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  • The Origins of the Palestinian People

    I recently came across a fascinating book entitled The Handbook of Palestine by H.C. Luke and E. Keith-Roach.  Produced in 1922 by the British Mandate government which had just taken control of the country after a long Ottoman Turkish rule, it’s a fascinating snapshot of the Holy Land beginning its transition to the State of Israel and the other claimants of the land.  I plan to reproduce some of the more interesting parts of the book on a sporadic basis.

    In this post they discuss the origins of the Arab-Syrian population, which is now referred to as the Palestinian people.

    The Arab population falls naturally into two categories, the nomads (bedawi), and the settled Arabs (hadari). The former are the purer in blood, being the direct descendants of the half-savage nomadic tribes who from time immemorial have inhabited the Arabian peninsula, and who to this day dwell in portable tents of black goats’ hair (‘the tents of Kedar’). The camps of the different tribes vary in form: some, such as those of the Ta’amireh, are as a rule rectangular, others are circular, others oval. Small in numbers, the tribes generally avoid open places for their camps, not only for shelter but in order not to be conspicuous; for similar reasons they pitch their camps at some distance from their watering places. Natural caves in the wadis are preferred by some families [e.g. at Mar Saba), as they afford better shelter and protection. There is little or no cohesion between the various tribes. Their watering places are springs, standing pools of rain water, and cisterns roughly cut in the rock in the valley bottoms. On the border between ‘the desert and the sown’ the people tend to change their mode of life ; the nomads become partly or wholly sedentary, the sedentary become semi-nomadic. Thus the people on the western edge of the Judaean Desert, as, for example, the Ta’amireh, who were originally fellahin, take their cattle out into the desert and live a nomadic life; on the other hand, genuine Bedouin in the desert regions, such as the Rasha’iden of ‘Ain Jidi, remain so long in certain places as to become almost sedentary.

    The Bedouin are for the most part Moslems, but are on the whole less devout than the settled Arabs. Some of the Bedouin, especially around Salt and Madaba in Trans-jordania, still retain the Christianity which they adopted in the early centuries of the Christian era.

    A Negroid element is found among the inhabitants of the tropical Ghor region in the lower Jordan Valley and around the Dead Sea. The presence of these people is attributed by some to a settlement from the Sudan, by others to the introduction of Negro slaves purchased at Mecca by pilgrims and retailed at Ma’an.

    The settled Arabs are of more mixed descent than the Bedouin, and form the link between these and the Syrians, by whom we understand the descendants of all those peoples, other than the Jews, who spoke Aramaic at the beginning of the Christian era. Some of these have retained their Christianity, but the majority have in the course of ages embraced Islam. The Aramaic language, after holding its ground for a considerable time in Palestine and Syria, ultimately gave place to Arabic (though surviving among the Samaritans and, as regards Syrians, in three villages north-east of Damascus), and this process was facilitated by the continuous replenishment of Palestine and Syria from the tribes of the Arabian Desert. This Arab infiltration has created and maintains the specific racial character of the population. The distinction between the Arabs and the Syrians is now not so much racial as cultural. The Syrians are agriculturists and dwellers in towns, civilized, industrial, and of peaceful inclinations; the Arabs are a pastoral people organized in tribes and with a natural tendency towards inter-tribal warfare. Palestine and Syria offer, on their eastern border, examples of every stage of transition from the nomad Bedouin to the settled fellahin; the Arab conquest of the eighth century was only the flood-tide of a continuous overflow from the desert into the cultivated land of the West.

  • It's Hard to Explain the Desire for Freedom to People Who Have Never Had It

    It’s conventional wisdom that we are a deeply divided nation these days.  And the conventional wisdom, for once, is right: we are.  Where things diverge is the explanation for same.  Although day-to-day politics are one thing, the divides we experience these days run deeper that “go along to get along” or the horse-trading of patronage driven politics.  They’re divides in the way we look at life, and they’re profound.

