If any government agency heads are reading, I will pimp your policies here for a secret one-time payment of $21,500. I'd prefer if, to minimize the work I'd have to do, you choose something from my archives that I can rehash quickly. Don't worry, nobody will find out.
Personal References
Bill,
You're a schmuck.
--Dustin
PS If anyone asks, I will deny vehemently having said that. Schmuck.
(Originally Published 28 Jan, '05)
The million-and-oneth monkey over at a million monkeys typing wrote the other day about some misgivings he was having about David Allen's Getting Things Done method, particularly in relation to major life issues like career development. Nothing serious, just some musings about whether what worked for the short term is the best way to go about looking at your life as a whole.
The GTD'ers were not amused. Among the responses he received were the following:
In a way, the response is a validation of his weblog's title: the web really is a million (or more) monkeys (well, apes, really) typing, and you're bound to see it all if you hang around long enough.
But it also points at a rather unflattering aspect of our culture right now, a tendency towards fundamentalism that is hardly confined to the strictly religious. Johnston (the aforementioned million-and-oneth monkey) didn't challenge the system, he didn't say it doesn't work -- in fact, he's one of the more popular GTD bloggers out there -- he merely mentioned that GTD might not answer all the questions in his life. ANd just look at how scared he made some people!
There's an idea I've been playing around with the last 6 months or so, that people are essentially universalizing creatures. (I've used a couple no-go words there: "essential", because I reject essentialism, and "creature" which ,the evolution acticists assure me, has been co-opted by the creationists. But like I said, I'm lazy.) We live in a world in which Bad Things happen, and this is where religion comes in. Religion allows us to believe that a) we can exercise some degree of control over the universe, thus forestalling or minimizing the incidence of Bad Things, and b) that when "a" fails and Bad Things Happen Anyway, there is some meaning, some reason behind them -- and as a sub-corrollary, that we might learn to understand that meaning. What scares us more than anything is the thought that we might live in a random, meaningless universe -- so we make meaning and we invent order.
But this isn't restricted to the religious domain (hell, the religious domain isn't restricted to the religious domain) -- the need for predictability and uinderstanding pervades all aspects of our life. A lot of your "-isms" -- racism, sexism, homophobism, fundamentalism, communism, libertarianism, liberalism, capitalism -- consist, at least in part, in the attempt to impose a system of order and meaning onto an otherwise unpatterned reality. One of the big wrenches (a monkey-wrench, perhaps) in the machine are cases of ambiguity -- the cross-dresser, the cosmopolitan, the female executive, the hippy, the secular Jew, the half-breed. By failing to fall into the "proper" categories, these people are unpredictable, and this unpredicability makes others uncomfortable. "If I do x, I don't know how this person wiill react!"
The best assurance of predictability and understanding would be a world in which every person would act in every situation the way we ourselves would act in the same situation. While this offends the sense that some of us have that diversity is not only good but beautiful, I think that it is an omnipresent part of being human. It is this that sits at the core of virtually every social theory of importance. Foucault's panopticon, Austen's performativity, Derrida's deconstruction, Scott's state, Balibar on racism, Althusser's hailing, Bourdieu's distinction, Spivak's subaltern, Said's orientalism -- all deal with the use of power to impose order and predictability on human subjects.
Thus racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and so on all emerge as ways of trying to force people unlike "us" (whoever the "us" is in a particular situation -- I suppose I should include all the anti-isms as well) to be more like us. Whether the means used are rhetorical, financial, political, or military, the bottom line is getting people to accept as "natural" our way of doing things, and to reject ways that differ from ours. Granted, this is often coupled with an equally strong resistive force -- the desire to assure that people significantly unlike us remain unlike us, and thus subjugable. This is the unmentioned side-effect of universalism -- the more you make a people like you, the less barrier there is to their replacing you. I'd say this is a tension that exists on every scale, from parenting to global politics.
Setting aside global politics, then, let's return to the GTD fundamentalism of the million monkeys. More and more in the modern world, and I think particularly in the US, the traditional sources of order and meaning are being eroded. The growth of particularly hard-line religion (folks more puritan than the Puritans!) and the latest anti-science backlash (which encompasses not only evolution but global warming, stem-cell research, pharmacology, genetic engineering, and so on) are one aspect of this. But there's a personal response as well, best represented by the rise of the "opinion" as the Golden Standard of individual rights. Having a right to one's opinion used to mean they could not like eggplant; nowadays it increasingly means not having a right to challenge racism, corporatism, political fraud, patriotism, etc. Let me give just one example: how many anti-war activists feel entitled to challenge the morality of the choice to be a soldier? I realize this is a complicated issue, although one that is rarely so complicated when we consider, say, the soldiers of the Nazi regime.
