Off To

One of the pleasures of sharing fun books and ideas with colleagues, is that you never know when they’re going to suggest something perfect. Here’s one story.

So, I’m working on this paper for a conference in Waterloo at the end of the month on the place of uncertainty in rhetoric. I’ve been wanting to write about this topic ever since I had an epiphany walking across the bridge between the East and West banks at UMN and realized that what I was really interested in was the Rhetoric of Uncertainty. In many ways, it’s the real core of my interest in science and museums. This paper is a small part of developing that project. My plan is to establish two points.

1. All science and natural history museums use appeals to uncertainty in the form of explicit or implicit stasis questions of fact and definition to create the conditions in which visitors acquire certainty and understanding. This is their traditional task, the one tied to science literacy.

2. Some modern science museum exhibits use appeals to uncertainty in the form of stasis questions of policy to create the conditions in which a particular problemmatic is opened up for visitors. At this level, museums offer a kind of rhetorical education. Intrigued?

The second point is the more significant one, of course, the one where I might be over-reaching, but I’m sure the nice folks at the conference will pull me back. The first one is me walking into the argument: making sense of stasis theory, establishing my assumptions, setting up the historical and conceptual shift that produces the modern deliberative exhibit. I spend a lot of time at this first level, because for some reason I can’t move forward until I have a solid framework.

The questions of fact and definition used at this first level often recapitulate and attempt to recapture for visitors the unsettled nature of science when museums were being formed. This is a point others make very well: science is essentially a forensic endeavor (hence the value of stasis theory), and the modern natural history and science museum is the result of decades of settling out those questions. For example, there was a time when we didn’t know that kangaroos existed or that the platypus was a real animal or that whales are more closely related to hippos than to cows. All of these things were uncertain, unsettled, and intensely argued over. When the museum takes them up today in order to communicate scientific knowledge, there is but a hint of this foundational uncertainty, which is meant to be transferred to visitors so that they’re curious — one of the basic assumptions of this paper is that curiosity (like rhetoric) exists only where we have incomplete knowledge.

For some reason that last paragraph captures a significant point that I can’t get away from: Natural history museums embody settled knowledge at the first stasis level, and today they try to reinvigorate those debates by asking questions like, “What is a mineral?” Essentially, there is an implied question of fact/definition that entire galleries of minerals or birds or plants or dinosaurs answer, and we’ve largely lost that connection. The museum chooses a rather inauthentic question in order not to help us appreciate the growth of knowledge that settled the museum but to help us care enough to read further and hopefully remember something. I want more out of museums, but stasis theory helps us understand both the formation and the current rhetorical appeals used by museums.

I really like hanging out with this question. I think that clarifying the relationship between forensic rhetoric, stasis theory, science, and the museum collection is a fascinating way for me to get a handle on what’s going on at a real fundamental level.

I’m far afield from the opening story, so let me bring it back home. One of my colleagues and I are trying to find a book we’d both like to read together. The one we’re on now, The Platypus and the Mermaid by Harriet Rivo, I just opened up today. I was immediately struck by how she helps to capture and contextualize exactly the stasis problem I’m saying is embedded in museum collections:

“Those sporadic squabbles served nevertheless as reminders that the road to consensus had been neither straight nor smooth. This was at least in part because the stakes involved in its achievement had been so high. Although in retrospect the consensus could (and ordinarily was) seen to represent the steady and rational interplay of accumulating data and evolving theory, its persuasiveness and authority had been less clear to earlier naturalists who encountered it in its incipient stages.” (10).

“These unusual animals called into question systematic flexibility at a different level, undermining the very categories that could not be stretched to accommodate them, as well as the principles on which those categories were based, and compromising the authority of the experts who endorsed and applied them” (11).

What we forget is how much was at stake, and how much these rather dusty, flat, and often poorly engaged galleries were once high drama fought at the level of fact and definition.

Now that those questions are answered and the galleries (largely) settled, the museum can do other things. One of those things is move us up the stasis ladder to questions of policy. That’s where the meat of this paper must go, but I’m enjoying clarifying this first step, which means, I think, that this might work as a book chapter.

To be continued…

From Eternal Peace and Other International Essays translated by W. Hastie, 1914.

The republican constitution is not to be confounded with the democratic constitution. But as this is commonly done, the following remarks must be made in order to guard against this confusion. The various forms of the state may be divided either according to the difference of the persons who hold the highest authority in the State, or according to the mode of the governing of the people through its supreme head. The first is properly called the form of rule in the State. There are only three forms of this kind possible, according as one only, or as some in connection with each other, or as all those constituting civil society combined together may happen to possess the governing power; and thus we have either an autocracy constituted of a monarch, or an aristocracy constituted by the power of the nobles, or a democracy constituted by the power of the people.