    We hear a great deal about “taking our country back”.  We also hear a lot about the “end of freedom” in this country.  But why, one asks, would one want to take away freedom in a place where freedom has generated the prosperity?  Conspiracy theories about, but there’s one thing that people on both sides of the debate overlook: when you’re dealing with people who have never had real freedom to start with, it’s hard to explain the benefits of same.  I’ve spoken about people like the French (before their revolution), the Russians and the Arabs (still) having this problem, but now I want to turn to a group that hasn’t tasted as much freedom as they think they have: the children of the successful.

    I say “successful” rather than “wealthy” because the two aren’t synonymous these days.  That’s for two reasons.  The first is that many of the decision makers in this country are part of the noblesse de robe that dominates our government and, right at the moment, there are obstacles in translating that loftiness of rank into real material success.  The second is that we are a strange country in that wealth isn’t measured in net worth as much as it is in income, and the credit one obtains from that income to flash the cash.  Neither is my idea of wealthy, but what do I know?

    But to the point: people desire wealth in whatever definition they have of it so that they can “do what they want.”  But is that really what happens?  What happens more often is that a) they end up doing what someone else told them to do with the money, i.e., keep up with the Joneses in the way to insure the Joneses are impressed and b) being forced to alter their style of mind and life to insure success is maintained.  That latter burden falls hardest on the children, and that’s where things start to get interesting.

    The first dirty secret people find out on the way to the top is that, to get there, you have to make that your priority, especially in our very competitive environment.  I find it strange that Christians, for example, can so blithely swallow prosperity teaching when Our Lord clearly set forth the priority issue: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate one and love the other, or else he will attach himself to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” (Matthew 6:24)

    The first place this impacts the offspring is education.  Nothing drove this point home for me than this, about my old prep school:

    And as for the school itself?  Well, it looks like they don’t have to worry about renegades like me any more.  When I went there, the school had only Grades 7-12.  Now they have them all, including pre-kindergarten.  The alumni director told me that parents who were seeking admission for their children into pre-K were already asking about the Ivy League admission rate.

    Once you do this, you’re placed your children past want to need on their destiny in life, no matter how you cover it up.  And, of course, pre-K is only the start; you then have to drive them (to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon the kid) to the GPA that insures they’ll get the desired result at the end.

    Unfortunately GPA isn’t the only determining factor.  Elite institutions want “well-rounded” and “good” people to pass through their gates, and that means an enormous amount of extra-curricular activities.  What that boils down to is time consuming corvée of “volunteer” service which may or may not be to the offspring’s interest or aptitude, but which looks good on the CV.  (The phrase “CV” or “curriculum vitae” implies that the person has had a life, which may or may not be true in the full sense).  On top of that we have all of the other activities which young people are pressed into, which these days become so numerous that they get in each other’s way on a daily basis.  (That battle is one that my wife, who teaches piano, struggles with all the time).

    By the time a person gets through the years of growing up and wending their way through the educational system to whatever final degree they get, what they really might “want” to do has been lost somewhere between ballet lessons and the debate team.  But then things get fun for everyone: how do we, snobs, products of this elite system, keep the “ball in our court” so to speak and make sure that the unwashed never get the upper hand?  It’s simple: you rig the system so that only people like you will move up, which explains what Walter Russell Mead refers to as the “guild mentality” we have amongst those at the top.  It also explains such things as why our “best and brightest”, who have no problem with themselves or their children marrying someone of the same sex, would sooner die than marry “below their station”, to use the old phrase.

    Under these circumstances it’s not difficult to understand why those at the top of this heap are baffled at best and contemptuous at worst by movements such as the Tea Party, which presupposes a country of flexible opportunity and success as a result of actual revenue generation.  But that’s a country which is, as Margaret Mitchell put it, gone with the wind.  The people at the top have no idea what real freedom is, why should they be sympathetic with those at the bottom who would like to find out?

