Sosteric is an assistant professor of sociology in Athabasca University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. A couple years ago, he became frustrated with traditional modes of academic communication such as scholarly journals and academic conferences.

“I felt it just created bulkheads between professors and the real world,” he said. “This is a particular problem in sociology where there are no journals designed to raise awareness of sociological research and discussions.”

Sosteric wanted to do something that would create a broader awareness of sociology and its contribution to society as a whole. He also wanted to invigorate the sociology program at AU.

The Socjournal, founded in 2010, functions “by providing content interesting to students, in a language students can understand, in ways students can relate to, in forms easily accessible to them,” he says.

With a million hits a month, The Socjournal is proving extremely popular. The readership is made up mostly of students but also includes some professors. In addition to those in humanities and social sciences, there are also readers from fields such as the natural sciences, agriculture, law, business and the military.

Content includes articles contributed by students and faculty members from both AU and other institutions. Sosteric also posts student papers from his advanced sociology courses that he thinks might be of interest to Socjournal readers.

“I turn down a lot of material written by academics,” he says, “because it is in traditional form (e.g., scholarly paper, etc.). We are not a peer-reviewed journal, and some academics have a hard time seeing past the publication blinders they wear.”

Since The Socjournal first appeared, registration in AU’s Sociology 287: Introduction to Sociology I has increased by 30 per cent, Sosteric says. While he acknowledges that other factors are contributing to the increase, he says, “I suspect a large part of the increase is a result of the efforts I’ve taken with The Socjournal to point potential students toward our sociology program.”

Chronologically, Kornweibel’s photographic journey of the African American experience covers the period from roughly the mid-1830s to the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and the establishment of AMTRAK.  Until the Civil Rights revolution, Kornweibel correctly remarked, “the only job open for blacks in most railroad offices was that of janitor.”  In a 1928 picture of a black employee and his white colleagues that worked for the Wabash Railway, while the white workers are gathered together, their black colleague –named Silas Barton– stands alone at the periphery of the picture.  The physical distance between Barton, whose occupation is listed as a janitor in the picture, and his white colleagues reflects, in the author’s words, “the racial and social gulf prevailing in the railroad workplace.  Kornweibel’s fascination with railroads and the African-American experience has been a central feature of his educational odyssey, since his days at Yale.

Dr. Kornweibel received his Ph.D. from Yale University in the 1960s and began teaching African-American History at San Diego State University in 1977.  Since this period, he has authored the following books: No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the “Messenger”, 1917-1928 (1976); “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (1999); and “Investigating Everything”: Federal Efforts to Ensure Black Loyalty During World War I (2002). The common thread that connects his scholarship is its focus on the need to recognize the African American experiences as an integral and indispensable element of American History.   In the tradition of post colonial writers such as John Hope Franklin, LeRoy Bennett, Toni Morrison, Kornweibel has plumbed the African-American experience, previously neglected and marginalized by mainstream historians,  and has committed his life’s work to memorializing the story of a group that endured and survived oppression since their ancestors’ arrival in North America, beginning in 1619.  Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey (from this point forward will be referred to as Railroads) celebrates the contributions of African Americans to our nation’s historical development and by doing so demonstrates the centrality of blacks in the spiritual and material fabric of America (Amott & Matthaei, 1992).

Railroads put forth a magnificent narrative of the African American experience.  Its use of pictures to capture the human spirit and its ability to overcome insurmountable odds is a powerful medium through which to illustrate the involvement of individual in the making of social history. It shows us the faces of our ancestors thereby demonstrating that history is more than the study of the past.  On the contrary, it demonstrates that history is more than the story about great individuals and events; it is more accurately defined as the scientific study of human societies and the ways in which our ancestors’ behaviors have shaped the cultural practices, social relations, and political institutions of past civilizations (Washburn, 1993).  The latter is illustrated in Railroads, which reintroduce us to the faces of the men and women—now mostly forgotten– who through the sweat of their brows erected the edifices that characterize our historical age. For example, Palmer Hayden’s printing of John Henry’s muscles and hammer versus the stream drill to determine which devices was superior in the construction of railroad tracks across our great nation.  As Kornweibel observed, the printing “symbolized African Americans’ transformation from agricultural to industrial workers, the strength of black working men, and Palmer’s belief, now vindicated, that his hero was not merely legendary but also a real historical figure.  The contest between the steam drill and raw muscle portraying John Henry and his ‘shaker’ gleefully besting the mechanical device and its beleaguered operator,” was donated by Miriam Hayden to the Museum of African American Art, located in Los Angeles, California.  Although John Henry was the victor in the contest, Palmer’s printing foreshadowed the large scale introduction of machines into the agricultural process, which resulted in many blacks in the South being pushed off the land in the 1950s and 1960s (Berlin, 2010). Many of these blacks would migrate to northern cities where today their grandchildren and their children are trapped in poverty and are fodder for our nation’s growing prison industrial complex (Meier & Rudwick, 1966; 1970).

