And what does this mean for the habits of mind we cultivate? I return often to the ideas of Jack Miles in this essay—also about generalists and specialists, with a key useful heuristic: that specialists tend to embody all the disposition of farmers, while generalists tend to embody the virtues of hunters. Both are necessary, and both need each other. The careful tending to a field whose needs are more or less known, protected, and nurtured further, on the one hand. And the more landscape-crossing, round-the-next-bend pursuit of the not yet known and its promised nourishment, on the other.I want students to try out and value both operative modes, no matter where their own career paths take them. Knowing that others are also asking valuable questions in different disciplinary ways ideally breeds humility: a sense that what one has to offer could be enriched when conjoined in conversation with others whose expertise may not be immediately legible from within a silo.
And not just humility: I want students in engineering to know that their practices can be both private and public, that their status as citizens can be catalyzed through making things.
Typical rustic folk games involved hundreds of drunken men from rival villages rampaging through streets and fields, trying to drive, say, a casket of beer (the proto-ball) into the crypt of a church (the proto-goal). The schools distilled such testosterone-fuelled rituals into new formats involving smaller teams, sober boys and sodden leather balls. Codified by the Football Association and later disseminated to the world, this style of soccer was never the so-called beautiful game; the original purpose of educators was to instill manly and martial virtues into future imperial soldiers and administrators.
[gallery] Quasiquotes
Writing absorbs me, so I do it in the afternoons, maybe the evenings. But reading, as Parks writes, has to be planned for. I have to wrest my reading time from the come-hither arms of the internet, so I do it in the morning.Here’s how I do it. After I drop off my daughter at school or summer camp, I jump on the subway. I ride the rails for three to four hours. Maybe the F train: out to Coney Island, back through Brooklyn, into Manhattan, out to Forest Hills, and then back. Or if I’m pressed for time, just the Q train: again out to Coney, back through Brooklyn, into Manhattan, out to Astoria, and back. Or if I’m in the mood for a change, the B or the D trains: they ultimately take me to the Bronx and back.
I take nothing with me but my book and a pen. I take notes on the front and back pages of the book. If I run out of pages, I carry a little notebook with me. I never get off the train (except, occasionally, to meet my wife for lunch in Manhattan.) I have an ancient phone, so there’s no internet or desire to text, and I’m mostly underground, so there are no phone calls.
Corey Robin. Robin is responding to this post by Tim Parks, which also received a thoughtful reply by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
Perhaps modesty should forbid me from noting that I covered these issues quite thoroughly in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. However, it does not.
Chronic pain in particular often doesn’t have a discrete material location, or an identifiable cause. “That doesn’t fit into the rubric of what it means to be a Western medical practitioner,” said Daniel Goldberg, a bioethicist at East Carolina University and author of the recent book “The Bioethics of Pain Management.” This leaves its sufferers vulnerable to skepticism, prejudice, and “accusations of malingering,” he said. It doesn’t help that many pain medications are addictive, and some people really do feign pain to scrounge their next prescription.Because pain has such a strong psychological component, finding objective tools to diagnose it is not a simple proposition. Research emerging in the last few years has suggested that certain types of pain create a distinct signature in the brain, and even that sensitivity to pain might be connected to brain structure. But the idea of a practical and affordable tool for measuring all kinds of patient pain is a distant dream at best. And that leaves pain susceptible to doctors’ prejudices, including unconscious ones. What it comes down to is: Do they trust their patient’s account of their own pain?
Don't
Today I am hearing on the internet that it is insensitive to celebrate Father’s Day because such celebrations could bring pain to those whose fathers are dead, or whose fathers were bad, or who wish that they could be fathers but cannot. I heard the same arguments on Mother’s Day. I have also read recently that to express delight in an alcoholic drink is insensitive to alcoholics. Basically, to give open thanks for anything, or to take visible and audible delight in anything, is a mortal insult to countless people. So don’t do it. Never praise aloud, never give thanks publicly, never honor or celebrate except silently, in your heart. Confine all public discourse to what public discourse is really for: complaining.
For the most part, conservative groups on campuses simply wish to study the Bible together, pray and worship in ways that deepen their own sense of Godliness. These groups welcome nonbelievers.They might even let someone like myself – a Christian of a different stripe – sit down and discuss their views. A campus is, or ought to be, a space where contradictory ideas are allowed to flourish, where genuine and deeply respectful debate can occur.
I would urge colleges and universities to give these kids their keys back. Let them elect officers in their organization who actually adhere to the ideas promoted by the group. That’s the essence of democracy.
As long as these groups don’t practice hatred or discrimination, or try to impose their views on others, let them be.
Our intellectual communities flourish when there are all kinds of ideas circulating, even ones we find curious or objectionable.
Becoming obsessed with a tiny detail in the landscape – the hoverfly – has given Sjöberg a broader perspective than many naturalists. “You realise there’s a lot of habitats disappearing, even on this island, but it’s not as easy as you think to destroy nature.” To take one example, there are no farms left on Runmarö (such smallholdings are not “economic”) and its flower-rich meadows are turning to forest. This is bad for sun-loving species such as butterflies, but Sjöberg points out it will benefit hundreds more wildwood-loving species of beetle….Optimism, feels Sjöberg, is not the easy option. “Optimism takes time and deep knowledge. If you know a lot about flies you have at least one area where you can read nature and realise it’s not a dystopian novel you are reading.” Optimism is also more constructive. “If the prognosis is too gloomy, you just don’t want to think about it,” he says. “If you want to save the world, the best thing is to create some sensitivity towards nature and the joy of it. You cannot go on about CO2 all the time. No one can be angry or afraid forever. If you want to change the world, you have to build it on some kind of joy.”