The second principle of division is taken from the form of the government; and, viewing the constitution as the act of the common or universal will by which a number of men become a people, it regards the mode in which the State, founded on the constitution, makes use of its supreme power. In this connection the form of government is either republican or despotic. Republicanisms regarded as the constitutive principle of a State is the political severance of the executive power of the government from the legislative power.

And there I will stop, because one can only take so much Kant.

There are rabbit holes that both writing and reading open up. Since late last year, the typewriter has helped me crank out many of my own. For the past two months or so, though, I’ve been winding my way through a route of books that has widened my world in ways that should have happened years ago. It’s been history, mostly, and an entrance to conversations very distant from those I’ve ever been a part of. There have been other things as well. Plus many starts and stops — too many to admit. What I’m beginning to find, however, is a need to participate in the conversations of my discipline. I enjoy too much the way other worlds outside my own click together. But that’s a personal satisfaction, not a professional one. I must remember the professional. In the mean time, this is my list of books so far this year. The goal had been 52, one a week, but that’s a bit impossible if I’m to write articles, conference papers, and a book (proposal).

Thinking the 20th Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder*
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell* (followed up with some essays, particularly “Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War”)
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler*
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The First American by H.W. Brands
Even a Geek can Speak by Joey Asher
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Hahneman*
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins**
Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson*
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens*
There But For The by Ali Smith
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey**
Blue Nights by Joan Didion*
Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

* Excellent and highly recommended; ** Reread aloud w/ Liz

The other day I walked out of the pool and one of my students tossed me a frisbee, inquiring, “When are you going to coach us?” They’ve been pestering me to coach them for a while, but I just can’t commit to it. “Ah,” I said. “No time.” He changed the subject and asked, “How was the swim? What do you like better, swimming or teaching?” I paused a bit too long for him to laugh at the implied answer. And after a few more tosses I made my way back to my office. On the way I realized that the real answer is, “Depends if I learn anything in class.”

This week has really made clear this desire: teaching is the most fun when I learn something during the period. That’s backwards, I know, since it’s the students who are supposed to learn something. But for me teaching is this real collaborative experience. I bring in texts, questions, problems, examples, etc. and we discuss them, and often together we say some interesting things about these things. (I’ll post an example in a day or two that’s become more and more interesting each time I teach it.) If I just say the same old things, then I’m a flat, bored teacher and the students don’t get engaged. So while my classes are surprisingly arced out — I have each day of each course outlined — those outlines are often just guides. They leave lots of room for me to riff and extemporize or speak to the interests and examples of the class. In effect, I give myself room to say (or encounter) something new each time I teach. Sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

So I’d say that teaching is rarely better than swimming, mostly because swimming is tremendous for me mentally and emotionally. But the best days are those where I jump into the pool with a bunch of energy from class and splash my way to sanity.

This idea has gotten clearer and clearer to me through a series of visits from students to my office hours this week. Like teaching, I always find these meetings super engaging, and one-on-one teaching is one of the things I dearly miss from my tutoring days. This week students are working on their informative speeches. They pick their topics, they must have three main points, and they get four text-free slides as visuals. Topics range widely. And for the first three weeks I emphasize and re-emphasize the fundamental questions: What’s your topic and why does it matter?

They work through this questions diligently, but the most thoughtful students get stuck and can’t quite see how to answer it. It’s hard to really work through this question in a big class, so I ask them to help each other out. Sadly, they’re not always so useful, so I often take examples and model on the board. I also change the question: “What do you find super fascinating about this topic?” And this week I tried another: Imagine that at the end of your introduction you say this “Now, you might be wondering why you should care about my topic….You should care for three reasons…” How would you fill out this motivational preview? This gets them closer. (And you, dear readers, can help me ask even better questions.)

What I realized this week, though, is that the challenge of the informative speech isn’t simply to tell us something we don’t know. We don’t want to be treated as simple vessels to be filled. We want what you tell us to illuminate our understanding. We want it to slide pieces of our world into place — at the end of your speech we want to almost hear that audible click of things making better sense. And even better, the informative speech should take us from a state of (perhaps) unreflective ignorance and reframe or reposition concepts and ideas. We don’t want to simply be told something new, we want that new information to help us see farther. Let me try an example from this week.