Kornweibel’s pictorial journey humanizes our history by introducing us to J.L. Hooker, brakeman for the Durham and Southern Railway; Maggie Hudson, the B&O’s third porterette, who worked for 36 years alongside her male counterparts, earning the same wages as a result of her membership in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union; Bessie Henderson, a maid who worked for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; and during World War II Marian Turner, Flossie Sawyer, Bessie Carrington, and Gladys Boyd who found work that was previously performed by black men staffing a Pennsylvania Railroad dining car in 1943. It also demonstrates that African Americans developed social and recreational institutions around their economic involvement in the railroad industry (Frazier, 1957; 1962).  This is evidenced by the Black Diamond Diers baseball team whose members worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, the gathering of the Association of colored Railway Trainmen, and the Great Northern Railway cooks and waiters balancing dishes and trays in the annual St. Paul (Minnesota) Winter Carnival.  The absence of African Americans in the white collar ranks of railroad workers reflects the fact that cultural, legal, and institutional barriers were erected to bar blacks from achieving equality with whites, regardless of the formers’ ambition, skills, or talents (Wilson, 1978).  The late Congresswoman, the Hon. Shirley Chisholm, reminds us that for a long time in our nation’s history it was not “fashionable” to be black.  An elaborate set of formal and informal practices were established to ensure that blacks knew their place.  She skillfully captured this reality when she wrote:

“It was during this period of the late 30’s and early 40’s, when Marian Anderson was denied the use of Washington’s Constitution Hall for a performance by the grand dames of the D.A.R….For a long time, I watched such white people closely, listened to them, and observed silently the treatment blacks were given in social and political situations.  It grew on me that we, black men especially, were expected to be subservient even in groups where ostensibly everyone was equal.  Blacks played by those rules; if a white man walked in, they came subtly to attention.  But I could see their fear, helplessness, and discomfort.  When I looked at the white people who were doing this, whether consciously or not, it made me angry because so many of them were baser, less intelligent, less talented than the people they were lording over. But the whites were in control.  We could do nothing about it.  We had no power.  That was the way society was.  I perceived that this was the way it was meant to be; things were organized to keep those who were on top up there.”

Shirley Chisholm’s remarks capture the unpleasant reality that for a long time African Americans were labeled problematic (Gould, 1993).  Their contributions to America’s development through the building of its railroad and canal networks were often marginalized.  When cotton was “king”, it was the labor of African Americans, as a critical element in the emerging world capitalist division of labor, which made it possible.  Railroads, by telling the stories of black firemen, brakemen, porters, and porterttes brings into the light what Kornweibel describes as unpleasant truths (Dailey, 2009). In the author’s words, it “challenges cherished stereotypes; confronts gender and racial biases; exposes hidden loyalties; and questions some railroad historians’ definitions of the field.”  In these regards, Kornweibel succeeds in eloquently proving that the history of railroads in the African American experience is a story worth telling and immortalizing in the form of his book.

While I found Kornweibel’s book very enjoyable to read and his photographs a wonderful depiction of the richness of the African American experiences in America, I never-the-less had the following two minor criticisms of his narrative. First, his narrative fails to provide an introduction explaining the author’s plan for the organization of the book.  The reader has to discover that each of the chapters of the book is a standalone essay devoted to different topics regarding the involvement of Blacks with the building and maintenance of America’s railroad system.  For example, chapter one, titled “Slavery and the Dawn of the Southern Railroading,” addresses the role that Blacks, and in particular slaves, played in the construction of the American railroad system.  Railroad construction was a dangerous occupation, and many blacks that were involved in this vocation were often inflicted with Malaria.  Chapter nine, titled “Not All Proper for Women,” delineates the involvement of women in this iconic American institution.   Many African American women performed a wide range of jobs, particularly during World War I and World War II, when the need for males to fight in the European theater resulted in a shortage of railroad workers.

