Brain Wave

Hamlet on Broadway, starring Jude Law

CLICK THE THEATER OPTION AND SELECT "JUDE LAW ON THE MEANING OF HAMLET"

Available for summer tutoring

The spring semester at Coastal Carolina Univeristy has ended.

I am now availabe to tutor middle-school, high-school, and undergraduate students via email.

I can help you or your child with:

- Grammar and punctuation skills

- Sentence construction

- Structuring essays and research papers

- Creative writing

For rates and more information, contact me at cfburch4@yahoo.com and place "Basic Ink" in the subject line.

As an adjunct college instructor, I ought to be offended...

I found this (actually quite brilliant) quote at UnlikelyStories.org:

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture more professors. —Simone Weil

When college students go blank

I pause the lecture and say, in a mocking tone, "Oh no -- they sent me to college and made me read and think!" I put my hands to my head. "It's too much!"

The glaze cracks on some of the faces and a few smiles break out.

Some of them seem to recall a reason for being in college. Some, but not all.

Doubt versus ideology; humanists versus rationalists

I recently dusted off The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (The Free Press, 1994) by John Ralston Saul.

I found his introduction very compelling:

"Our civilization is unable to do what individuals cannot say. And individuals are unable to say what they cannot think. Even thought can only advance as fast as the unknown can be stated through conscious organized language, an apparently self-defeating limitation.

"The power of dictionaries and encyclopedias is thus enormous.... A dictionary can as easily be a liberating force as one of control.

"In the humanist view, the alphabet can be a tool for examining society; the dictionary a series of questions, an enquiry into meaning, a weapon against received wisdom and therefore against the assumptions of established power. In other words, the dictionary offers an organized Socratic approach.

"The rational method is quite different. The dictionary is abruptly transformed into a dispensary of truth; that is, into an instrument which limits meaning by defining language. This bible becomes a tool for controlling communications because it directs what people can think. In other words, it becomes the voice of Platonic elitism.

"Humanism versus definition. Balance versus structure. Doubt versus ideology. Language as a means of communication versus language as a tool for advancing the interests of groups."

Andrew Wyeth: home-schooling success story

The realist painter -- perhaps magical realist painter -- Andrew Wyeth has died.

This afternoon, NPR had an outstanding item on his life, which included the information that Wyeth had been home-schooled.

Wyeth was a sickly child who was home-schooled; he had lots of time to play imaginary games and wander in the countryside. Wyeth biographer Richard Meryman says that childhood sense of wonder never left him.

"I think to understand Wyeth is to understand that in that body is a 10-year-old boy," Meryman says. "And at the same time the body is occupied by an intensely serious artist."

The son of the well known illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth began his artistic training under his father's tutelage. It was after his father's death in 1945 that Wyeth really came into his own as an artist.

I didn't catch those "imaginary games" or Wyeth's tendency to "wander in the countryside" when I heard the report on the radio, but it stuck out to me when I read the report online. Last February, in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, I asked my wife to take a photo of me standing beside one of my favorite paintings, "Christina's World" by Wyeth. The stark realism of that painting also seems imbued with a sense of fantasy, or an other-worldly gravity.

The philosophical thunderclap

When people are young, their first galvanizing experience tends to be their only galvanizing experience. Let’s say you grow up nominally Christian with small-town values and a few vaguely-defined questions and frustrations about life, parents, church, and your hometown.

You go away to college and you have a galvanizing experience with existentialism (even though that’s a broad movement) through a great professor and/or literature and/or philosophy and/or art. It’s like a thunderclap or a revelation: suddenly existentialism makes sense to you and addresses those vaguely-defined questions and frustrations. It explains things is a way that makes sense to you where you are.

One way or the other, you follow the existentialist thread throughout your college career because it provides an integrated point of view, an organizing principle for all the random data and experience of life. Your decision-making and values, for at least the first few years out of college if not the rest of your life, are influenced directly or indirectly by existentialism (if not by reading Nietzsche, then maybe by watching David O. Russell or David Cronenberg movies).