A student came in who wanted to do his speech on strokes (one thing about Kettering students, their co-op experiences really do make them interested and interesting, even if they don’t realize it). Ok, so strokes. You in? You excited? You gonna be in the front row? He’s going to break it down this way: 1. What is a stroke?; 2. How do we evaluate the severity of a stroke?; 3. How do we rehabilitate a stroke patient?. Still in? Would you sign up to hear this speech? Would you be excited by it? The student was sensitive enough to admit that this structure is boring. I agreed. It’s a fantastic three-part informative structure. It covers things well. It’s logical. The transitions are obvious. But boring, right?

What’s more his initial motivational appeal is this: One day we will all know someone who will suffer a stroke (and that person might be us), so we should listen to his speech. He’s taking the stance of a public health official, and he’s talking to students who are 18 and (hopefully) years away from the threat of a stroke. It’s a true statement, but not one that’s going to create buy-in.

And as we were talking what I realized (what I learned and what got me excited) was that this appeal wasn’t even the thing that made the topic exciting to the student. He didn’t even know himself well enough to identify the source of his own interest. Without that, how would he ever reach his audience? So I asked the him: What’s fascinating about this topic? To you? Why do you think this is neat enough that other people should know about it?

And then he talked and suddenly it was so obvious. What was so interesting and what he really wanted to talk about was that there was this entirely new model of rehabilitation for stroke victims. “Ok,” I said. “A new model is gets us somewhere. Tell me more.” So then he went on about the new model, and here he lost me but piqued my interest in the speech.   But what was clear was that this new model was a dramatic rethinking about the way that the brain and the body worked in stroke victims. His speech, in short, was going to revise our basic understanding of rehabilitation. It wasn’t just going to tell us the four ways we rehabilitate stroke victims. What use is that to us, right? Instead he was appealing directly to this amazing shift in the way we think about rehabilitation.

Now, admittedly, this might still seem pretty boring. But I think that this taps into our very human desire not to just know stuff, but to know really interesting stuff. And what’s interesting (at least to a bunch of novices) is not just what rehabilitation is, how it works, or how it proceeds, but that the way we think about what rehabilitation is, is changing in quite interesting ways. That’s something they might want to tell someone else.

Case in point: I’m listening to Einstein’s biography, and in the 1930s, the man was an unprecedented international hero, with parades and speeches everywhere — Japan, France, America. We can’t even imagine celebrating a scientists like this today. But for all his celebrity, no one understood the theory of relativity. The quip was “only 12 people understand it” (that was up from three a few years earlier). But what they did know was that this man had just rewritten the cosmos. He had just revised our notion of reality. And that alone turned out the crowds.

So the informative speech can’t just be about learning things. If we read a history book for the sole purpose of answering Trivial Pursuit questions, I think most of us will get bored pretty quickly. In fact, that’s almost never why we read history. Instead, if we read a history book to answer a particular question about the world, then I think all those historical facts function to make sense of reality, not just fill it in. We like to have our mental models either clarified or completely rejiggered in ways that make things simpler or better understood. The next time I teach this class, I need to make this point sharper.

Since coming to Flint, I’ve swam with the Flint Falcons, the local YMCA National team. But before I could swim in Kettering’s pool with them, I had to prove myself by biking up to the Flint Y at 5:30 a.m. to join them for their morning practice. After a week of that, they let me into the 2-hour evening workout. While I’ve stayed in the same lane the entire three years, getting moderately faster in fits and starts, many kids have moved through getting bigger and faster and more confident. It’s amazing what happens to these kids in three years. I keep up and am super proud to hop in after a day of teaching. Emerging two hours later is like coming out of a worm hole: somehow two hours have passed and I am a different person. During workouts, I rarely talk to the kids, but they say “hi” to me and we give high-fives after hard sets. They’re good kids, they like their drama, but they get it done in the pool. When I first moved here, I didn’t realize how alone I really felt until one of the kids said, “See you tomorrow, Greg” as I lumbered out of the gym and it made me feel so happy. It was the first time I felt like I existed in Flint.

Now, two of my teammates are left training for Olympic trials. Here’s one of them interviewed for the ABC12 in Flint – You can see me plodding along with paddles behind Andy at :35 The profile is of Andy, but Courtney broke a national record a week ago and deserves all kinds of respect as well. It’s amazing that I get to swim next to these two. Coach Cooper also makes an appearance.

So that’s my pool, my coach, and two of my teammates. We’ll see what they do this July at trials.