Second, Dr. Kornweibel does not provide a framework for understanding the global forces responsible for integrating blacks who were politically and economically marginalized and largely members of the unskilled agricultural sector of the American 19^th Century labor force (Ganz, 1995).  Specifically, African Americans in the American 19^th Century labor market were unskilled laborers in the Capitalist international division of labor.   Culturally, they were defined as inferior and/or deficient, and poverty (and all its vicissitudes) was a constant feature of their existence.  In short, from slavery to post reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, Blacks have been characterized as deficient, and poverty and living on the margins have been constant features of our historiography in America.  Despite these minor shortcomings, Railroad is a book that should be placed on our nation’s high schools reading lists and in the libraries of every American interested in giving their children a balanced and honest portrayal of our nation’s history.

Bibliography

Amott, T., & Matthaei, J. (1992). Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-Cultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Berlin, I. (2010). The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. New York: Penguin Books.

Dailey, J. (2009). The Age of Jim Crow. New York: W.W. norton and Company .

Frazier, E. F. (1957; 1962). Black Bourgeoisie. New york: Collier Books.

Ganz, H. (1995). The War Against The Poor. New York: Basic Books.

Gould, S. (1993). American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate and Inferior Species. In S. Harding, The Racial Economy of Science: Toward A Democratic Future (pp. 84-115). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

James, C. (1963). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Book.

Meier, A., & Rudwick, E. (1966; 1970). From Plantation to Ghetto. New York: Hill and Wang.

Washburn, S. (1993). The Study of Race. In S. Harding, The Racial Economy of Science: Toward A Democratic Future (pp. 128-132). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Wilson, W. J. (1978). The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

The group leader says it is for your own good and that it will teach you life skills, but for you it is an emotional horror show. I mean, can you imagine the emotions that you’d feel? Singled out in a group of twenty, publicly labelled as a loser too stupid to follow the rules, the subject of derisive and degrading attention, isolated, even terrorized by the psychological horror, you’d be traumatized for a long period of time. And this would be true even if the group you were in was relatively supportive. Even if they downplayed the social isolation and public shaming, you’d still feel it at a deep level. We are social beings after all and as the great Robert Merton said, we get our self image in part by the way others see us. And if we think others are seeing us as some stupid loser (which is actually the intent of socially isolating someone in this fashion) then that is how we are going to see ourselves. And that can’t help but have a negative, disturbing, impact on us.

Of course the sad thing is, it is a lot worse then just your own personal feelings about it. The reality is most groups would not be supportive. A lot of psychological research in the sixties (look up Zimbardo’s prison experiments) show very clearly just how ugly it can get for people who are publicly separated and isolated. People, even close friends and family, turn on you when an authority figure labels, isolates, and rejects. There can be a snow ball effect. First you sit in the middle of the room and feel bad. Then the people around you start to treat you differently. They laugh and point fingers and find other ways to isolate and exclude you. They avoid you at coffee break, talk behind your back, titter and laugh and generally extend the boundaries created by the visual isolation.  Pretty soon you become a bonafied social pariah, avoided by all and excluded by many. Of course from a social control perspective the whole things works very well because having experienced that kind of trauma once, you’ll never want to go through it again, and so fer sure you’ll jump into line and tap along with the tune provided. But of course once you’ve been labelled and humiliated, the emotional damage is done.

Talking about it now you can see, it just can’t be a good thing and as an adult experiencing something like that you’d probably (hopefully) recognize the abuse for what it was and leave the group. I’d certainly encourage it.  Research (see below) shows that people who experience emotional abuse have problems with anger, attachment, bonding,  emotional responsiveness, have problems applying even basic social skills. How damaging would that kind of public isolation and rejection be for you if you actually put up with it? So if you’re experiencing something like that, get up and walk away.

