In terms of the debt ceiling issue in specific, I feel like this is sort of the Cuban Missile Crisis of my middle-aged life and you know what? At this point I almost just want them to get it over with and fire off the policy nukes. Just go ahead and wreck it all, because if we’ve come to the point where there’s a significant political faction with real social foundations that so thoroughly hates its fever-dream boogeyman vision of “government” that nothing else and no one else matters, we’re just going to be stuck right at a perpetual blockade line, a permanent schism. Taken in isolation from the larger story of the last two decades, this moment alone is completely WTF crazy. You have one side in a negotiation whose primary policy objective they’re pushing for is, “Not allowing an almost certain meltdown of the global financial system in the next six months” and the other side saying, “If you want to get your narrow-minded policy objective, the prevention of a major global catastrophe, you’re going to have to eliminate most of the federal government and re-establish the gold standard and maybe resign from office too if we decide to really stick it to you. Hey, that’s what bargaining is all about, you gotta give some to get what you want.” It’s as if the opposition had told FDR he’d have to make major political concessions before they’d allow him to declare war on Japan after Pearl Harbor.

However, one thing that the first-term House Republicans who are in some way or another tied to the Tea Party have gotten right and the entire Obama Administration and almost all Congressional Democrats have gotten wrong ever since the day after the 2008 election is that the point of political power is not to reproduce political power for its own sake. When people voted for change, what they wanted was a a government that was less about the eternal dance of patrons and clients and more about undertaking dramatic, sustained steps to fix what doesn’t work in American life, and doing that with some sustained larger vision about where we want to be going, what we want to aspire towards, rather than just a bunch of technocratic tinkering.

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At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell makes some valid criticisms of the writing of Matthew Yglesias along just these lines. And yet I’m not very satisfied with where Farrell (or others endorsing the critique) leave off. Farrell argues that Yglesias and other conventionally liberal political bloggers like him focus too much on the crafting and implementation of policy not merely because that’s the beat they cover but as if policy is the alpha and omega of what “politics” in any sense ought to be. Farrell properly observes that this approach is completely lacking any theory of politics, any explanatory sense of why envisioned policies get designed and implemented, are opposed or impeded, or are never even considered as possibilities by government officials and representatives.

There’s a very narrow space within which it is reasonable to argue in a fairly pure technocratic fashion about good and bad policy design and to reasonably hope that the better policy could be adopted and implemented. Basically this only makes sense within extremely detailed, lower-level bureaucratic contexts where there is relatively high internal consensus about administrative rules and general objectives and extremely low rivalrous attention from competing interests which will gain or lose depending on which policy is adopted. In short, almost nothing.

On the other hand, almost any leftward theory of politics, however sophisticated or inclusive of various branches of thought, has its own problems when it comes to thinking past the recognition that short-term and long-term political outcomes are determined by interests, processes, histories and subjectivities that begin and end well beyond the defined boundaries of formal governance. The issues accumulate fast and furious, and are painfully familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance of the intellectual history of the modern left. (Some of those issues haunt various lineages of conservative or libertarian thinking as well.)

If political struggle is just about competing interests, isn’t progressive or left politics just the expression of the interest of particular classes, institutions or constituencies? If so, what makes those interests any more righteous or deserving of victory if you’re not one of the beneficiaries? If progressives claim to be able to see beyond or outside of their own self-interest to see some longer-term general good, what allows them to do so? If progressives can do that because of some analytic framework, can individuals with competing interests use the same framework and be persuaded of the ultimate rationality or accuracy of the analysis in the long-term? Or would good outcomes be those that favor the self-interest of progressives plus some finite set of non-progressives while also well and truly absolutely hurting some other social constituency at all time scales? Do you have to be an altruist to get beyond outcomes based on self-interest?

What actually leads to either short-term or long-term victories in political struggle? Just more resources and power? If so, what’s the point of even trying if you’re less endowed? Why isn’t political success endlessly and perfectly accumulative? Every round of political victory should lead to an even greater and more unassailable alignment of power behind a particular set of interests. By implication, it should also be profoundly unimportant to ever talk about or debate political outcomes: just count heads, money and resources which are interested in differing outcomes and see who wins, like slapping two cards down in a game of War.