    The sooner everyone sees the reality of this the sooner we can put a realistic game plan to deal with it.  And by “realistic game plan” I don’t necessarily mean a political solution to our problem.  As my Computational Fluid Dynamics professor observed after a disastrous mid-term exam, we’re given certain cards to play in life and we have to play them.  Waiting for some “righteous” solution to take place on a general basis isn’t, in my opinion, a good way of using the time God has given us on this earth.  As I put it many years ago in Dear Graduate:

    Prep schools are amazing institutions. One the one hand, they tell us that they want us to find fulfilment in life in a very idealistic tone, but when they turn from the abstract to the concrete they cast this fulfilment in terms of material success via getting into “good” universities and entering highly compensated (and/or politically powerful) careers. You, for your part, are doing your duty in both respects. But it isn’t their life, it’s yours. God has given it to you, and the road to fulfilment isn’t the one that school or society says, but the one He set forth for you from what I like to call “negative infinity.” (The ultimate goal, of course, is to be with Him at “positive infinity,” where this site gets its name.

    This page and its companion highlight the result of my own voyage. When I sent my first two published books to my prep school’s alumni director, along with an account of my varied career, his response was that “you have lived an interesting life.” God has an interesting life for you too. It’s your choice: make it.

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  • The Elizabeth Warren Saga Keeps Getting Stupider

    A few days back I commented on Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she’s Native American.  Since then we’ve had the piece at Breitbart which shows that a) her claimed Native American ancestor wasn’t and b) another ancestor helped round up the Cherokees for their sad journey to Oklahoma.  This has thrown her campaign into a tizzy.

    Where I teach is only five minutes from Ross’ Landing, the “jumping-off” place for the Trail of Tears.  So the subject of the Cherokees–and the Scots-Irish, probably the trunk of her family tree as it turns out–is of intense interest.  There are some observations that need to be made:

    1. It’s entirely possible that the woman in her background Warren claims was Cherokee actually came from the tribe.  In the wake of the Removal, the Cherokee were understandably reticent about claiming their heritage, which is why it’s frequently tricky to verify such a claim.  The only thing that would settle the issue would be genetic testing, fairly common these days.  However, given the risk of failure, I doubt that the Warren campaign will risk it.
    2. It’s also possible that someone involved in the Removal would turn around and marry a Cherokee, or have a relative to do so.  “Running off with an Indian” was and is a common thing to do in these parts, it’s just more expensive now with the high cost of weddings.
    3. Having Cherokee ancestors means that you have possible slave holders in your background, as some of the Cherokee owned slaves.  It also means that you are the descendant of a people group whose removal was done in part because their civilisation and education level was starting to make the surrounding population look bad.
    4. Having Scots-Irish ancestors means that you’re the scion of the people group whose characteristics the bi-coastal elites hate the most.  It’s a howl to think that such a person would stand for the Senate from Massachusetts, let alone a Democrat.

    The whole saga of the Cherokee is complex and defies many of the politically correct stereotypes we have constructed around race and ethnicity.  Were this controversy in Tennessee or Oklahoma, it probably wouldn’t be the big deal it is.  But then again she probably wouldn’t have much of a chance running as a Democrat in either state.

    The irony of the whole thing is that Warren, who built her reputation as a consumer advocate and is running as something of a radical, isn’t in the right party to make a serious difference there, either.  In spite of their willingness to throw people in jail for all kinds of financial and other peccadilloes, the current administration/régime is giving the heavy hitters in the financial system–campaign contributors and future employers all–a wide berth.  That “limousine liberal” approach to “reform” is a major reason why we still have a competitive political system in Massachusetts and everywhere else.

  • Jefferts-Schori Should Face the Facts: Diversity Isn't What She Wanted to Start With

    At the beginning of David Virtue’s acid commentary on the run-up to General Convention 2012, he quotes the Presiding Bishop as follows:

    We need to discover ways to engage in the outside community. The Episcopal Church must embrace change and diversity if it is to move forward.

    We, er…you had the greatest chance to strike a blow for diversity and atone for colonialism and racism at one shot: hand the Anglican Communion to the Africans.  But you didn’t, because it wasn’t the diversity you were looking for.