Now of course, saying it like this makes a solution to the problem seem relatively easy, just get up and walk away. But now imagine that the team leader has authority over you. Imagine that your group leader actually had the power to confine you to that “box” in front of twenty of your friends and colleagues. It would be bad enough to begin with, but it would be even worse under conditions of force and duress. Not only could you not get up and leave no matter how you were feeling, but all the negative emotions would be amplified to that point that even a tough, independent, adult might succumb to the damaging effects of the abuse. It is not even too much to say that a sensitive adult may experience post-traumatic stress. After all, being shamed in a public space is a traumatic event by any standards.

So, if you are following along with me now you are probably thinking that this form of bald faced abuse of power and authority is something that we, as a civilized modern society, should be able to do without. There’s lots of way to motivate people without resorting to either physical or emotional abuse. In fact, as anybody with a clue will tell you, physical and emotional abuse are horrible motivators leading to far more problems than they solve. So imagine now that we take this box thing and do it to children in school. Imagine you have a twelve year old daughter and imagine the teacher has threatened that child that if they don’t behave and live up to expectations, they are going to have to sit on the floor for a week. You remember what school is like, and how horrible children can be to each other. I imagine that a psychologically and emotionally defenseless child would be TERRORIZED by even the thought of that sort of public display and humiliation. You can imagine the damage done should the child actually be forced, by the teacher, to submit to the public humiliation. Self esteem would take a hit, their social network would probably crumble, and the effects would no doubt trickle out into the schoolyard in ways to innumerable to enumerate in this short article. Schools have a hard enough time dealing with bullying to begin with without teachers painting a target on a child’s back in this fashion.

I’m not kidding.

If my twelve year old daughter can’t “make the rent” in her classroom, her teacher is going to identify, isolate, ridicule, and publicly humiliate her by taking away her desk and forcing her to sit on the floor in the midst of thirty of her school age peers. And while her teacher says that it probably won’t be a problem for my daughter, I am horrified nonetheless that even the threat has been issued. I mean, this same teacher, and this school principle, would never ever in a million years think they could pull a stunt like this with adults (can you imagine how upset the teaching staff of the school would be if I put their names and pictures here, put them in a box in public, and held them up for public shaming and ridicule? Furious they’ll be. I’m sure it will be bad enough that I’ve just pointed at them in this fashion), so why are the feelings of our children so irrelevant that they do not even register on their radar? Frankly I feel sorry for the three kids she’s done it to in the past. I mean, I’ve read the research, I am counselor by trade, I am aware of how profoundly damaging something like this can be, and frankly I am shocked that professional teachers seem unaware of basic psychological research. I hate being such a boisterous critic but this is important. The research shows this kind of thing undermines creativity, damages productivity, and causes social problems. As a society we’re always looking for ways to save money so if these practices undermine our global competitiveness and cost us in terms of damaged creativity, lower productivity, and the cash dollars it takes to deal with social problems, then on those grounds alone we should be up in arms over this kind of nonsense. If you ask me though, protecting our kids from emotional harm is reason enough.

Bottom line?

If our education system is turning out teachers and principles who don’t think twice about emotionally abusing our children, and if as parents we can’t see that abuse, and don’t stand up to stop it, then we as a society, got a problem.

Sources and References

Brendgen, Mara, Wanner, Brigitte, & Vitaro, Frank (2006). Verbal Abuse by the Teacher and Child Adjustment from Kindergarten Through Grad e6. Pediatrics, 117: 5.

Hyman, Irwin & Snook, Pamela (1999). Dangerous Schools. What we can do about the physical and emotional abuse of our children.

Krugmen, Richard D. & Krugman, Mary K (1984). Emotional Abuse in the Classroom: The Pediatrician’s Role in Diagnosis and Treatment. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. 128: 284-286.

Moeller, James R. (2002). The Combined Effects of Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Abuse During Childhood: Long-term Health Consequences for Women. Child Abuse and Neglect, 17(5): 623-40.

• http://kalimunro.com/wp/articles-info/sexual-emotional-abuse/emotional-abuse-the-most-common-form-of-abuse
• http://www.findcounseling.com/journal/child-abuse/emotional-abuse.html
• Zimbardo Documentary

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International’s excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

“[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling.”