Do constituencies, classes and institutions ever misperceive their short-term or long-term interests? Make mistakes? Equally, are some political outcomes the consequence of systemic interactions that no human being or human institution will ever be able to accurately predict or anticipate?

I could go on in this vein. There are library shelves groaning with two centuries worth of sophisticated writing about these problems and their numerous corollaries, but at this point in my life, I don’t find that corpus terribly helpful either for understanding political outcomes (past and present) or for answering my questions about what we’re supposed to at least try to do now, if there’s anything in fact to be done.

The more strenuously one insists that bad political outcomes are driven by social and institutional interests seeking to benefit at the cost of all other interests, with a clear rational understanding of the fit between the policies they demand and the outcomes they seek, the starker and potentially more hopeless the question of politics becomes unless by some chance there’s a nearly even distribution of competing interests or you’re in the camp of people who have superior resources. The Crooked Timber thread I’ve referenced here has a lot of commenters who observe that at some point, the job of politics is to forcibly punch through or otherwise overcome some oligarchic or dominant interests that prevent good policies or governance from happening. This sounds good as a way to rouse the crowd and sneer at the wonkish neoliberals, but try to take it past that rhetorical point and a lot of extremely rivalrous visions of praxis, with varying degrees of improbability and/or undesirability, start crowding into the room. Fight the power, smash the state, wait for the Multitude to get busy, build an anarcho-syndicalist commune: much of it doesn’t seem, as Yglesias observes in that thread, to amount to a terribly specific alternative to fiddling around with deferred tax credits for LEED-certified merino-sheep shearing in designated small-agribusiness zones.

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This is the first time in a while that I’ve even tried venturing back into these kinds of discussions. There’s something about them that is not just emotionally distressing to me but seems so much to exemplify the dire and hopeless situation of the political present. On a visceral level, I really just do not want to be stuck in this kind of conversation, the kind where we’re debating who is a bad person for moving rightward or who isn’t a serious thinker or which particular text offers the proper critical framework for constructing a new crisis theory of capitalism.

My own answers to many of those long-standing questions are only partly derived at this point from my work as a scholar and intellectual, and are less and less appropriate to the norms of scholarly or intellectual discourse the older I get. I think individuals, institutions, communities don’t always or even often just defend their particular self-interest. I don’t think they often accurately understand or clearly express their interests, any more than I believe human psychology or agency is well-described by the sketch version known as homo economicus. I think political agency, whether expressed narrowly in the drafting of policy or broadly in the mobilization of resources and constituencies, frequently leads to unanticipated or surprising consequences, some unexpectedly good for almost everyone and others terrifyingly destructive even to the agents who initiated a particular course of action. I think it’s intellectually possible and morally desirable to understand people unlike yourself, even people whose aspirations and worldview are genuinely antagonistic to your own. I think totalizing ideologies and totalizing social philosophies are intrinsically ill-suited to explain the human past or set a course for the human future. I think language isn’t just a framing device or an instrumental apparatus for the production of consciousness and subjectivity. I think every imagined alternative to liberalism and modernity ends up reinstating both of them under the table as well as using both of them to generate complaints about their shortcomings.

Hang on. Let’s try again. Here’s what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call “good enough”. I don’t want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my name in lights, have the penthouse apartment on the East Side. I don’t want to write out a lengthy policy manifesto on what American foreign policy towards 21st Century African states should be and then spend the next ten years taking meetings and writing op-eds to push my plan. I just want to do a good job as a teacher and a colleague and a father and a husband and a person. I want to earn a good living and enjoy what pleasures come my way without scheming every day for a better living and pleasures I can never have on what I earn now.

I don’t want to care very much about whether one particular implementation of TARP or another is better. I don’t want to insist that my kid’s teachers and school need to follow my exact pedagogical preferences. I don’t want to bring a court case because this one time somebody had my kid be part of a moment of silence before a fifth-grade class. I don’t want to regard myself as endlessly called upon to personally participate in the righting of every wrong I can see, understand or know about. I want to flip Marx around and get to the point where most of the time, the point of thinking and talking and writing is not to change the world but just interpret it and enjoy the interpretations of others.