Into this rich stew of fear of disorder comes David Allen, whose relatively simple system offers hope for people buried under what he calls "knowledge work", that nebulous and poorly defined field that more and more of us find ourselves employed in. We don't stand on an assemblyline and push a set of buttons all day anymore; most of us have jobs that consist largely of making decisions, setting priorities, and moving information. And working late -- we work longer hours, on average, than at any time since the 1920s. The system is simple: collect everything, assign each "thing" an action, and do that action. Lather, rinse, repeat. For the rest of your life.
And that's the key to the response Johnston got from the typing monkeys: for the rest of your life. Allen's system is not just a method for doing things, it's a life discipline. It's not intended to impose order at work, but to impose order on our lives. The same tools that work at the office are meant to work in our personal lives as well (especially as the line between the two is increasingly blurred). In essence, it promises the same thing religious discipline offers: order and meaning. Johnston's heterodoxy, which took the form of suggesting that maybe the short-term benefits of GTD could be supplemented with Stephen Covey's "7 Habits", in this formulation, is like an Evangelical Christian suggesting that maybe they should adopt the principle of papal infallibility, or Muslim halal rules. More than that. though,. it implies that the system that a lot of people are investing their lives into isn't complete -- and that therefore they might have to change. Frightening stuff, apparently, for a number of people, whose response is typical -- the way I do things is right, and your failures are a result of not doing things the way I do. It's exactly what the French and British told their colonial subjects in Africa and the Middle East, what they, and later the US, told (and tell) American Indians, what the Spanish told the South and Central Americans they conquered.
It would be funnier if it weren't so scary.
From "Extreme Academia"
American Lecture Idol
Paula: "Fabulous! So what if they didn't understand the concept of the postmodern rejection of absolute truth? You gave it your all, and that's what counts."
Randy: "Dawg, it was ai'ight, it was ai'ight. A little pitchy in the Richard Rorty section, which isn't the material I would have chosen for you. But you were you, man. You were definitely you."
Simon: "Frankly, I preferred Clay's presentation on gender ambiguity. Have you considered a career as a book editor?"
I have started a blog for my Intro to Cultural Anthropology classes. I'm not exactly sure how or even if it will work -- but better to learn by doing than not to do at all, I guess. I will be posting class prep. materials, lecture notes, information on videos shown, and random links and information of interest. Although intended primarily for members of my classes, anyone is welcome to browse around, read the material, even take part in any discussions that spring up.
Hilary Clinton was the first female board-member of Wal-Mart.
Q.V.:Back when she was first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton became the first woman appointed to the Wal-Mart board, and tried to get the company to hire more women managers, but that effort apparently went the way of national health insurance.
A while back, I mentioned the case against a Georgia school district over textbook stickers discrediting evolution as "theory, not fact". The judge has found against the school district, ordering them to remove the stickers. Says the judge:While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.
Score one for science, although it looks to be a bit of a pyrrhic victory -- 2000 families complained about evolution being in the textbooks, and only 6 against. I can't imagine the district's biology teachers successfully meeting this kind of resistance. At least now they have the law back on their side...
From BoingBoing comes this story North Korean government's efforts to promote short hair about the among its citizenry:
The government of North Korea has launched a series of television public service announcements called "Let Us Trim Our Hair In Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle!"Snip from a BBC News story on the campaign: "It stressed the 'negative effects' of long hair on 'human intelligence development,' noting that long hair 'consumes a great deal of nutrition' and could thus rob the brain of energy."
Here's a thousand words by way of response:
While looking for a file related to my dissertation, I came across the following short piece on anthropological representation of American Indians. I can't for the life of me figure out what I was writing it for, although the ideas, I know, come from my senior thesis, written almost 10 years ago. As the work references NAGPRA and the Kennewick Man case, though, it must be newer. I suppose this piece will find it's way into my dissertation somehow, but the central idea seems to stand well on it's own, so I figured I'd go ahead and post it here.