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and “In itself it will never make us ethical [people].” Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:

“Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.”

WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the “bottom line.” But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of “minute particulars” and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the “real world.” Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.

AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, “itinerant professional vandals”? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that “they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust.” Leopold asked: “If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”

In simple terms, humour can be described as that which makes people laugh. What makes people laugh, however, is not universal. Different people find humour in different things. We may not be able to articulate exactly which things make us laugh, or even why they do, but just by experiencing them we are able to distinguish between what is funny and what is not, at least for us, as individuals. That much is obvious.

What is perhaps not as obvious is that humour is not a fixed or static attribute located inside words, text or actions. It depends on the coming together in a favourable way of various elements, such as tonality and timing to create a specific scenario. More importantly, context is crucial. This is a lesson that sociologists learn early in their careers. Whether a particular comment makes us laugh depends on the context in which it is made. The exact same uttering may vary in its effect if its setting changes. The same remark that you overheard in a serious situation, which had you seriously struggling not to burst out laughing may come across to you as extremely bland if repeated in other circumstances. This may help explain why so many anecdotes fail to live up to their implied promise of hilarity, ending up with the anti-climactic excuse of ‘you had to be there’, a tendency cheekily pointed out by the Irish comedian Dara O’Briain in one of his routines.

The importance of context to humour drives home the idea that humour has an inherent social character. Humour happens in a social space, and this social space plays an important part in the creation of that same humour. A silly comment may sound much funnier uttered in class, where it is unexpected, than at the park where leisurely banter is normal. This is obviously not because of the physical differences between the classroom and the park, but because of the different social situations that they represent. Social sites are not neutral, but come riddled with their own rules of appropriate behaviour and expectations.

The same is true for social roles. A nation’s head of state telling a joke during times of national crises would cause different reactions to a comedian telling the same joke at a comedy show, irrespective of how impeccable the former’s delivery is. Humour is thus also social in terms of its regulation: there are appropriate places to laugh at, and inappropriate ones. There are things and people one can joke about, and others that are taboo. Above all, humour is social because it entails communication and interaction between people who share things in common.

This social dimension of humour is nowhere clearer than at stand-up comedy shows, which are basically halls full of strangers brought together by their desire to laugh. In delivering their routines stand-up comedians presuppose certain knowledge on the part of their audiences. The most fundamental and obvious one is that the audience understands the language of delivery. Nobody will laugh at a joke in a language they do not understand, no matter how objectively funny it may be. The second presupposition is that the audience is able to get the jokes, and can relate to the subject matter discussed by the comedian. This applies especially to observational comedy, which uses the most trivial and mundane aspects of everyday life as its subject matter. Put differently, the comedian and audience must have some level of cultural affinity.

Faced with a roomful of strangers, the observational comedian must dig into experiences that ordinary people can recognize. Without experiential knowledge, or at least a vicarious understanding of the topics discussed, the audience would find it difficult to appreciate the humour. This is why such comedians are more likely to discuss the daily difficulties faced by office workers as opposed to the problems encountered by astronauts during rocket launches.

Needless to say, talking about familiar things by itself does not make things funny. The skill of observational comedians lies in their ability to make the mundane interesting, to make the audience look at daily occurrences from a new angle, to see the funny side of everyday things. The observational comedian is able to make us look at our home town with tourist eyes. In doing this, observational comedians step into a zone that is also inhabited by sociologists.

Sociology is often described as the systematic study of society. Studying sociology is said to help us question what we take for granted, the things that escape our rumination, that common-sense knowledge we cultivate just by living in our society. In ‘Thinking sociologically’ Zygmunt Bauman explains that sociology is all about making the familiar strange.

If this is so, then the sociologist and the observational comedian depart from a similar place. Admittedly, their motivations, and intentions, are miles apart. Comedians care little for social theory, research or the creation of knowledge. They only want to make people laugh. Likewise, sociologists are definitely not renowned for accentuating the comical side of social reality. They are more likely to be concerned with such serious things as social cohesion, social solidarity, social action, power, conflict and social inequality. Nevertheless, both sociologists and observational comedians are interested in making us look at things we think we know well with fresh eyes.