Flip it. I don’t want anybody telling me what the fuck to do in my house. I don’t want my kid’s pediatrician who I otherwise like to quote me media effects research that I know a great deal about and regard with skepticism and make my daughter recite the appropriate catechism in order to get out of the annual exam without a lecture. I don’t want the guy down the street and his co-religionists to start relentlessly lobbying the school board to remove references to evolution from high school biology class. I want fellow professionals who push constantly for ever-more insane levels of meritocratic pressure to be structurally and culturally inflicted on our kids (or on my students at Swarthmore) to just cool it in public, if they have to be tiger moms and dads, to keep that as private as they would if their sex lives involved razor play and urinating on each other. I want to accept and marvel at human resiliency rather than build an endless managerial and supervisory apparatus for preemptively protecting every potentially vulnerable person from every potential kind of trespass or offense. I want rules and strictures to be a last resort rather than a leading preference.

In short, my political aspirations at this point could be summed up pretty well by Jon Stewart’s plea to just chill the fuck out, America, take the temperature down. Do reasonable things. Appreciate the genuinely tough questions in life and politics for what they are, and appreciate the different answers that people come up with to those questions. I think there is, if not a “moral majority”, a decent majority, a mellowable majority, who pretty much also just want life to be good enough.

A politics of “good enough” is not Obama’s politics. I don’t think there’s been a President in my life who more thoroughly represented a relentlessly meritocratic ethos and social constituency. He might be able to handle the chill out part, though, which the Republican Party and their loyalists absolutely and viscerally reject. But “good enough” and “chill out” are not particularly a big part of the discursive culture of online discussion either, and not particularly a common sentiment in the sociocultural world of professionals, academic or otherwise. So it is not just our leaders who would need to represent a mellower and more mature majority, but at least some of us who would need to tweak habits and practices, spend less time vigilantly patrolling the walls of our sometimes vanishingly small redoubts and more time hosting an open house.

There will still be plenty of unacceptable shit to be outraged by, plenty of things to care passionately about, plenty of good work for good people to undertake as well as plenty of barricades which must at all costs be manned.

What I did want to think about was the pedagogical justification for the “cold call”, for picking a student at random and asking them to produce an answer or comment about the material that the class is working on. It’s really not something I do in my own classroom, but I know colleagues who do it at times or do it a good deal. I can think of two major arguments for this technique. The first is competency-based: that there will be contexts outside the classroom in which students will have to produce relevant answers to direct queries quickly and accurately, so it’s best to give them practice at doing so inside the classroom. The second is the instrumental use of humiliation as a motivational tool, that a student who is not doing the work needs to be publically shamed in some fashion.

The first argument makes some degree of sense to me, but on the other hand, I’m not clear that cold-calling is the best way to practice or learn how to give rapid, accurate answers to public queries. When I’m teaching to a skill that I think is something that is called for in professional or civic contexts where I don’t entirely agree with the manner in which it is called for in some of those contexts, I try to make that clear, so that the skill itself is something open to active questioning or consideration by students. More importantly, whether I’m happy with the instrumental framing of a particular competency or not, I try to make sure that we get to it in stages, that I consciously deconstruct everything that’s involved in a single demonstration or enaction of that skill. I’d try to do some of that explanation whether I was working with elementary school children or college students. This is part of how you persuade students that they need to do something that they may find unpleasant or unfamiliar. A persuaded student sticks with the task a lot longer than a commanded student.

The second argument? I concede that in some cases it might work in some narrow sense of that word. Being humiliated unquestionably motivates a lot of human action and feeling. You don’t forget that experience in a hurry. Neither, however, do you easily forgive it, even when the person doing it to you seemed to genuinely have your best interest in mind. People who’ve been publically shamed or humiliated do not reliably change their behavior so as not to be ashamed: it’s just as common for them to form a more abiding hatred of their tormentor and his or her purposes, or to adopt more tenacious habits of avoidance. If purposefully making a student feel ashamed is ever a legitimate pedagogical tool, I think it’s the equivalent of breaking the glass on a fire alarm: done only when the only alternative is to let a building burn down.

