The New York Sophist

I must remind myself that education and learning is practicing something. We don’t have the convenient reminders like doctors and dentists do, that they work in or at a practice; that they own a “medical practice” and “practice medicine.” I think we “practice education” but we don’t have the reminder all the time that we are doing well at the thing by trying to do it at our best level.

Practice goes deeper than preparation. In Buddhism, practice is the thing. There’s a famous story about the Zen center in New York that people would arrive and the master would sit them down and say “we’ll get started soon.” Then everyone was just sitting. They were doing the thing they were waiting to do, unaware of it. This was somehow the perfect kind of practice – not concentrating, not thinking about it too much, and letting your mind go and think and imagine what is coming. Seems like good Zen practice to me.

Practicing something is being in it and doing it, practicing it not to prepare for the real thing, but practicing it because we care for it and we want it to be good all the time, every time. Practice is something that is done to improve or get better right now. Certainly not for when it “really matters.” This is a big mistake that a lot of well-meaning teachers make. We have the following well-meaning but horrible trope:

“In the real world, this work/behavior will not be accepted by your boss or employer”

I hear this one a lot. I think this is lazy. This is a fear appeal, that whatever practices are going on in the classroom are permissible to a degree, but not the degree that you are preparing for in the world. In other words, your behavior would be rejected in a situation that really mattered, where the stakes were high (translation: the classroom doesn’t matter; low-stakes). The teacher pins their authority on the questionable one of the forced labor market of capital and the idea that they are saving the student from a material punishment in the future.

Another related one is that the student “disrespects” the instructor through their lateness or poor work. I don’t understand this one either. Why are instructors in the immediate position of deserving respect straight away? A more equitable relationship is one where respect is the finishing place not the starting place of the teaching relationship.

These two examples misunderstand the role of practice. What are you practicing? How to be yourself. This requires intense attention daily. When you are reading you are practicing being yourself reading; when in class, you are practicing that. You are practicing speaking when you share your thoughts; you are sharing yourself, you are practicing how to be in the world with others.

This doesn’t mean that what happens in class is less than or somehow not high-stakes, it’s the highest stakes as it is the real world. No distinction. Whatever happens in a classroom is as real as it gets. The students and instructor have to face it together and account for it. There’s no game or fakeness. It’s the real deal, it’s the same practice you will do for the rest of your life out there without a classroom to “protect” you or a school to make sure you don’t mess up.

Practicing practice is the focus of education and what higher education should really be thinking about right now. How do we encourage serious practice of our practice? Are there multiple practices? How do we engage them and make sure the practices are good? How do we sustain the focus and attention on our practice of thought, writing, speaking, and reading? This isn’t just up to each individual; this is a community effort and at the same time is and becomes the practice of community.

The ICC indictment against Netanyahu is getting a lot of attention in the media as being out of line. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham has said that if an ally arrests him, the United States will tank their economy. Joe Biden has said the charge is “outrageous.” But what other method or manner should be used to investigate whether a head of state with a powerful military has violated the rights that all humans should enjoy by default?

It’s clear that powerful world leaders are not a good source for evaluating this on face. They have a narrow goal of self-preservation, often couched in the rhetoric of the nation-state. The state must defend itself not only territorially, which is obvious, but also symbolically – the permanence and obviousness of borders is best conveyed through material violence. The state has no other tools other than slaughter to convince others that their borders are real.

There are times when border defense via weapons is necessary but these times should be rare. The further you live from a border the more real it seems. The closer you get, the more it seems to be somewhere else. You are never quite there. Sometimes we have to put big signs and facilities on borders to make sure people don’t mistake where they are.

The symbolic necessity of a hard border in the logic of the nation-state means that leaders of nation-states will defer to going hard on defending them – including violating other borders and territorial integrity, invasion, and other such actions that one would see at a pre-school such as breaking your stuff because you broke mine; knocking over your brick tower because you didn’t like mine, etc.

The suffering people on and around the border and the state or organization that has been determined to be at fault pay the price. The ICC makes sure that the state’s actions do not violate the rights of those who happen to be close to these borders, or in a geographically inconvenient spot. The ICC is the agreement that the governments of the world should step back and check one another to determine if state reaction to the flimsiness of borders goes too hard or too devastating on the physical lives and practiced rights of the people who happen to be in the area chosen for this demonstration of force.