    There’s another point she made that David missed in his volley:

    The Episcopal Church draws strength from its growing immigrant population, cried Jefferts Schori to a newly minted congregation of liberal Episcopalians in the Diocese of Albany that found Albany Bishop Bill Love a bit too exclusionary (read orthodox) in his understanding of mission.

    That simply isn’t true.  The Episcopal Church was founded to take up the slack left by its orphaning from the Church of England after our Revolution, which meant its first communicants were English descendants.  That didn’t change for a long time; for many years it was the WASP church, a familiar church home for England’s children who came over here and a place where others could adopt a suitable British style spirituality and mentality.  The revisionist bent in the Episcopal world was generated by same descendants, not those who huddled at Ellis Island and the like.  The Anglican immigrants coming now (such as they are) come from provinces where TEC’s revisionist idea isn’t to their taste.

    One thing for sure: TEC’s plan may make its leadership feel good about itself, but it is not a plan for membership growth.

  • Taking a Position on Yoga Isn't Simple

    It’s getting complicated out there:

    A spate of unsavory controversies in the United States is cracking up yoga’s wholesome image, with accusations of financial fraud, sexual misconduct and copyright issues involving asanas (positions) plaguing the community.

    As a result, India, the land where the physical, mental and spiritual discipline of yoga began in ancient times, is truly getting itself into a twist.

    The intensifying debates around yoga seem all the more pertinent considering the staggering reach of the discipline and the exponentially growing business around it.

    A large part of the problem is that the Americans have gotten in the act.  Today, as the article points out, we have 100,000 yoga instructors in the U.S., while India, with more than three times the population, has only 175,000.  And we’ve enlisted the services of another group with a supply glut–attorneys–to really mess things up with intellectual property issues.  It’s hard to understand how one can put a legal lock on something that’s been around as long as yoga has, but that hasn’t stopped the American legal system from doing it anyway.  (My wife would pinpoint the problem in this way: this country has more blondes than India. But I digress…)

    Many Christians have reservations about getting into yoga because of its Hindu origins.  The Hindus are worried too, because they claim that yoga is getting away from its Hindu origins.  But is yoga originally Hindu?  Maybe not:

    However, many believe that the provenance of yoga goes back to the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium BC, long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Others trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries BC.

    The Indo-Europeans, whose queasiness about the future was documented in an earlier post, didn’t leave much certainly about the past, either.  And that, of course, leads to a discussion of the mutual influence of Indian and Roman culture, which certainly impacted Christianity in its early centuries.

    What we need is some enlightenment on the subject.  But that isn’t going to happen if Deepak Chopra has anything to do with it.  As he put it in the Washington Post (a publication frequently lacking in enlightenment):

    The whole point of yoga is to achieve enlightenment, and that the most revered practitioners, whether known as yogis, swamis or mahatmas, transcend religion. In fact, even if yoga were granted a patent or copyright by the United States Patent Office, there is no denying that enlightenment has always been outside the bounds of religion.

    Both Buddhism and Christianity would argue that point, the former for obvious reasons (the whole religion turns on one enlightenment) and the latter for reasons I discuss here.

    Enlightenment, however, can be defined differently.  The enlightenment that many Americans seek to find in yoga isn’t spiritual but personal, i.e., becoming physically lighter than before.  There are other ways than yoga to achieve that, and part of that is to deal with the “knife and fork culture” that we have inside and outside the church.  But we already have good advice on that and other related issues, from the Sermon on the Mount:

    “That is why I say to you, Do not be anxious about your life here–what you can get to eat or drink; nor yet about your body–what you can get to wear. Is not life more than food, and the body than its clothing? Look at the wild birds–they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns; and yet your heavenly Father feeds them! And are not you more precious than they? But which of you, by being anxious, can prolong his life a single moment? And why be anxious about clothing? Study the wild lilies, and how they grow. They neither toil nor spin; Yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his splendour was not robed like one of these. If God so clothes even the grass of the field, which is living to-day and to-morrow will be thrown into the oven, will not he much more clothe you, O men of little faith? Do not then ask anxiously ‘What can we get to eat?’ or ‘What can we get to drink?’ or ‘What can we get to wear?’ All these are the things for which the nations are seeking, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But first seek his Kingdom and the righteousness that he requires, and then all these things shall be added for you. Therefore do not be anxious about to-morrow, for to-morrow will bring its own anxieties. Every day has trouble enough of its own.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

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  • Advice to Graduates: Go Where the Future Is

    Last week I did a “commencement address” to college students.  Today I take on their high school counterparts.