The really tricky thing is the intersection between the first objective and the second. I can’t anticipate every possible emotional reaction to a teaching technique or strategy that I commonly use and see as effective or necessary. I’ve been surprised in the past by hearing from a student that some approach I thought was fairly ordinary made them feel excited or passionate or alienated or unhappy. I can’t try accommodate every possible temperament or background or I will end up teaching to none of them. I do think I can make a good guess when a strategy has a higher chance of disturbing or confusing some relatively common subset of my students, and that’s when I have to make a pretty smart call about whether the upside justifies the risk.

In my own professional vision, I’d put cold calling very high up on the list of “probably not worth it”: skills of rapid, accurate response to public queries can be built up (and put to the test) in other ways. The risks–particularly in this case to elementary-age girls and their engagement with mathematics–seem very high. Most people don’t develop a motivation to do something independently, with passion, that they associate with emotional pain and embarassment.

1) We teach on the MLK holiday, but I had time to take my no-school-that-day daughter out to lunch. We ended up talking about a bunch of things, but at one point she decided that she needed to know about the entire continuity of the character of Green Lantern. I attempted to escape the subject at several points, but she was fairly implacable. Somewhere around “and then it was revealed that Parallax was actually a yellow fear demon and Hal Jordan came back to life”, I was getting some pretty serious wtf glances from other diners.

2) My daughter’s birthday parties each year revolve around a theme that she selects, and I usually end up playing a character relevant to the theme. This year is Greek mythology, so I’ve decided to be Fredalus, Daedalus’ obscure and not very successful cousin.

The interesting thing to me about the interest in mythology is that it wasn’t really sparked by the Percy Jackson books: those followed on rather than preceded her engagement with the myths. She found them the way that I did, by reading the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths well before the film of the first Percy Jackson book came out. What’s especially interesting is that there’s a lot of general interest in Greek mythology among children that we know and her cousins as well, and at least some of the other kids we know took the same path to getting interested in the subject.

This is another one of those cases of cyclical cultural themes where a complex-systems approach is very helpful as an interpretative tool, partly because it helps defer some of the tendency to overread the intentional or instrumental meaning of this kind of recurrence (of the sort that I think WJT Mitchell slides into at times in The Last Dinosaur Book).

There’s certainly an “interested” historical explanation for why classical Greek literature and culture have remained in circulation within a Western society which has self-consciously defined the West as derived from Greco-Roman precedents, but the lightly sanitized (although the D’Aulaires version delightfully keeps some of the edgier elements in view) simplified apparatus of Greek mythology has some of the same root-level attractions as dinosaurs, Pokemon, Harry Potter, superhero comics or Star Wars. The individual stories tie into a comprehensively imagined and interconnected world and effectively teach children how to master two important kinds of systematic knowledge: taxonomy and intertextuality. That mastery then yields social rewards in relationship to other children who’ve also taken an interest in that cultural system. The D’Aulaires’ approach encourages a reader to learn the names of gods, demigods, heroes and kings, and to understand how different types or taxa interrelate within those stories. They also encourage young readers to not only relate the stories as they tell them but to relate their telling of stories to other tellings of the same stories by different authors and from different times.

I think these kinds of mythoi have some of the same “procedural” learning involved that you see in certain digital games and media: they not only teach content but they teach a mode of learning content at the same time, in autodidactical combination.

All of which is a TL;DR way of saying that I’m happy to be Fredalus supervising a “cut the head off the Medusa” version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevin/58910501/sizes/m/in/photostream/

I don’t have much to add to some of the common criticisms of Chua’s arguments about parenting, like her vaguely creepy racial mapping of parenting as cultural destiny.

Still, let me see if I can add one distinctive note to the public debate of the last week. If I have any professional weight to throw around here, it’s as someone who teaches in a highly selective institution of higher education that might be one of the destinations that “tiger moms” would aim their children towards.

