Learning

I'm teaching Gargantua by Rabelais...again.

This work from the first third of the sixteenth century appears frequently on my syllabus, from Honors 101 to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature to Monsters of French Literature.

It fits in many academic contexts because it talks about so many big ideas: politics, religion, education, love, life, sex, morality, and justice... and it caused great scandal in its day. Actually, among my students, mostly young, polite Southern students, it causes great scandal today, too.

I love it when I can scandalize them...

I mean, it's not like there is anything in the novel that is worse than what they watch every night on television. But it's got a great way of grabbing their attention.

For example, when Gargantua is still young, he explains an experiment of his to his father. The experiment comes down to seeking out the best material in the world for wiping your ass after you shit.

I told you...scandalous.

First, thinking that softer is better, young Gargantua tries different fabrics like cotton, velours, silk...and then he attempts furs from different animals...and then while he's using one behind a bush, a cat walks by, and he thinks, hey, haven't tried a cat yet, so he wipes his ass with the cat. The fur wasn't bad, he says, but the claws were murder.

He finally settles on a winner. After trying all kinds of things, he concludes that a young swan with soft white, downy feathers works best, provided you hold it between your legs, grasping its feet behind you and its head in front of you so that you can work it back and forth between your legs.

At this point, my students are just staring at me, rather aghast at the crude subject that we are discussing in a graduate-level class at the university.

The lesson is not about, as you could have probably guessed, the history of personal hygiene.

It is about the natural curiosity of children, their intellectual potential, and about “taste.”

Most of all, it's about learning.

Rabelais wants to make a point about learning. We can learn anywhere, anytime, and about anything. It's a metaphor about a way to live life. Are you going to decline to think about your everyday situation, even the messy, embarrassing parts, or are you going to live an examined life? Socrates said, after all, that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Of course, I can't let a chance to by without making a connection with politics today. Rick Santorum, Mr. Frothy himself, has been making a lot of noise about why we need to protect our children from college professors, you know, the people who know shit.

Ask yourself this question: who wants me to learn and who wants to keep me in the dark?

You should be on the side of the former and tell the latter to go to hell.

Uterus police

Uterus police

This cartoon pretty much says it all about Republican hypocrisy.

Rick Santorum sugar daddy on contraception: In my day, girls put aspirin between their knees

OK, now this one, I'm putting up for a reason. The comment that this person, the leader behind Rick Santorum's Super PAC, makes about birth control in his day and today just takes my breath away. (Actually, it took Andrea Mitchell's breath away too.) How can this old white man even think about saying something so blatantly sexist without realizing that he will do great damage to his candidate's and his own reputation?

Ah, that's it--he wasn't thinking at all!

Rick Santorum sugar daddy on contraception: In my day, girls put aspirin between their knees

Mark Fiore - The Gospel According to Bishops

Mark Fiore - The Gospel According to Bishops

Experimenting with my new blog and links. Enjoy the cartoon!

Christopher Hitchens and Garrison Keillor

Two things happened this week.

I finished Christopher Hitchens’ (aka Sir Hitch) book, God is Not Great, and I saw Garrison Keillor live on stage.

Weird juxtaposition, at first blush, I know, but let's go a little deeper.

The subtitle of Hitch's book (RIP, by the way) is How Religion Spoils Everything. It's a volume that Hitch himself says that he wrote over the course of a lifetime living with and then apart from religious circles. For the last few decades, he became a devout atheist--another weird juxtapostion--essayist, and, well, alcoholic.

Garrison Keillor, on the other hand, is the nationally (internationally?) famous host of A Prairie Home Companion on NPR since, well, since before I was aware of either PHC or NPR. The radio show typically combines mild social commentary with humor--Lutherans vs. Unitarians, for example--and adds in a good measure of music, radio soap opera-like skits, and, of course, updates from Lake Wobegone.

I saw Garrison this week live on stage for the first time ever, and was it ever a memorable event. He told stories of Lake Wobegone, sang duets with Heather Masse, told jokes, and reflected on love in honor of Valentine’s Day. It was everything I expected, and more.

The “more” came by way of my thoughts comparing what Garrison was saying to what I had only so recently read in Hitch’s book. Garrison talked about how small we are when we look at ourselves in the grand scope of things. Sitting there in a rowboat in the middle of a lake with his uncle, he pondered how we live on a tiny planet that revolves around a sun that makes up the majority of our solar system’s mass and another planet, Jupiter, makes up almost all of the rest. And then, he mused, think about how our solar system is one of billions in a galaxy among billions in the universe. Yet, there he was in a rowboat with his uncle in the middle of lake, a mircoscopic speck of dust on an only slightly larger speck of dust floating around in the ether.