The refreshing and enlightening experience of such a galvanization is probably fuel enough to keep you going for years — meaning, you’re probably not going to think, “OK, so, I had best be intellectually thorough with this new philosophical orientation; I’ll go back and read Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Neoplatonists, Confucians and Neo-Confucians, Thomists and Neo-Thomists, Kant, Wittgenstein…” No, you probably won’t be that intellectually thorough. You won’t need to do that much homework, because that galvanizing experience of existentialism was just what you (thought you) needed at that time, and it reoriented your way of thinking and reorganized the world around you, and now you cannot imagine needing anything more.

It’s probably the same with how some people experience Calvin, or Aquinas, or C.S. Lewis, or innumerable others. When something feeds you, you feast on it. Why stop feasting on something that tastes so good and run around to all the other options on the buffet? You’re not trying to fulfill some academic standard of intellectual thoroughness. You’re trying to live a life. Read what feeds.

This, to me, is a fascinating psychological aspect of us as human beings. The actual content of whatever produced the galvanizing experience could include a high degree of truth, or a mix of truth and falsehoods in varying degrees, or no truth at all. But many of us have those moments when a new system or a point of view strikes the hot iron of who we are at a certain moment.

How smart people, even psychologists, get duped

"Everybody is doing it" -- apparently, the phrase still carries immense social capital that informs decision-making.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation included a segment today entitled “The Science of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped.” (Click here to listen online.)

The program featured an interview with Stephen Greenspan, a psychologist and author of Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It. (Check it out at Amazon.com)

And, Greenspan was one of the people who was duped by Bernard Madoff.

According to a brief piece in the London TimesOnline:

Stephen Greenspan is clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado. He is one of the losers from Bernard Madoff, having seen a fair chunk of his retirement savings disappear. He is also one of the world's experts on financial scams and why investors get dragged into them, and the recent author of Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid it.

The irony is not lost on the professor, who has published a scholarly analysis of how he came to be duped in eSkeptic, the newsletter of the Skeptics Society. The notion of gullibility has been largely ignored by social scientists, he writes. There are four aspects: situation, cognition, personality and emotion.

The Madoff scam involved “social feedback measures”, which meant that, as so many prominent people were investing, it was hard to believe they were all wrong. In terms of cognition, he admits he knows little about finance and was too lazy to find out. Greenspan says he has a trusting personality and does not like to say no to a sales person who has given him an hour or two of his time.

Emotionally, he was not greedy but merely wanted a safe return for his retirement. “A host of factors, situational, cognitive, personality and emotional came together to cause me to put my critical faculties on the shelf,” he admits.

Basically, it sounds like it could have happened to anyone -- certainly if the people involved are bright, successful, and widely known, how could you be wrong to jump on the same train?

I offer a religious angle on this story here.

-Colin Foote Burch

Education, philosophy, and behavior: Is C.S. Lewis's view any less true today?

I'm curious if anyone thinks the following observation, made by C.S. Lewis in the 1940s, is less true today than it was when it was written:

"If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now?"

That's the central issue I'm after.

However, it seems unfair and inaccurate if I do not include how Lewis continues:

"Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because He is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow Him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

"But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that means)."

(Quotations from Beyond Personality, which was later included in Mere Christianity.)

The Home-Schooling Advantage: A Dad's View

1. When the car breaks down on the side of a highway, it's a moment for expanding the kids' vocabulary.

2. Technological advances have made home-schooling easier. For example, most basic cable plans include access to PBS Kids, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and The Golf Channel.

3. Courses include Advanced Topics in Popular Culture, which is easy to teach when Dad is driving and really wants to listen to The Flaming Lips on the minivan's sound system.

4. A visit to the grocer’s produce section is an educational field trip, therefore tax-deductible.

5. Home-schooling encourages practical understandings of subjects like agriculture, botany, chemistry, and cultural heritage, especially when Dad breaks out the home-brewing kit.

- Colin Foote Burch
(c) copyright 2009 Colin Foote Burch