I am four and I am thirsty. It’s me, my mom, and the hill. We’re the last ones to make it to the top. But we’re not there yet. We’re here, fifteen, maybe twenty feet from what looks like infinity:

With each step forward we slide a half step back. It’s going nowhere. The small plants seem like they might help, but it’s a mirage; they’ll just rip out and just getting to them means losing ground. My thirst is strong and we are stopped and I am whining. My mom is done with this. “Swallow your spit,” she says. I try, thinking, “This can’t really work, can it?” And it doesn’t and that’s it and her frustration sends me to run down, alone, while she finishes the climb, crests, and disappears below the horizon. I walk alone along the shady campground road and find a water fountain at the curve near our campsite. It’s a glorious drink, wet and cold and iron. Then I stand and turn around and the memory fades away. What was next?

It’s the last memory I had of Hill 39, until this weekend, when, newly 33, I returned to see whether it still dwarfed and daunted. My mom asked me if I was going to run down. My sister asked if it was still so steep. Yes and yes. The photos do not do it justice; it’s nearly straight up. Each step still slips. The plants still tempt: “Surely if I could use them to help me…” It’s still easy at first and still impossible near the end. Running down still feels like floating and that feeling still makes it worth the climb.

At the top, Lake Michigan shines in the sun a half mile away. The distance stuns: how did they get all us kids to the top of this hill, swimming gear, snacks, drinks in tow, and then to the beach? And back again? This is heroic parenting, and it’s no wonder my mom was fed up with me.

I spent a few hours on the beach. I combed through rocks, I sat and listened to the waves, I flew my kite, I skipped stones, I wished I could swim through the early deep water near shore and make it out to the sandbar. When I finally made the trek back to Hill 39, I sat on top for a while looking down. If it wasn’t impossibly inaccessible, I would believe they cart sand in every spring to sustain the hill. I didn’t think I was really going to run down, but there’s really no choice. The giggling which just starts naturally (it always did, right?) is so pure that at the bottom, I’m tempted to climb up and do it again. But I don’t. I walk slowly around the campground, past the curve of my vague memory, then I climb in my car and find the road and my way home.

On his way back, Ze Frank speaks truth.

How can you not pass it along?

Pass it along.

Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22 is a brilliant affair. It deserves to be read twice. I’ve always gravitated to Hitchens’s writing for its sheer force. Though I must admit it is a force I don’t always understand. Much goes unsaid; sentences (or entire paragraphs) sometimes feel like non sequitur. But it’s exactly this that makes me appreciate how and what he writes. I tend to overstate and overexplain. Hitchens is more parsimonious, and that means, where you wish to understand, you must occupy for a brief moment the genius that doesn’t want it all spelled out. Now, too often Hitchens pulls from his encyclopedic reading — authors literary and political that I’ve never heard of — and I feel I miss much. But that, too, is part of the joy of trying to meet Hitchens on his terms.

Before he became a militant atheist and offended the religiously-minded, Hitchens was probably most famous for supporting the Iraq War and perplexing an entirely different population. Like many, I opposed this war, but I let Hitchens have it and never really thought deeply about his stance. Hitch-22 explains in its own way. And what is clear is the deep asymmetry of arguments that convinced Hitchens and those that were used to convince the rest of us. Hitchens is never convinced that Iraq and Al Qaeda colluded. He’s not even convinced of the nuclear WMD argument. Hitchens approached the overthrow of Saddam’s Baathist regime on terms that — at least for someone who paid relatively close attention — were never offered in force. Was there a moral case for war? Did Hitchens make it? I’d need to look back at his arguments then to see. But in his memoir he convinces me of at least this: had I traveled in Kurdistan, had I known the brutality of the regime, had I known this personally and through the experiences of close friends, then I, too, would have felt the moral case for war. But that case wasn’t the one given. And just as I can respect (and feel I’d agree with) Hitchens’s stance on this; I will never feel the moral criticism he applies to those who were anti-war. My anti-war stance resulted because the political arguments were so poor, such an affront to logic and argument, and so fraught with contradiction and convenience that it was (and remains) immoral to have agreed with them. Hitchens shows us another way, but I’m unconvinced if that way was ever accessible or, if accessible, if it would have been efficacious.

If nothing else, Hitchens explodes distinctions — political, literary, sexual — in such a way that you’re left uncertain of your exact pivot point.  This is his real Hitch-22: “It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativests at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them” (422). If at the end, you don’t feel this challenge, and in fact you don’t want to embrace it, then I’d strongly suggest that second reading.