    I have accumulated a decidedly incongruent academic career, by current standards at least.  After enduring the offspring of this country’s premier zip code at the Palm Beach Day School (now the Palm Beach Day Academy,) I went down the coast to the St. Andrew’s School.  A college preparatory institution, it woke up one way to discover that it didn’t really intend for me to go to the college I chose: Texas A&M University.  Thanks to my nice Jewish classmate the blowback from that decision isn’t as painful as it once was.

    Disparity and blowback notwithstanding, the last two institutions have one thing in common: their reputation has improved greatly since they handed me a diploma.  St. Andrew’s is now one of South Florida’s most prestigious secondary schools; when I tell people back home I went there, they’re generally impressed.  Texas A&M has come a long way as well, especially in the sciences and engineering that have always been its speciality.  When A&M joined the Southeast Conference recently, the hope was out there that the school would enhance the academic standard of the conference.

    We live in a culture where what’s on one’s diploma is dreadfully important, from who becomes President downward.  One reason (not the only one) why I never pursued the Ivy League option is because I never thought this country would become the credential-obsessed mandarinate that it has.  But that’s just the point of this piece, aimed primarily at high school graduates: you have to pick the next step based not only on where you want to go, but where you think everything else might go as well.

    It’s easy to look at things the way they are and follow the conventional wisdom.  Today we have the mandarinate.  But what will things look like in ten years? twenty? fifty?  Will the choices we make today not look so hot a few years down the road?  Will the underlying institutions that hold things together continue to do so?  Will they come apart in bankruptcy and corruption?  Will the centres of power shift?  These are questions that, in our “pursue your dream” culture, get the short shrift.  We’re supposed to dream our dream and pursue it, right?  But what happens when we have to wake up?

    In their book Latin for People, the Humez brothers observe the following:

    It is not everybody who can tell you something about the future and have it turn out to be true.  The original Indo-Europeans, rather than make frequent liars out of each other, seem to have decided that the safest way of talking about the future was in the subjunctive, and a separate future tense could wait to be invented until later when life was bound to be more certain.

    Americans love to live in the subjunctive, which is a big reason why the reality of the last four years has been so painful.  But we at least need to take a stab at finding out where things are going in a realistic way.  After all, we have to live in the future we make, unlike the various promoters in our life who steer us one way or another.

    Liberals tell us that we should read more books.  Personally I think we should take that a step further (liberals used to as well, until they got control) and read subversive books.  Subversive books are not those which express whatever radical chic that’s out there (like the ones that Bill Ayers wrote for Barack Obama) but those which really challenge the apparent reality that’s being presented to us.

    Subversive books taught me two things: a) the various political, economic and social systems out there won’t last forever and b) I wouldn’t either.  Let me deal with the first.

    We live in a country that is being run into the ground by the people that own and operate it. Americans operate with the implicit assumption that this country will last forever, but history tells us that it will not.  History also tells us that, when a country is being ineptly lead, that end will be accelerated.  As even my not terribly religious grandfather observed, this country has many blessings.  But these can be squandered, and they are by a system which is more interested in implementing the fashionable than the workable.

    In the days before Columbus the Straits of Gibraltar were considered the end of the navigable world, and their motto was “Ne Plus Ultra” (there was no beyond).  After Columbus and others demonstrated otherwise, we changed their motto to “Plus Ultra” (there is a beyond).  Although Americans are good at running their international reputations down through tourism outside the country, it seldom occurs to them that their future might be there.

    During the current occupancy of the White House, I read an article in, of all places, the New York Times where a young Connecticut man struggled to find a job even with a degree from a prestigious institution.  His grandfather, a World War II veteran, suggested that he look for work outside of the country.  The young man declined, preferring the homebody dole route.

