Additionally, I appeal as often as I can to all the things they do (like locking their doors and rolling up their windows because "those people" are out there as they drive down Woodward Avenue to a Tigers, Lions, or Wings game) that are ridiculous and all the things they know not to be true (all Black men can jump high (because of the extra muscle in their leg), are hung like horses (cuz they're closer to nature/beast then us civilized white folk) and out to get white girls (even if they like big butts and white girls don't have 'em) but think without thinking or don't bring to mind when others consciously or unconsciously say things that reinforce such received knowledge. And the number of flabergasted and shocked faces in the class once we start talking about sex/gender/sexuality is just a world of fun to play with... its as if they've never heard an adult - outside of health class? - say the word penis, much less the others that come out of my mouth.
My reaction just yesterday, however, came from a Social Problems class that I had read David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch. I had them write papers either unpacking Johnston's narrative/populist/emotional style or researching material that might reinforce or undermine Johnston's claims or connections. About a quarter of the class bought the populist outrage but completely missed historical and conceptual point. About half of the class did mechanical textual analyses or limited research comparisons but about a quarter of the class (~12 out of 50) refused to engage any of the historical referents, anything about the difference between national monopoly capitalism and neoliberal political economy, or any of the clearly factual material Johnston introduced. Their argument, at root, was that Johnston never told the side of the story put forward by the wealthy and businesses (sometimes, but actually quite rarely true), that he made all sorts of emotional but empirically unsupported claims and connections (somewhat more true but far less true than the students suggested), and that Johnston initiated the project based on a deep and prior bias against any and all people with money or power and that if Johnston was honest at all he'd have acknowledged that he was just jealous that he wasn't in a position to do exactly what these very reasonable, if aggressive business folks are/were doing, because if he was he would just as anyone would since its a dog-eat-dog world and everything anyone does hurts someone else.
Much of this was further reinforced by just getting back from a weekend talking with McGraw-Hill reps and a raft of other faculty about Soc 100 textbooks, web services, and assessment tools and finally seeing how much textbooks that, rather than teaching the sociological imagination, present a formulaic survey of the discipline (just about every textbook out there), are rooted in Bloom's Taxonomy. It became so so clear why I hate textbooks, they assume students remember, understand, apply, evaluate, criticize and produce knowledge (or something like that) in a manner which recapitulates that formulaic trajectory and they not only write the books to present material in that ossified order but also prepare textbanks to assess learning outcomes (puke) based on that hierarchy... The vicious cycle of stultifying education in secondary and post-secondary teaching and public anti-intellectualism became that much more clear and, while I've fought both tooth and nail all of my career, I gained a better sense of how - even by fighting it - I was contributing to it in ways I didn't understand before but which were probably undermining my own pedagogy (and political vision of my own teaching).
Hell, I find far far greater emotional fairness and intellectual flexibility in the West Michigan religious conservatives I've had in my classes than among these folks... this'll pass, and my emotions are frayed as it is, but this really bummed me out.
A
On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 5:54 AM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> I've not had an experience this intimate but run into it quite regularly
>> with my students. Somewhere between a Progressive reliance on Experts and
>> CB's accusations about the lists superiority complex must lie a way of
>> dealing with delusional anti-parties. What I am least prepared to deal with
>> is folks - that you've just described on the "right" and Doug has described
>> on the "left" - for whom history, data, complexity and structured arguments
>> hold no sway.
>>
>
> All persuasion has emotional as well as logical components. Who we
> identify with and against, who we accord high status and low, is always a
> big part of getting us to part with convictions we are attached to, or not.
>
> So it seems when logic plays an asymptotically small role, if you want to
> persuade, you have to focus exclusively on your emotional powers. In your
> case, you are a professor. And so for most students, you have a certain
> parental charisma even if they hate you.
>
> And so IMHO, if you feel compelled to try to make a dent on such a person,
> the only tack worth trying is to communicate, as kindly but as firmly as you
> can, as if it were an undeniable fact, that this is all nonsense, a case of
> mass hysteria such as happens all the time, from witchburnings to the
> housing bubble, where masses of people believe things that just aren't true
> by revving each other up. (As a sociologist, maybe you can get them to come
> up with lists of such phenomena and treat them comparatively :-)
>
> If they react angrily or want to argue, beg off as kindly as you can that
> well, it must be that you don't get it.
>
> You won't win the "argument." But the fact of simple complete dismissal
> from a person with intellectual authority will put a pebble in their shoe
> that will bug them a little, no matter how much they believe. Nobody wants
> people they respect to think they're an idiot. And the less fired up you
> are, and the more you can say it as if it were simply a fact, the more it
> will worry them. And maybe over time, they'll wonder.
>
> And to be be fair, even supremely rational argument usually works like this
> in part. Most arguments where friends have convinced me to change really
> fundamental beliefs, the concession has taken place days, weeks or months
> after the argument when I can't get it out of my head and start arguing both
> sides -- and slowly watch my argument collapse in the sheltered privacy of
> my own head, where it feels like a relief and a personal achievement rather
> than shameful public defeat. (And I think I'm someone who concedes error
> more readily than most.)
>
> So I wouldn't worry so much that people don't change their beliefs right in
> front of you. The nice thing as a teacher is that you get to monitor them
> over time.
>
> But I would certainly say that the key to change anyone in this mode, if
> for some reason you feel you need to, is simply through disapproval.
> Engaging the factual points is self-defeating. The whole point is that this
> is not how rational thought works. That whenever they see ideas that seem
> too crazy to be true, they probably are. And learning to take that
> stance...well, that's not something you can teach logically.
>
> Michael