I’d say yes, I do see some tiger children from time to time here, particularly among science majors. Some of Chua’s critics claim that children subjected to her kind of parenting habitually self-destruct the moment they’re out of reach of their controller. Anecdotally, I don’t really see that pattern. Sure, I can think of cases that seem to fit, but I can equally think of cases of young adults who were driven very hard by uncompromising parents who pretty much accept and embrace that vision when it comes time for them to fly out of the nest, and who pass it on to their children in turn. I’ve also seen more than a few “bear children” go from being gentle, omnivorous wanderers to being totally lost souls whose downward mobility is as precipitous as a waterfall.

Where Chua is just frankly wrong is the proposition that bear children don’t “win prizes”, that tiger children are set for life, that they win and dominate. She’s wrong empirically: I frequently meet people who are at the top of their respective professions or situations who were raised in every way the opposite of Chua’s children. And she’s wrong morally: life is not an instrumental prize that you secure permanently and unambiguously at some magical point in your adulthood, nor should it be. Look what happened to some people who were by the consensus of their peers “winners” as they headed into their 20s. Look at how some of Wall Street’s winners shat the collective bed recently.

If I have seen a pattern, among my students and my parental peers alike, it’s that parents who try to be someone that they’re not, pursuing a parenting style that doesn’t come from their own life experience, are the ones who will create the most psychic havoc for their children and for themselves. That’s the really pernicious thing about figures like Chua, or indeed most folks who try to sell a complete parenting philosophy to an anxious middle-class public, whatever the recipe they’re peddling. Parents who are trying too hard to do what bourgeois consensus views as the right thing, who are too sensitive to the glances and petty remarks around the edges of a PTO meeting, who peer surreptitiously around the living room of neighbors to spy out their domestic rituals (half to ensure the conformity of the neighbors, half to assure the spy of his or her own conformity): those are the people whose kids are much more likely to massively disavow what they’ve been pushed or required to do, or to angrily lament the lack of earlier pushing or prodding by their permissive parents. More to the point, those are the kind of parents who inhabit the work of novelists writing about the domestic discontents of bourgeois families, who try too hard to perform an inauthentic self for too long and then one day skate out onto thin ice and fall right through.

I would never tell a tiger mom to be a bear. Of course, that’s a very bear dad thing to say, the essence of the whole-of-the-parenting-law-is-do-as-thou-wilt. I’m not saying that I don’t have opinions and advice about the parenting (and children) of others, but for me that’s a very intimate, complicated feeling. I wouldn’t presume to tell a stranger how to do it right, other than to say that it’s a mistake to do something because other people say to do it.

Unfortunately, middle-class life is perhaps of necessity a nervous condition built on a desperate quest for social distinction: always aspiring, never achieved. Inasmuch as Americans continue to maintain their collective belief that everyone in the United States is middle-class, that American identity is always aspiration, maybe they can never get to a point of accepting that an individual philosophy of parenting should grow naturally from the cultural soil of every individual life and come to rest at that point.

Chua and anyone else trying to sell parenting to anxiety-ridden people might learn a lesson from Ann Hulbert’s intellectual and social history of parenting advice. The main lesson would be humility: this has happened before and it (unfortunately) is likely to happen again. When Chua says that “permissive parenting” is a new thing, she’s just flat out wrong. But then every advicemonger says the same thing each time: they have come to restore some past wisdom from some present trend towards degeneration.

I suppose that’s why I don’t just tend to my own flock and let things happen as they ought to: the history of advice to parents is a long series of families knocked out of joint, separated from their common sense and practical wisdom, and worse yet, sometimes pulling the culture as a whole along for the ride.

For us, that was morning soccer, a Halloween parade and then a Halloween party for kids that my daughter co-organized. All of those things I take to contain the same message that Stewart’s rally does: we’re all in this together. On the sidelines of the parade, it seems ridiculous to think that there are people running to represent the people of this county, this state, this country, who think that many of us who are in that crowd aren’t real Americans, that we don’t count, that they’re not obligated to consider us in the hunt for votes.

Which, by the way, is why I think Halloween is the most amazing accomplishment of modern American culture. For me there’s no clearer way to discover that somebody just doesn’t get it, whether it’s an overly precious K-12 private school banning costumes that derive from popular culture or from problematic history (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not) or some zealot screeching about how Halloween is an endorsement of paganism.