    When the Greatest Generation suggests it’s time to skip the country, you know we’re in trouble.  But why take it from these stalwarts; our own government is funding those who wish to study abroad, especially in China.  Although our higher educational system is still the wonder of the world, it isn’t the only game in town.  And just because your government (or somebody else) pays your way into a foreign education doesn’t mean you have to come back.  As was the case with my prep school and college, today’s struggling institution is tomorrow’s powerhouse, and that goes for companies and countries as much as educational institutions.

    That last point brings me to focus on a subset of you: Christians.  You should face the facts: your country doesn’t want you any more.  They don’t want your values, they don’t want your lifestyle, and most of all they don’t want anyone who believes that there’s anything or anyone beyond them.  Your country?  That probably betrays a very Palm Beachy view that a country is defined by its people at the top.  Sad to say I’ve lived long enough to see that reality cross Lake Worth and become the driving force in society, a by-product (or the intention?) of a society where the money and the power is increasingly centralised.  You can dredge up anything you want from our history, but it doesn’t change the simple fact that the reality on the ground (or in the air between New York and Los Angeles) is not the same.

    Now American Christians have one serious block on the road to a new life elsewhere: they’ve come to equate a great Christian life with material prosperity.  Most American Christians associate leaving the country with mission work, and about the best the most can muster is short-term missions, much to the collective sigh of the long-timers.  But the New Testament makes a stark differentiation between what’s good in this world and what’s good with God.

    For those of you who are not called to emigration, one piece of advice: have an exit strategy for whatever life plan you have.  It’s the American way to have “Plan A” and kill yourself (or go to pieces) to make it happen without recourse to an alternative.  If there’s one place in life where you need to be unAmerican, it’s here.  Have a Plan B and be happy with the life God has given you.

    And that leads me to the second lesson from subversive books: someday we all will end, on the earth at least.  Really, I didn’t learn that from reading a book, but I did learn (with divine prompting) about the ultimate exit strategy.  The death rate is still one per person.  We’re told these days that advances in medicine will make perpetual bodily life a reality not so far into the future.  But if we look at the insanity which drives our world these days, we’ll most likely end up like Tolkien’s elves: given that eternity in the body, we’ll destroy ourselves with fruitless quests and internal divisions, to the point where death will become the “gift of men”.  Eternity is still what matters; don’t lose sight of it.

    Well, I’m sure your school administration is squirming in its seat at all of this, which is one reason why I don’t give these speeches live.  (Idea: if you want to give a theistic commencement speech in a public school setting, just put it on Facebook and tell everyone to go there.  Not only will you get your message across, but it will ruin the ceremony, as everyone will be cruising their mobile devices from there out.)  But as a person who is a product of both long term success in this world and the world to come, I weary of the “conventional wisdom of the unwashed”, even when they have standing in the new elite.  May God richly bless you now and always!

  • Elizabeth Warren Might Be a Redneck, Too

    This business about Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee heritage is getting out of hand:

    Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said today she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet other people with tribal roots.

    Living in what still is in many ways the land of Cherokees, to me her background and claim to Native American heritage isn’t that extraordinary.   It’s pretty much standard procedure for someone to claim Native American heritage no matter how few of the ancestors were Native Americans.  It’s certainly legitimate to claim it and obtain minority status for purposes of government benefits; I encourage people at my church who have Native American background of any kind (and in an East Tennessee Pentecostal church, that’s a large part of the congregation) to obtain any benefits the government might bestow upon them.  It’s only right, isn’t it?

    But Warren and her opponents have overlooked a crucial piece in the puzzle: if she has Cherokee background, there’s a good chance that she also has Scots-Irish background as well, since the two groups intermarried extensively in both Tennessee (where the Cherokees started) and Oklahoma (where they were forced to move.)  And that brings up the spectre of something that doesn’t sell well in the home of same sex civil marriage: that, underneath all of the education and success, that she just might be a redneck.

