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.

The Scourge of Internet comments

Prof Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (one of the blogs I read the most) has a fantastic explanation of why he usually disables comments on his posts. Vogon poetry is invoked. Passive voice is explained. And so on. I don't bother closing the comments on this blog because, luckily, not enough people read it to leave soul-sappingly stupid comments.

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.

The thin line between twenty-six and twenty-seven

I had to double check my age so that I wouldn't repeat the surreal few months of my life after I turned 22 and had been telling everyone I was 23. But, yes, tomorrow I celebrate 27 years. Am I being dramatic when the quote coming to mind to commemorate the occasion is from Shakespeare's Richard II?

I wasted time; now time doth waste me.

Milton in India: Poetry and Tradition

I'm taking a break from watching the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony—I can report that sports commentary is inane even with an Indian accent. Perhaps "watching" isn't the right word because the news channel NDTV was only allowed to show clips of less than thirty seconds and on a seven minute delay. There's nothing else to do because almost every business in Delhi was shut so I had a meditative day at home.

One thing I thought about was the reason I came to study India in the first place: Living tradition. When I first visited Delhi six years ago, I had a kind of conversion and realised that my degree in Classics was not my preferred way of studying literature because Indians on the whole had a much better sense of the continuity of their culture than Westerners. When we study Classics in the West, we have a tendency to forget about the most interesting aspect of the texts we study, namely their two millennia-long influence on our culture. As I read it, the rapid decline of cultural literacy in the West after the First World War made Classics departments circle the waggons around the study of antiquity and insist that anything else is Comparative Literature. We only study Greece and Rome, 400 BC to 200 AD, but you can study anything you want.

Blogging Milton from India, introduction

Besides a Hindi-English dictionary, I brought one very heavy book with me to India: John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose Works. Most people know Milton as the author of Paradise Lost but he wrote a lot more during a career that came to define sixteenth-century English letters. He was both a popular poet and deeply intellectual, rather like Shakespeare, whose plays appealed both to the noblemen in the VIP seats and the commoners standing below them.

Why am I reading Milton in India? There are two reasons, the first of which is just that my eleven months here are a circumscribed chapter in my life and I need a project to lead me through them. The system is closed: I am in India for the first time as a professional scholar, and the rules of my Fulbright grant literally do not allow me to leave the country without putting my funding in jeopardy. Despite a steady stream of cameo appearances by friends and family from my American life, that life has been paused so I can have this one. Because this period stands apart, I thought I should have a project, and it can't be my dissertation since writing it will last at least a year after I return from India. So I'm going to blog, maybe once a week or every two weeks, about what I've read in Milton.

Exciting title: Descriptive title

A headline from The Onion that I really like:

A Statement Followed By A Question Separated By A Colon: An Effective Journalistic Technique?

We have the same colon-related cliché problem in academia. There is an unspoken rule that every conference paper title has to be both engaging and descriptive, for example

Meet the Beetles: A Prosopographic Study of Entomological References in Budge Collection Papyri 34 and 35

The art of writing well and avoiding Michiko Kakutani

The myth of the novelist as genius: The writer locks himself in his chilly garret, works flat out with little sleep and less food using an outmoded instrument (a quill pen or a forty year old Olivetti typewriter), and emerges with a fully realized work that perfectly explicates the human condition. That novel then becomes a classic to be read by generations of high school students and undergraduates.

What does that version conveniently elide from the process? Advances, printing, book tours, publicity, delivery, royalties, and so on. The fact is that though things were much simpler in the fifteenth century, variations of these intermediate steps were there even when William Caxton was printing the first English books (he was in it to make money after all). We cling to the Romantic idea that if someone writes a worthy story, it makes it into the hands of the reading public with no fuss. But behind every author is a good editor and behind every good editor is a publishing company whose functionaries have decided an idea is marketable. And of course a good writer has very little chance of coming to the attention of a good editor without a good agent. Aha, you might say, but didn't Stephen King write his breakout novel Carrie in the back room of a laundromat? He had a good agent.

The battle of the novel and the physics textbook

Why study the humanities, stated with a burning conviction by Rabindranath Tagore:

The real truth is that science is not man’s nature, it is mere knowledge and training. By knowing the laws of the material universe you do not change your deeper humanity. You can borrow knowledge, but you cannot borrow temperament.

Of course we all like suspension bridges, antibiotics and computers, but our technical mastery over the world will be as pathetic as Ozymandias if we lose what makes us human, namely what Tagore calls "temperament" (I'm not sure what word he uses in Bengali).

Pitch perfect: A couple of lines from Faiz

A friend of mine recently reacquainted me with a couplet by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84):

nahiin nigah mein manzil to justajuu hii sahii
nahiin visaal muyassar to aarzuu hii sahii


Literally:
If I can't get a glance [of my beloved] then at least I have the search itself,
If union [with my beloved] is impossible then at least I have desire itself.

The Tragical History of Sullivan Hyder

Three years ago in the British Library, I came across a remarkable set of letters scattered across the East India Company records having to do with the Company's training policies. The dozen or so letters that piqued my interest deal with Sullivan Hyder, a mixed-race boy born in England in 1811 who became a printer's apprentice and eventually had to leave England because there was no prospect of his finding work there.

I wanted to write an academic article about the status of Indian language teachers in the early nineteenth-century using the documents concerning his family, but unfortunately Professor Michael Fisher beat me to it in his Counterflows to Colonialism. Since Professor Fisher had followed the documentary evidence as far as it would go, I put the story of Sullivan Hyder away. Recently though, as I started planning a historical novel that I am nowhere near ready to write, it occurred to me that Sullivan could be a faithful friend to me if he were the main character in a short story. With Sullivan's help, I can find the right voice for my novel before I start it.

Et à l'aurore...

I'm a graduate student training to be a university professor. After a few years in the trenches, my writing now conforms to academic style. Instead of being light and playful, it has become ponderous and self-serious even when I'm not writing for other scholars. I need to get over this.