Halloween is pure rocket-fueled awesomeness in every respect: costumes, candy, spookiness, bacchanalia, you name it. Being against Halloween or wanting to censor it into inoffensive oblivion is worse than being against Mom and apple pie.

Working with fresh vegetables from the garden helps me put general foodie preoccupations in perspective. This New York Times piece on expensive boutique ice cream raises the question of when it makes sense to prefer local or high-end foods and when it doesn’t. I like locavores and slow-food advocates because the consequences of their advocacy is often very good food. But the more religious versions of both turn me off. I don’t think it’s at all clear that eating local is always a net plus in environmental terms, for example. I know it’s not always a net plus in terms of taste or quality. There’s nothing better than heirloom tomatoes from your own garden, but plenty of things that I have grown over the last decade aren’t measurably better-tasting for having come from my own yard. When I find that’s the case, I stop growing them. (I also stop growing them when it turns out that the local varmints can’t keep their paws and beaks off of them.) The mainstays are tomatoes, beans and greens, all of which seem better to me grown right here.

In terms of local foods, cheese and dairy can often be superior, but that’s often because of the way the dairy is run or the skill with which the cheese is made, not because it’s local. Local meats can be better, but that’s generally the case only if there’s something different about the conditions under which it is kept or the breed quality (especially with heirloom breeds). Eggs are different: a freshly-laid egg is a thing of wonder. Local produce is better if it’s something where spoilage is a factor over longer distances or if it’s a fruit or vegetable where mass production has totally destroyed flavor in favor of standardization and shippability (tomatoes or apples). And all of this applies if you’ve got the money to pay for distinctiveness: none of these locavore preferences scales at all well to mass production. I was down at the Italian Market in Philadelphia earlier this week, and honestly, in some cases, I don’t see that the produce or meat there outdoes a good-quality supermarket, except that you can get more cuts and things like tripe from the butchers there.

All of this goes double or triple for prepared or manufactured foodstuffs. There are mainstream brands that I think are superior to up-market organics, and in some cases better than what you might make yourself. I can make corn tortillas from scratch and then cut them up and fry them, but honestly, there are a number of brands of tortilla chips that would outdo anything I can do at a cheaper price, without the labor. Good food is good food: it can come from a factory or from the little old lady next door, from a big farm or from a garden.

This turned out to be a trip-saving move as a huge thunderstorm rolled over the camp that night, dropping what seemed like an inch or so of rain during the evening. Our tent is pretty watertight and I’d pitched it so that the water flow under it kept anything from pooling, but we still had quite a bit of water inside. I’d thought to put everything up on our chairs, so only a few towels and whatnot got soaked. Most of the camp cleared out that morning, as it seemed most people had everything get soaked.

Then I agreed to go whale-watching with my daughter. I’ve never been seasick before, but it’s been a while since I was on a boat. For some reason this particular voyage really got to me at both ends of my digestive system, and it was well over a day before I felt halfway human again.

And then it rained heavily again. But we did have some great hikes and several totally beautiful days. Plus this year I found some decent campwood, which made cooking over the fire a much more relaxing experience.

It’s a densely historical and layered vision, and it’s more than just a weapon in a long-running culture war. The suburbs didn’t happen by accident and they aren’t a pure expression of the natural market desires of postwar Americans. But they aren’t the spiritually and culturally vacated wasteland of The Ice Storm or American Beauty, either. Or maybe that’s just what the Fred Flintstones and Harry Angstroms think when they look about, mere heartbeats before thwarted desire or disease or failure come for a visit?

So at least I suppose those who write fiction from the peak of Mount Olympus may think when they gaze down on the tract-house mortals in their folly. But Saint Steven of the Extra-Terrestrial is there to bless the Big Wheels and Habitrails of yesteryear, so all may be well.

Me? I dunno, my cup doesn’t quite runneth over, but it’s pretty full. Yesterday, before the rains fell, I prowled around my little half-acre world and was happy.

And hey, the bench I’ve been working on is coming along pretty well.