    We should check this out.  Does she have a trailer pulled up on a remote lot in Western Massachusetts?  Does she have a secret stash of grits?  Is one of the cars in her garage on blocks?  The people of Massachusetts have a right to know.

    It’s probably good, all things considered, that she’s running for the Senate in the Bay State rather than “back home” where her ancestors came from.  Her Scots-Irish relatives do many strange things, but there’s one thing that they’re not doing, and that’s voting Democrat.

  • Stating the Obvious

    Note the sign to the right.

    You think we need one like this for our fiscal condition?

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  • They Used to Put Posters Like This in the Dry Cleaners in the Soviet Union

    I have to admit it: I was amused when the poster at the right appeared on Drudge, who linked with this article, which likened Obama’s use of the “Forward” theme with its use in socialist/communist contexts.

    First: the slogan “Forward” does have strong roots in the history of communism.  Whether we will see iconography like that on the right to follow is another matter; what we’ll get will probably be less interesting.  What they’ll put out will be more high tech but the old communist propaganda poster is an art form of its own.

    Having travelled in both the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I saw a lot of propaganda, posters and otherwise.  It turned up in many places.  The most memorable experience came during my first visit to the Soviet Union.  We were staying in a hotel which attempted to exploit our surplus value with its high dry cleaning prices, so our agent decided to strike out in a cab to a local dry cleaner.  Sure enough, the walls were festooned with propaganda posters.  “Better Dry Cleaning Through Communism!” What a concept!

    There are still situations where a good propaganda poster would really do the trick.  I suggested that then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good propaganda poster for the People’s Republic of California, which got this reaction from a Virginia reader.  I’ve had fun with the slogans too, as was the case at the end of my piece Half a Million Roubles, Is It Enough? (which is more relevant for Mitt Romney than Barack Obama).

    But one thing’s for sure: a second Obama term will bring us closer both to the fifty square metre apartment and to the realisation that we have, in reality, been taken to the cleaners.  Forward!

  • Advice to Graduates: Past Performance is Not a Guarantee of Future Returns

    Advice to Graduates: Past Performance is Not a Guarantee of Future Returns

    It’s the time of the year when most people graduate from whatever school they’re graduating from.  This is a hypothetical graduation address, this week aimed a college students.  I’ll take on the high school students in a subsequent post.

    These days college–especially undergraduate studies–is a long, expensive undertaking, usually accomplished by a large amount of debt.  (Come to think of it, what in our society is accomplished without a large amount of debt?)  And yet, in spite of the long-term obligations that come with it, people continue to put a great deal of stock and effort in a college education.  Why is this?  Most of you know the answer: because jobs and careers opened up by a college education have a higher level of compensation than those that don’t, at least overall.  College seen in this way is an investment, and I’ll come back to the financial analogy.

    One thing I’ve noticed while walking the halls of Old Kudzu (“Old Ivy” is more appropriate for places Up North which are not appropriate to speak about here) is the “first in family” thing about college.  There’s a great deal of emphasis on those people who have broken the multigenerational custom of living and dying for a college athletic program without having stepped foot on campus except to head to the football stadium.  On the other hand, I come from a long line of “college men” whose main problem wasn’t going to college: it was getting to the place you’re at today, i.e., graduating.  Today that’s another obsession of our educational system.  We’re told that our graduation rates are too low, with the implication that those who don’t walk the stage don’t walk the golden path of success in life.  But somehow my ancestors were successful in spite of that fact.

    One that actually did make it to the end was my grandfather, Chester H. “Chet” Warrington, who graduated–after giving his parents much heartburn–from Lehigh in 1912.  He’s there on the right, before he actually made it through.

    Even though he graduated from the birthplace of Tau Beta Pi, engineering’s highest honour fraternity, he wasn’t much of a scholar.  There have been many changes in the whole meaning of a university education from his day to ours, and one of them is how much more competitive our system–in and out of academia–has become.  In those days college was largely the province of the well-heeled, and the “Gentlemen’s C” was not a dishonourable result.  (I would say that the “Gentlemen’s C” is still very much alive and well on campus today, in spite of the changes!)

