pashto) or don't speak much English. Sweeping aside the cinematic illusion that if you say something in English everybody will be on the same page, it's clear that one of the fundamental problems with American involvement in Afghanistan has always been communication.

I tackled the question two years ago in an article for SAJAforum. I analyzed a Guardian video project by John McHugh (who is also quoted in the recent ABC article). The eight-minute long video is subtitled so you can watch the dysfunction unfold in real-time as the translator consistently misrepresents the words of the Afghan civilians to the American soldiers and vice versa. Numerous opportunities for constructive engagement are lost. The shred of mutual trust on either side at beginning doesn't survive the translation.

Strange Fruit: The "Ground Zero Mosque" thing is racism...

An incident at another protest (of the non-mosque which is not actually at the World Trade Center site) as described by The Record, a northern New Jersey newspaper:

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

"Go home," several shouted from the crowd.

"Get out," others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called "The Way." Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

America the secular

People who invoke the Founding Fathers as evidence that our nation has slipped from an ideal sadly tend to be themselves more doctrinaire and closed-minded than the Founding Fathers were. It is an unfortunate reality that society allows people who are reactionaries to call themselves patriots, while people who think holistically about social and political problems are pushed from one unsatisfying label to another. “Liberal” went from being a positive identity to a slur and its preferred replacement, “progressive,” now too is more often employed as invective than not. Those who style themselves defenders of liberty, no matter how absurd their factual or ethical claims are shown to be, have been allowed to monopolize Americanness (which is a failure of both the Left and the Center in our politics). To my mind their narrow definitions of patriotism demean our nation because they require us to forget our history.

The abuse of history by people who should know better (Newt Gingrich, for example, has a PhD in history) warrants reflection. Consider the proposition that the United States was founded as “a Christian nation,” an erroneous assumption from which many others flow. Christianity has a privileged place in our society for legitimate historical and cultural reasons but a not insignificant minority of Americans believe our government today should be openly Christian even though the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected that option. If devout Christians feel under threat because of workplace emails explaining Yom Kippur and Ramadan (which incidentally begins today) that is only because we as a nation have forgotten our founding principles: Everyone's faith, whether familiar or unfamiliar to the majority of Americans, is equal.

I don't think this would ever happen in the US...

Jón Gnarr, the Mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, came to the city's gay pride parade dressed in drag (he's straight and married). Here's the picture of the comedian-turned-politician. But maybe this isn't a surprise from the country whose Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is the only openly-gay head of government in the world.

On a very different but still Icelandic topic, I just learned that Icelanders don't have surnames. I knew there are a lot of "X-sson" ["son of X"] and "X-dóttir" ["daughter of X"] names around but I figured that was a relic like "Johnson" in English. But no, it turns out that they are real patronymics: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir actually is the daughter of Sigurður, and you have to call her by her full name or as "Jóhanna" rather than "Ms Sigurðardóttir," which doesn't make any sense. Phonebooks in Iceland are alphabetical by first name but apparently also list a person's profession in order to reduce confusion. Having found out all of this, I really want to take advantage of one of Icelandair's cheap flights.

Eerie silence from anti-same-sex marriage legal minds after Prop 8 ruling

Round one of the federal Prop 8 trial ended last Wednesday when Judge Vaughn Walker released his findings, handing the pro-same-sex marriage side a resounding victory. The trial was a historic event because for the first time in America history, homophobic people (who claimed repeatedly they were not homophobic) were forced to present evidence supporting their views in federal court and they failed spectacularly. Stripped of innuendo or recourse to religious doctrine, there was nothing for them to say. The lead anti-same-sex-marriage lawyer, Chuck Cooper, even let slip during closing arguments that felt he didn't need to offer evidence (ctd at p 10 in Walker's ruling). That won't fly anymore.

Digital ink was spilled across the web celebrating the eloquence and rational underpinnings of Judge Walker's decision, as well as its canny construction. It was designed to appeal to Justice Kennedy, who will be, as usual, the swing-vote when the case inevitably arrives at the Supreme Court in a year or two. (Dahlia Lithwick offers an excellent analysis in Slate). For me what was most interesting were the reactions from people opposed to same-sex marriage in the wake of this defeat.

U of Toronto Centre for Comp. Lit. re-org is a terrible idea

“Who the hell cares?” is the reaction that 99% of the world would have to the reorganization of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto—if they knew about it. Basically the administration have proposed subsuming the Centre into a new School of Languages and Literatures, along with a jumble of East Asian Studies, Italian, German, Slavic Languages, Spanish and Portuguese, but there are also more subtle, worrying changes. It’s part of a larger trend of universities thinking about the bottom line rather than about how to make good teaching and scholarship happen.

Joel Stein's racism problem (sigh)

In next week's issue of Time (it's already up on the web and has been making the rounds of the blogosphere), there is a painfully unfunny observation column by Joel Stein called "My Own Private India." It's a comparison between the lilywhite Edison, NJ of his childhood and the much browner Edison of today. (According to the 2000 census, Edison has the highest concentration of Indian-Americans in the country at about 18%.)

I wanted to write a detailed post to explain what exactly makes me so uncomfortable about the piece but Sepia Mutiny beat me to it in a post that is as hilarious as Stein's article is cringe-worthy. My advice, seconded by SM, comes down to this: If you're going to toe the line between racism and comedy based on race, which is exactly what Stein is trying to do, then you have to have a point (or get a free pass by being a member of the ethnic group you're satirizing). That's what seems to be lacking in Stein's essay--no one on the web seems to be able to figure out why he would have written something like this except that the author thinks it's funny, which isn't enough when talking about race.

Trains! Death! Moral Philosophy!

The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment created by the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot in the context of the ethics of abortion. Until recently I had never heard of it even though it's well-known among philosophers. This month, the BBC World Service devoted an entire documentary to it called “Would You Kill the Big Guy?” Despite some hokey production choices (including a philosophy-themed gameshow), the two-part series is well worth a listen. I would have been happy to leave the Trolley Problem to professional philosophers except that as I thought about it, I realized that it's not an exaggeration to call it one of the best tools for moral thinking that we have.

The most basic version of the Trolley Problem is this: There is a runaway train hurtling down a track and five unsuspecting workmen are about to be flattened. You notice a junction that could shunt the train onto another track where there is only a single worker. The lever that operates the junction is right next to you. What do you do? Do you allow fate to take its course and the five to die, or do you intervene, pulling the lever and saving the five but directly causing the death of the one? (We assume that there are no other solutions, such as shouting a warning. Since this is a thought experiment, there is no need to add endless extraneous details such as that the workers can’t hear you because they’re listening to their iPods.)

Irony alert: The CA gay marriage trial judge is gay

Last weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that Judge Vaughn Walker, the federal district court judge presiding over the case seeking to overturn California's gay marriage ban (Prop. 8), is himself gay. And to think that at the beginning of the trial there was a lot of hand-wringing by pro-same-sex marriage commentators over whether Judge Walker might be instinctively anti-gay. Well, now we know.