The ICC seems like the perfect place to this rhetorician to stand and defend one’s actions. It seems like the best forum we have of this writing to make the argument that the nation-state has no alternative but material destruction and casualty when there is an existential threat to the state. The ICC prosecutor has the burden to argue when and where that line exists: That the defense of the nation-state has limits that should be respected and enforced in order to secure the fundamental rights of the people of the world. This discourse would be incredible to have access to in order to help people have conversations with one another about military reaction to violation of state sovereignty, and why violating peoples’ right to life or right to safe passage, might not be a valid way of re-establishing the symbolic certainty that “borders make the state” (to the tune of the clothes make the man).

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think stepping back and having the arguments articulated as to why such destruction is not only appropriate, but necessary, or perhaps the only option available versus the arguments that this kind of state action is illegitimate because of the cost on human rights, life, etc as well as the interesting argument that perhaps it further de-legitimizes the state in ways that it can’t recover (a very cynical reason to sign on to the Rome Statute, but I would think some governments had this conversation in their parliament or perhaps behind closed doors) is essential for us to figure out not just who to vote for or what policy to protest against, but the very nature and role of things like voting and protest in our world that we increasingly feel as more real and simultaneously deeply, deeply symbolic.

Finding some pretty striking and pretty sad draft posts in my Google Drive, which honestly I haven’t looked at in many years. I started using OneDrive and Word exclusively a while ago and cleaned out my Google Drive to save money. I put everything on my NAS and deleted it from Drive except for the Google Docs. Those don’t take up any space, and there were about 1200 of them. So I figured I would just let them sit there until – well, probably forever. I saw no need to really mess around with them.

Now My NAS is getting older and I need to make a backup and put it somewhere else. Backups are tough. Without backups though you get no archive. And when I start to make a backup, I become an archivist. I have to decide what is worth keeping and what gets tossed. It’s costly to archive every single document and file you have on every computer. My NAS has a functional 16TB of space with 7.5 of it used. We’ll have to get bigger one day but at that point, I’ll just buy a new NAS unit with more drive bays. Restoring 16TB of data should be made as easy as possible. So I’ve been curating.

I’ve thinned out the backup as much as possible but in so doing found some drafts of things that I can’t believe I wrote – they seem too good for me from 11 years ago. I found some very sad, very angry things too – all of which I think I’ll post on here. They are worth sharing even though they strike me as not my own.

Years ago I did some archival research at the University of Maryland and met a great archivist there who was too busy to really spend time with me although he helped me a lot in preparing my visit. On my last day there we met and he apologized for being so busy – he had just been dropped into (or had dropped on him) boxes of Spiro Agnew’s archival material. Most of which was socks and gifts of geographically-themed ashtrays. This seems like garbage to me, but the rubric of the archivist says: Who are we to decide what future scholars should have access to? What becomes important in the future? What should we keep for them if not everything? It’s a tough thing to try to guess about future significance.

For me I’m glad I have a lot of backups. You can see on this “new” blogsite I have thousands of posts restored from frequent backups from all my old blogs, including the one from 2007 where I’m speculating about what it will be like to work at St. John’s. That positivity aged like milk, but it’s still nice to see it there. Is this an archive of ideas, and have I saved too much?

It’s late here and everyone is in bed, but I can hear my NAS uploading the backup to the cloud server.

Been pretty down and out about teaching, my work, my job, etc. But this week things look to turn around. I have two pretty good opportunities that are coming together this week so I just have to figure out what I’d like to be doin. As a friend said, it’s time to take a look at what you want the back 9 to look like. A great way to think about it.

Also got some feedback that online students really love the course and apparently praise it, so that’s good. I think that there are a lot of fraught things about teaching online. Most of them don’t bug me, but perhaps the one thing that I don’t have a good feel for is whether the class is feeling good and feeling like they are getting good things from it. There’s no good feedback mechanism: If the class is going well and making sense, the students are quiet. You don’t get a lot of messages or emails.

I do wish the students would use the Discord server more but they simply don’t do it. I don’t think I’ll require it going forward. I think that there was a brief moment where students really connected with Discord but that quickly passed. I don’t know what they are using today, maybe tik tok, maybe a combination of things, maybe nothing? Whatever it is, it’s not going to work well for online courses. I wish Canvas would add a live-chat plugin or something. Maybe there already is one?

I think I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally added the archive of every blogpost I’ve ever done (with a few exceptions) to this site. I think the earliest post here is now 2005 or 2006, when I was still studying rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh.

There’s not a lot of interesting stuff back in the ancient days unless you are me or want to see what my posts used to be like. Otherwise it’s just nice to have so many posts in one place.

I also found some old blogs I used for class, and one we graduate students used at Pitt to host a reading group together. All of these were under an email address I haven’t used in some time, but WordPress found it and connected it here to my newest blog site.

It’s great that all these perspectives were preserved!