    But we, as we do with just about everything, have pushed the whole business of academic achievement to the limit.  It’s surely frustrating to most academics that people who aren’t very good students actually have a successful life in this world, as my grandfather had.  It’s even more frustrating that, after all of the glow people put around academia, the money goes elsewhere.  So we’ve had a drumbeat, of late, of how important it is for people to have very high grades, and to correlate (at least in our minds) those high grades with success in life, and ultimately to try to rig the system so that those who do well in an academic setting will be afforded similar success afterwards.

    But life neither starts or ends on campus.  And sometimes the reality of life wedges its way onto campus.  A good example of that happened in one of my classes last year, and the life lesson it taught bears repeating.

    One of the courses I teach is Foundations.  First question some ask is “Foundations of What?” There are many “foundations” courses on campus to introduce students to a wide variety of subjects, but mine is the Foundations course par excellence: it concerns the design of foundations for real structures such buildings, bridges and the like.  This past year my students convinced me, for their design project, to enter the American Society of Civil Engineers MSE wall contest.  An “MSE” wall, for the uninitiate, is a Mechanically Stabilised Earth wall.  If you’ve driven down the interstate and seen newer walls flanking the roadway, usually with fancy decorations, you’ve probably seen an MSE wall.  The fancy decorations, however, have nothing to do with that: behind the front of an MSE wall is a network of grids and meshes by which the earth behind the wall actually helps to hold it up rather than just trying to push it down.

    In this competition, the students build a large wooden box with a removable face.  They then put an MSE wall entirely built of kraft paper and tape behind it and fill the box with sand.  Removing the face, the moment of truth comes when the wall either holds the sand in place, leaks a great deal of sand, or collapses with sand on the floor following.

    The class divides itself into two teams, using an electronic sign-up system.  When the team compositions were finalised, the “buzz” around the class was that one team was made up of the “smart” people and the other wasn’t.  I was unconvinced that it was that rigged; years in the private sector and engineering practice gave me the gut feeling that the outcome would not follow the conventional wisdom.

    It didn’t.  When the removable panel was in fact removed, both walls held, but the “smart” team had the scarier moment as their wall bulged and leaked considerably.  Conventional wisdom took another hit.  But the whole point of an educational system is to learn something, and there’s a good lesson here.

    There’s a great deal of emphasis on the value of intelligence these days.  It’s almost an obsession, really, and permeates our whole system, from child rearing to the educational system itself and ultimately to the credentialling system that marks the road to the top.  Raw intelligence, however, is only one piece of the puzzle.  That intelligence has to be properly applied to achieve the best results, and that application includes two things: an understanding of the environment in which you’re operating and the willingness to put the effort in to attain the goal.  Those two elements are frequently lacking, and I speak from experience: the lack of those two elements have led to many of the mistakes I have made in life.  Although there’s a great deal of talk about including “real life experiences” in an academic course, to be honest time constraints and the same lack of understanding in academics lead many such efforts to fall flat.

    Even with the political clout that our financial system has these days, it’s still necessary for those selling financial products to make this disclaimer (or one like it): “Past Performance is Not a Guarantee of Future Returns”.  I think that should be placed somewhere, or at least watermarked, on every diploma issued by institutions of higher education.  Those of you who have finished the course of study can be justifiably proud of what you have done.  But you and the society you live and move and have your being in need to understand that what you’ve done isn’t a guarantee that what you do subsequently will have the golden touch.  The society that believes that and promotes accordingly is itself heading for a fall.  It was the hard lesson that Ch’ing Dynasty China found out the hard way the century before last; we will follow suit if we do likewise, our fall being at the hand of the same Chinese (with others) who did learn the lesson.

    Graduation is a time of celebration, but, as the Latin root notes, it’s just another step in life.  The education doesn’t stop here, and by that I don’t mean the continuing education requirements that permeate our professional credentials.  Making the education work is the new task, and in many ways it’s as important–if not more important–than the first.

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