This means that despite setting off in completely different directions, observational stand-up comics and sociologists begin their respective journeys in relative proximity. And while this may be inconsequential to the stand-up comedian, who may find little of benefit in sociology, it need not be so for the sociologist.

Unfortunately, a lot of sociological research and writing ends up lost in academic publications that few people read. As a discipline, sociology suffers the unfortunate condition of being often about people and their everyday lives, but seldom for everyday people and their lives.

In this regard, observational comedians fare better. Such comedians are able to command people’s attention and keep things relevant. They do not have much choice. The nature of their job entails keeping things grounded in experiences that people can relate to. More than that, laughter is easier to sell than social research, which makes the comparison between comedians and sociologists somewhat unfair on the latter. Indeed, observations made by comedians are intended to create laughter, not knowledge, and so the “truths” expressed by them remain largely inconsequential, told only for laughs.

Conversely, sociologists are not primarily interested in people’s amusement. For sociologists commanding the undivided attention of a general audience is less of a priority than understanding and explaining social matters. This is unfortunate because sociological writing often carries research findings and truths that are more useful shared than hidden behind walls of impenetrable jargon in academic hideouts. In this sense, making the familiar strange does not suffice. That strangeness must also be made intelligible and accessible.

This sketchy comparison of comedians and sociologists thus presents a scenario where those most likely to hold people’s attention with their questioning of taken for-granted knowledge have only light-hearted frivolities to offer, whereas those with more substantial things to say lack the mass audiences of the other.

This does not mean that sociologists should become comedians, or compromise their research integrity to appease a mainstream mass of non-sociologists. It does, however, remind us that the social world, which provides so much material for observational comedians, can indeed be a funny place. Way back in 1963 Peter Berger warned that sociology should not ignore the “buffoonery of the social spectacle” (p. 165). Sociologists would do well to remember this piece of advice. Indeed, if Berger’s plea is heeded, people may become more receptive to questions that challenge the structures of everyday life.

At the most basic level observational stand-up comedy can be an aide to sociology by serving a heuristic purpose, as a springboard from which everyday social reality is questioned and deconstructed. This is perhaps what drove Tim Delaney to write Seinology, a book that takes a sociological look at the comedy series Seinfeld, a show that is loosely based on the observational comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. The show was often described as being about nothing. As Delaney argues, however, in reality the show is about everything, with episodes made out of basic ordinary circumstances and social situations. Many issues that were tackled in the show have a direct sociological relevance.

What the above suggests is that although different, the worlds of sociology and observational comedy are in some sense proximate enough to make the building of casual bridges possible. Observational stand up comedy can help us appreciate that the way things are does not always make much sense, and convention can be rather funny, if not downright ridiculous. This is its potential contribution to sociology. Sociologists, on the other hand, can help us understand that these conventions, and the forces that create and re-create social life, are alterable. This knowledge is empowering and can be sociology’s contribution to society.

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References

Bauman, Z. (1997). Thinking Sociologically. In A. Giddens (Ed.) Introductory readings (pp. 12-18). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to Sociology. New York: Anchor Books.

Delaney, T. (2006). Seinology. New York: Prometheus Books.

Symbolic Interactionists feel that behaviors are inherent based upon the social cues learned from those important figures in one’s life.  For example, the way we celebrate Christmas is a prime example of how we perpetuate behaviors, better known as traditions, during certain times of the year.  No matter how Scrooge-like I am, I still look forward to certain aspects of the Christmas season, aspects which have been commonplace in my family for more than three decades.

While the typical celebrations are no longer pertinent in our lives, we struggle to determine new norms for our social unit.  While we can no sooner revert back to past experiences and habits, except in memory, we must move forward to determine how we change our symbolic gestures toward one another for the future.

I am well aware of the fact that our family is not unique in the fact that we not only lost a loved one, but in our isolated state, it feels as if we have experienced an event of which others cannot relate.  The celebrations of holidays, a social expectation which encourages feelings of discontent by their very nature, take on a difficult and sadly dark tone when one must face them without an ever present force no longer with us.

My sister, of course, was this force. I would always consider her to be the architect of any celebration.  Any time, any place, anywhere, my sister would come to the rescue with a cake, a gift, and a decoration.  With her assistance, Christmas would see mountains of gifts, cookouts would see a virtual buffet of food, and birthdays would be made complete with cards and the expected ice-cream cake.