It didn’t quite work out like that. It ended up being the first time I’d ever been admitted to a hospital. I learned some interesting new things. Among them, if an overweight man in his forties walks in at 9 p.m. with severe localized pain in the lower right abdomen, they get moved fast through the system. I actually waited to put in my name until a teenager who thought her wrist was broken (it turned out to be sprained) got her name in, figuring I wasn’t as urgent, but as soon as the desk nurse saw my description of what I’d come for, they whisked me in to the back. It didn’t turn out to be what they expected, which was a kidney stone or appendicitis. Instead, it was mild acute diverticulitis, an inflammation of intestines.

Don’t worry, everything’s cool now. Two days of IV antibiotics, a longer course of oral antibiotics and some advice about dietary changes (farewell to thee, o sesame seed…though I already forgot about that once, as I looked down in horror on a sesame seed roll that was already 3/4 on its way to my intestine).

Anyway, one of the things I kept thinking about during the experience was a familiar theme for me, which is the ongoing problem of the professions. Academia and medicine, it seems to me, share some similar problems. Academia’s issues I see from the professional’s side, medicine’s problems from the perspective of the clientele. The first perspective tends to put me in the position of an apologist, the second as accuser. Maybe between the two some kind of insight is possible, though when I add it all up, I’m left with the sense that many modern professions are simultaneously indispensible, a highwater mark of social progress and hopelessly screwed up in ways that can’t really be fixed by outsiders or insiders.

If lying on a hospital bed at three in the morning waiting for some kind of solution to wend its way into your lower intestiine so you can be run through a scanner while an IV bag is dumping fluids into your flesh via a needle in your hand has an upside, it was the charming doctor in the ER who turned out to be very interested in African history. (She asked: I didn’t volunteer.) It wasn’t just that this gave me a welcome distraction. It was more that this made me feel like a person rather than a slab of meat or a naughty child brought in for punishment and a stern talking-to. Other doctors have made me feel otherwise in the past, and this is one reason that I’m getting ready with some resignation to hunt for another primary care physician.

I know my own psychology well enough to know what kind of relationship I expect to have with a doctor, to know my own pattern of expectations and my own tendency to just avoid or evade professionals who violate those expectations. I want someone who treats me as something of a social peer while also being a professional who has skills and competencies very different than mine. Frankly, I want my pediatrician, who knew me really well but was also someone I trusted and allowed to cajole or criticize me as a teenager.

I can see this from the other side as well. Not all professors can be all things to all students. As I finish up my grading for this semester, I’m very conscious of the fact that there are students who don’t flourish under my laissez-faire policy of treating everyone in my classes as a presumptive grown-up, capable of deciding for themselves whether it’s worth investing time or effort in my class. Some students need a drill sergeant or a surrogate parent or a big brother or a boss. I can’t do that. I wouldn’t expect every doctor, in the same sense, to be able to malleably be the person that I need while also being the person that some other patient needs.

The problem in part is that it’s hard to figure out where the professional and personal character of doctors or professors ends and their institutional systems begins. Should I tell my primary care physician that I don’t like the peremptory on-the-clock office visits? That I don’t know whether to trust her scheduling me for tests or her prescription of medicines when she doesn’t really bother to explain to me what she’s thinking with either, or present me the alternatives? What if she tells me that’s just the way the system works at this point, that no one is going to give me anything other than that? I could sound like a student complaining about being in an introductory lecture-based course with four hundred other students at a state university where the professor is reading in a monotone from presentations prepared fifteen years ago and my only direct contact is with a bored teaching assistant. That’s the way the railroad runs. You can switch a small liberal-arts college, but you have to get in and you have to have the money. Or maybe you’re an even touchier subject: there are students who do spectacularly well only under very specific institutional regimes even at small liberal-arts colleges, or who can only connect with some very specific kind of pedagogy, and who knows where that is out there in the world?