It’s a humbling thought...

Garrison’s message, couched in this cosmological context, was simple: live today. Live every day, and never wish a day away. Growing up in a severe Lutheran household, he said, people had high expectations for him and they all had to do with the second coming... Fine and dandy, but what to do until then? The answer: concentrate not on the second coming, but on the coming of each day, each beautiful day.

I left positively inspired.

So where does Hitch come into this? Surely, you might say, the atheistic (read here: cynical, vitriolic, [insert alternative platitude here]) can’t be compared to the poetic, profoundly touching craft of Garrison Keillor?

First of all, both are masters of the English language. They have mastered different registers and discursive genres, yes, but they each can turn a phrase like no other. I wish I could write like Hitch and speak like Garrison.

And then, each urges us to live our lives not for what may transpire for tomorrow, but for today. They each urge us to do so, moreover, not for reasons that stem from negative consequences like hell or expulsion from the faithful, but for reasons that find their being in the best that humanity has to offer.

For Hitch, humans are reasonable, logical, and capable of astounding feats of science, technology, civility, and polity, if only we can keep ourselves from being distracted by hatred, bigotry, and prejudice.

For Garrison, humans can create art, music, and poetry that bespeak the wonderfully profound depths of the human spirit. Why spend timing hating when we can spend that time loving?

Live well, my friends, and live today.

Are universities liberal hotbeds?

Rick Santorum, ol' Mr. Frothy himself, recently leveled this charge against our universities: universities indoctrinate our youth into leaving their religious conservative principles behind and adopting a radical leftist agenda.

Interesting...

First of all, there are lots of conservatives on university campuses and many on university faculties. Now, the exact balance between the two sides will depend upon many factors: the region of the country, the university in question, public vs. private, the school within the university, and the department within the school.

And then there is still room for variance...

Now let me ask you this. I'll take it as read and concede the point that many university professors are liberal, and the percentage may be higher than in professions like, say, Wall St. bankers or marketing executives.

Why is it, then, that the most educated people in our populace, those who hold Ph.D.'s tend to be more liberal?

It's an interesting question and there are several possible answers:

1. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once universities became more liberal, they started attracting, even recruiting, liberal students to return as professors.

2. Liberalism comes as a consequence of knowing "stuff." The more you know, the easier it is to see comparisons, contrasts, and differing points of view, and so you don't tend to identify with one viewpoint as staunchly as conservatives do.

3. Life in the academy, with its emphasis on secure employment and a comfortable but by no means luxurious living standard, appeals to those don't have entrepreneurial inclinations.

I think the the Rick Santorums of this world think in terms of number 1, i.e., the vast liberal conspiracy theory. I think he believes professors hold secret meetings in dark star chambers and sacrifice the babies of religious conservatives during black masses in honor of Marx and Hitler. No, really, I do think he believes this.

As for number 2, it's a compelling for different reasons. Why do conservatives hold to their views? For that matter, why does anyone hold to one set of beliefs over another? Because that person thinks s/he's right to do so. But once you see how the world can be reorganized through a different perspective, it's awfully hard to come back to that first perspective and hold to it as tightly as you once did.

Number 3 was something I heard a little while back, and I found it quite intriguing. Education didn't produce liberal professors, but rather liberals were drawn to academic life. This is the anti-Santorum argument. You can read about it here.

One thing is true, though: universities are places where all points of view should be freely shared, discussed, sifted through, and accepted or rejected based on the evidence and arguments presented.

Or is that too liberal an idea?

This mission of this blog...

Whereas I used to post my thoughts on life, society, politics, religion, philosophy, and all manner of things on Facebook, I think that it is high time that I moved off of that social platform for those purposes.

All views expressed on my blog are my own and not associated or representative of any other group to which I belong or for which I work.

People are welcome to reply by way of confirming, denying, contradicting, correcting, or whatever to my own posts as well as to those who choose to participate in this blog, discussions without borders...

Any disrespectful, racist, sexist, homophobic, or hateful remarks will be deleted. However, if you're interested in debate and argument, then you're more than welcome.

And let the discussion begin...