For more than 10 months, I have wondered how all of these situations would differ after her death.  Would life really go on without our Conni?  Would we find things to celebrate from now on?  The answer is yet to come, as we have not met the one-year mark since her passing. With only the memories to sustain us, my family has remained in a state of anomie for some time, unsure how to act, or how to re-craft our perceptions of holidays, togetherness and our interfamilial relationships.

I suppose this article could explore the differences between historical acceptance of death, and that of today.  However, it was not the intent.  While I started this article in hopes of discussing more about how we look at the holidays, it turned into a personal discussion of how I view them.  While I cannot apply the idea of our personal interactions to a general audience, I felt I could write a short article on how they can be interrupted on a personal level.  This article became less of an informative view of society and special occasions, and more of a tribute to a life cut short.

And, I must say, I’m ok with that.

Redefining reality generally begins when individuals notice a disjuncture between observable facts and established modes of explanation, e.g., a democratic system that is supposed to serve the people, but that instead caters to the whims of the powerful. Due to their devotion to established modes of thought, some observers might ignore anomalies, or contrive a convenient explanation that sustains their belief in what is already known, e.g., democracy in the United States may be imperfect, but it distributes power pluralistically through a convoluted representational system. Alternately, more independent thinkers might treat such a dilemma as an opportunity to transcend the socially-imposed barriers that constrain their understanding of observable reality.

The process of transcending socially imposed cognitive barriers often begins with a creative observation (e.g., “Hey! Why don’t politicians ever follow through on their campaign promises?”). In some cases, individuals who are determined to make sense of the anomaly in question might follow up their observations by developing an individual-level intellectual challenge to established modes of understanding (i.e., it appears as though the United States democratic system is primarily designed to serve the interests of power-brokers). Such acts of intellectual rebellion tend to further erode the foundations of conventional thinking (i.e., “Based upon what I have observed, I no longer believe democracy in the United States serves the will of the people.”). Finally, the culmination of the redefinition of reality process involves constructing an entirely new explanation that simultaneously explodes existing ideological boundaries while also advancing a more adequate description of the phenomena in question, i.e., the United States political system masquerades as a democracy, while functioning like an elite-centered oligarchy.

Thus, as the foregoing example illustrates, individuals occasionally demonstrate the requisite mental apparatus to make note of anomalies, develop creative new explanations for mysterious phenomena, and then overcome manifestations of social power that delimit their thought and action. Therefore, the thoughts and behaviors of individual social actors are not entirely determined by the invisible influences of social coercion. Instead, sometimes agents can creatively counteract the distorting influences of social coercion and, in so doing, generate moments of truth.

A moment of truth is an experience wherein individuals, via the process of redefining reality, are transported from an inadequate version of reality to a more satisfactory paradigm. These experiences may be considered relatively truthful in that they are generated through a process whereby agents systematically counteract the influences of invisible social power over their definitions of reality. Thus, Mills (1956) argues that people who confine their analysis of the US political system to the realm of the observable (i.e., the words and deeds of elected politicians), cannot help but fall prey to artfully calculated illusions. From Mills’ perspective, the observable activities of political actors in the United States are designed to provide a convincing impression that politics-as-usual lives up to the ideals of democracy. Yet, Mills argues that appearances are deceiving. While political representatives go through the motions of faithfully serving their constituents, shadowy operators work behind the scenes to ensure that politics-as-usual serves the interests not of the majority, but of a privileged minority of power elites. Consequently, the truth is not defined by facts alone, rather the truth can only emerge as a result of a deeper investigation into the manner in which perception is often cunningly distorted by the interventions of social power. Therefore, it is in the process of counteracting the distorting influences of social power that it becomes possible for agents to experience moments of truth.

References

McGettigan, Timothy, 2011. Good Science: The Pursuit of Truth and the Evolution of Reality. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Popper, Karl, 1983. Realism and the Aim of Science. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

• Harry Reid Cancels Debate
• Largest Internet Protest in History is a game changer (really!)
• The numbers are impressive.

Now, if we could just mobilize that kind of sentiment to end poverty and world hunger, then I’d have something to tweet about.