The anthropological study of Native Americans has been plagued by the same problems as anthropology elsewhere in the world. The scientific stance of anthropology, coupled with the anthropologist’s position as a member of the mainstream Western society has given rise to a situation similar to Edward Said’s "Orientalism", a situation we might call "Indianism". Like Orientalism, Indianism is "a discourse that... is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with power political, power intellectual, power cultural, power moral" (Said 1978: 12). The power of the anthropologist, as a member of the mainstream scientific community to define and represent Native Americans, generally to the exclusion of Native American voices, is firmly entrenched in the colonial and hegemonic position of anthropologist vis-a-vis Native Americans. The image of Native Americans thus produced, the "Indian", like the "Oriental", emerges "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical realities but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" (Said 1978: 8).
At the core of most anthropology dealing with Native Americans is a belief in the concept that there is something about Indians which marks them as clearly different from the mainstream society. This concept is ultimately grounded in the evolutionist hierarchy of "savage" (or "primitive"),"barbarian", and "civilized" societies (Morgan: 3-28). Since the "primitive" was seen as clearly not "civilized", s/he was seen is somehow different from the Westerner, who was "civilized". While the rise of relativism in anthropology has (somewhat) erased the notions of inferiority and superiority from this model, the cultural otherness implied remains. As a category of otherness, the Indian has been defined according to a group of supposedly shared characteristics, including a greater degree of closeness to the land, a smaller basic unit of community, a simpler form of leadership and inner cultural division, etc. (Note that the identifying characteristics of Indian-ness are all in relation to "civilized", or Western, society.) What may have been uses a term of convenience for early white colonists has become excepted as a scientific fact.
By classifying all these people as Indians, "Whites categorized the variety of cultures is societies as a single entity for the purposes of description analysis, thereby neglecting are playing down the social and cultural diversity of Native Americans.... [The] idea of the Indian has created a reality in its own image as a result of the power of the Whites and the response of Native Americans" (Berkhofer 1978: 3).
By virtue of the anthropologist's scientific authority and positioning in White society as representer of the Indian, this simplified version of Native American lives has become accepted as what Indians are really like. For the Native Americans so defined, "the power of the Whites all too often forced them to be the Indians Whites said they were regardless of their original social and cultural diversity" (Berkhofer 1978: 195).
In addition to the simplification of Native American diversity, anthropologists have also perpetuated an image of Indian cultural timelessness in their portrayal of Native Americans, especially to the use of the "ethnographic present". Thus anthropologists have denied the processes of cultural change in Indian communities in a way no anthropologist would accept if the subject were his or her own culture. Western culture has obviously change in the 500-plus years since Columbus first landed in the New World, yet Indians are considered of remain static throughout the same time period. "anthropological monograps and texts... describe Indian life in the timeless ethnographic present," writes Berkhofer, "... as if the only true Indian were a past one" (1978: 67).
The simplification of Native American diversity and denial of cultural process is compounded by the use of anthropological data by the government in the design and implementation of policy, forcing Indians in turn to adopt such representations in their dealings with their government. Anthropologists have
succeeded in burying Indian communities so completely beneath the mass of irrelevant information that the total impact... has become one of simple authority. Many Indians have come to parrot ideas of anthropologists because it appears that the anthropologists know everything about Indian communities (Deloria 1969: 87).
Anthropology "perpetuat[es] the motifs, values, and studies of Indians of 100 to 150 years ago as if Indians of today should follow those guidelines" (Deloria 1973: 96), and thus judges Native Americans on who they were, and not who they are. The discipline "has unconsciously fallen into the position of blocking very significant movements in the American Indian community" (1973: 93-4) in portraying this timeless image of Indians, who must choose between following an outmoded way of life in order to retain their Indian identity, or denying the anthropologist's image and thus risk losing their cultural identity. The anthropologist has left no middle ground by denying legitimacy to the cultural forms found among Native Americans today.
Anthropologists, with their objectivity grounded in scientific detachment, have given the impression that they consider it their right to study Native Americans, making it clear that the advancement of science comes before the needs and desires of mere people. This is especially apparent in the furor over NAGPRA, for instance in the Kennewick Man case. In the eyes of many Native Americans, anthropologists have exploited them for their own professional advancement, offering little besides irrelevant theories and dangerous policy advice in return. Like the Orientalists of Said's description, anthropologists have invented a type of Indian "suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe" (Said 1978: 7) but inherently unsuitable for the preservation and evaluation of actual Native American culture, society, and people.
Berkhofer, Robert, Jr. (1978). The White Man’s Indian. New York: Vintage Books.
Deloria, Vine (1969). Custer Died for Your Sins. New York: Avon Books.
Deloria, Vine (1973). God is Red: A Native View of Religion. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Morgan, Lewis Henry (1963 [1877]). Ancient Society. Cleveland: World Publishing Co.
Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.
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