As a client, I don’t even know any longer what a reasonable expectation about my medical care might be, or how fussy and particular a patient I really am. I don’t know whether my medical future primarily ought to be imagined as a case of enduring what I have to endure and avoiding the worst-case scenarios or whether the right set of professionals could deal with the puzzle that is me in some way that I can’t myself deal with. That’s what both therapeutic and educational professionals promise, after all: they will do something for you which you cannot by definition do for yourself. That’s what all the hubbub of assessment and outcomes-tracking is about: are the professions adding value? And are they adding value commensurate with the tolls (financial and otherwise) they impose on their clientele and their societies?

I think so too. I’ve pointed out before that this is one positive way to think about the end of a world where children roamed freely on their own adventures through suburban wildernesses, that maybe we’re transitioning to a desirable middle-class world where families adventure together, where the world of children and adults is less culturally and socially separate than it once was.

On the other hand, I keep thinking that there’s more to it than the emotional satisfaction that some parents of my generation have found in the company of their children, and not just the conventional issue of whether we’re smothering our kids with too much control or attention.

I wonder if part of what’s happening with middle-class to upper middle-class families and time is also conditioned by the rising difficulty of reproducing social class in the United States.

I’m going to be somewhat simplistic here just to try and get the point across. Crudely speaking, you could argue that in the 1950s that the middle distribution of income was not just far larger and the ends of the spectrum drawn in closer towards that middle, but that the American middle-class imagined that it had hit upon a fairly stable formula for its own reproduction. Namely, a relatively minimalist range of signpost practices defining middle-class respectability that could be passed on to the next generation along with expanded access to a high-quality education system that included professional training at its culmination. Put the two together and you had a system for social mobility that could be imagined both as egalitarian and meritocratic, accessible to many, securely reproducible, but not a guaranteed and accumulating legacy.

The cultural signposts were defined and then demolished within the span of a single generation: Jell-O, Levittown, Leave It to Beaver, the Brady Bunch went from being idealizations to hateful conformities to ironic ridiculousness fairly quickly from 1965 to 1985. Income equity went roughly the same way, at the same pace, and higher education, while still a passport, controlled entry to an increasingly murky and complex world of economic and social advancement.

That 1950s middle-class could split the world of children and adults as radically as it did for two reasons. First, because a working patriarch could actually hope to accumulate enough in his own life to leave an inheritance for children that would help insure the reproduction of the status that he’d achieved, both indirectly through education and directly through property and money passed to the next generation. Second, because women in the home and social institutions like school could do the work of middle-class cultural reproduction in a relatively minimalist fashion, on a kind of assembly-line. You didn’t have to worry too much about a child’s interior experience of schooling and childhood if the outer signs of respectability were successfully monitored and secured.

So what I wonder a bit is if the insecurity of middle-class life and the uncertainties of reproducing it in the next generation is producing a much more intense focus on generating a flexible, responsive kind of cultural capital in the children of professionals. Jell-O, church attendance, and the pinewood derby for Cub Scouts doesn’t secure anything any longer. Nor in any simple sense does education by and of itself. So families draw together in part to cultivate the self, to create exposure to a wide range of stimulating experiences which are nevertheless selected for their potential for cultural capital creation. Music lessons, language lessons, access to computer and digital tools, constructivist toys and games, travel selected for enrichment potential rather than ’empty’ leisure, parentally-accompanied museum visits and so on. Schools do many of these activities as well, but many professional parents increasingly distrust the capacity of schools to properly enrich their children unless the school is somehow distinctively individualized in its approach to enrichment. Because, in part, the cultural capital that creates some sense of distinction in a new entrant to middle-class life is that which is intensely individualized.

This is an issue that Michele Lamont touches on in How Professors Think, but it’s a point that extends across most of the professions. The job candidate or aspiring professional or competitor for funding who stands out is often the person who appears the most individually distinctive while also locking down all the visible or apparent baseline benchmarks of credentialing and competency. That’s the person who gets tagged as having “quality of mind”. That’s what applicants to selective colleges try to accomplish as well, to assure admissions officers that they have excelled at all the standard expectations and that they are unique and special individuals. The unique and special part often comes straight from the kinds of cultural capital that a particular household has worked to cultivate in all members of the family, and that work involves drawing closer together, sharing experiences while also controlling or directing them with some vaguely productivist, self-improving ethos in mind.