US GENERAL ON IRAQ WITHDRAWAL

[knip]

not me...too 'dark agish' for me...i want to reach the stars

[mnaz]

I disagree that troop withdrawal necessarily equals a great downturn in the quality of Iraqi life. It could well be just the opposite. Saddam is gone, and the new Constitution is far from what we'd hoped anyway.... far too theocratic, or so I've heard. I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Good discussion, though.

[stilltrucking]

A Canticle for Leibowitz http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science ... ticle.html

High tech tribes
I don't want to go to the stars until we clean up the mess here. We have no right to inflict this disease called man on other worlds until we get our shit together here. Dark ages, These are pretty dam dark ages to me. The holocaust was not something that happened sixty years ago. It happened during my first five years of life. In my sixty four years I bet a couple of hundred million people have been killed in wars, famine, disease, genocides, well if nobody died we would be up to our ass in people. But come to think of it we are up to our ass in people. Speaking of stars, we have a astronaut in orbit who can't come home because he don't have a round trip ticket. Seems we are boycotting Russia because of Iran.

Knip tell the truth, why have we left despots and murderers in power all over Africa yet we took the high ground with Iraq?

[mnaz]

That is what makes this issue so hard to debate.... the (potential) humanitarian upside.

But in the final analysis, the primary reason the US invaded Iraq was strategic self-interest. We wanted a higher degree of control of that key geography. We wanted a military presence. At first, we even tried to sell Iraq's infrastructure components to US corporate interests. This motivation of self-interest is why the oil fields were guarded during the invasion and the Museum of Antiquities was left for looting. Granted, the Antiquities story was exaggerated when it was first reported, but there were some priceless cultural artifacts lost. Call me crazy, but I think this speaks to our true motivations in the war.

The people of this region aren't stupid. They can figure out what we're up to. While they may be grateful to us for removing Saddam, as they should be, they also have a right to resist our unrequested long-term military presence and undue influence in their affairs.

I think much of our trouble now stems from our poor "humanitarian" track record in the region. The US backed Saddam, despite his atrocities, to serve its own self-interests. That was less than 20 years ago. This sudden switch to a heavy-handed "moral high ground" seemed a tall order to begin with. That ain't how real life works.

[knip]

certainly, s/t...but i am speaking more from a personal perspective than as a spokesman for george the idiot...and from a personal perspective, i've already answered that question

as for the rest of the post, i'll respectfully disagree...dark ages represent a digression...i think today we are still moving forward...of course, the chunk of history one needs to properly assess that is too big to be apparent in the here and now...but i'm not sure we're overcrowded today simply because we have more people than we did yesterday

[stilltrucking]

Granted, the Antiquities story was exaggerated when it was first reported, but there were some priceless cultural artifacts lost. Call me crazy, but I think this speaks to our true motivations in the war.

Was it? I seemed to remember seeing a PBS show about it. Things looked pretty trashed to me.

While they may be grateful to us for removing Saddam, as they should be, they also have a right to resist our unrequested long-term military presence and undue influence in their affairs.

Mnaz, Saddam is gone, time for us to ride off into the sunset, like the hero of a cowboy movie. But we have already stayed too long.

The Taleban were also our friends. That got dam lie, “the enemy of our enemy is our friend.” Man I hate that.

Knip you are a lifer. You have to see things the way you do. That seems to be your personal experience.

[mtmynd]

knip - this article came out yesterday -

In part from a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'" (emphasis mine)

For the complete article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressr ... bush.shtml

I don't know about you, but anyone that "hears God speak" and responds to 'His" demands" creates havoc for others. I've heard killers say they listened to God. The jihadists claim direct communication with God/Allah. Now here is the POTUS claiming to listen to God speak to him.

It may be a premature statement (it's early a.m. here) but there's a thread running thru these examples that tells me those that claim to hear God speaking to them bring about death and destruction in some form or another.

What would you think if your PM claimed to have heard God speak and would send you and your forces to "do God's will'?

[Zlatko Waterman]

Having already stated my own view of BUSHCO's military adventures in Iraq, a view which must be well known by now to the Studio Eight populace, I'd like to add this note, in the form of an essay, by Nicholas Burbules, a professor at the University of Illinois.

Prof. Burbules discusses several issues and aspects of education, many of which are familiar to me after my years as a teacher. He also speaks of utopianism. That is why I have posted his essay. As Jacob Bronowski maintains in his book and film "The Ascent of Man", utopianism brings with it many dangers. While Burbules focuses on education, the difficulties he adumbrates here apply equally to "world reform" and the "conversion of dictatorships to democracy" ( or at least that form of consumer capitalism proclaimed by BUSHCO as "democracy").

Against this dangerous utopianism, Burbules juxtaposes and ruminates on Unamuno's "tragic sense."

My father, who was drafted and served during WWII, hated the military-- the discipline, the tedium, the poor wages and the poor food. But he was always quick to reiterate one of his favorite chesnuts: "If it hadn't been for the US Army, we'd all be speaking German right now . . ."

Whether or not he was right, those who argue that we have to prevent a situation in which we're all "Speaking Arabic . . ." often ( like President Bush) resort to metaphors like falling dominoes
( pace, LBJ!) the oppression of women ( it took the "forward looking US" from the end of the 18th century until 1920 to give women the right to vote . . .) and other threats to endorse a version of utopianism.

( paste of Burbules essay below)






The Tragic Sense of Education

Nicholas C. Burbules

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Published in Teachers College Record Vol. 91 No. 4 (1990)

This article originates in a dilemma—a dilemma of feeling as well as intellect. As educators, our activities require us to hope for the best that may be possible: the development of an individual person or group of people; the betterment of a society. Yet the further the process of education proceeds, the more aware we become of the ambivalent character of our successes and failures, the difficulty of attaining significant or lasting change, and the kinship of hope and disappointment. What should our attitude be as we continue in our educational endeavor?

"Education" refers simultaneously to a process and to its outcome. Philosophers of education such as Jane Martin and Richard Peters have focused on issues concerning its outcome—for example, what does it mean to be an educated person? Here I want to investigate the other point, that education is a perpetually incomplete and potentially unfulfilled process; that teacher and learner embark on an endeavor whose intended outcome is, from the very start, inevitably in doubt. Education that is worth anything involves experiencing uncertainty, confusion, and failure. It is not a straight and narrow path, nor is each step in the process a clear change for the better. Every gain is a loss; every deeper insight won is a cherished, comfortable, and familiar illusion slipping away. From the long view and with hindsight we may say that this is all for the better, but the long view is not available to teachers and learners at each step along the way.

In this article I am adopting and adapting a phrase from Miguel de Unamuno, the "tragic sense of life," to express a view that asks us to confront simultaneously the prospects of success and failure in education—in fact, the inseparability of success and failure—without abandoning the endeavor itself.

THE TRAGIC SENSE

In making sense of our lives, we often draw from the tropes and styles of narrative literature. As Hayden White describes, tragedy is one of the primary explanatory frames: "All other prospects on human existence tend to freeze life in an apprehension of either chaos or form; only Tragedy requires a constant alternation of the awareness of chaos with the will to form in the interests of life." Sidney Hook puts it this way: "The element of the tragic enters in the defeat of plans or hopes, in the realization that in much grief there is not much wisdom, and that we cannot count merely upon the passage of time alone to diminish our stupidities and cruelties."

Aristotle's famous analysis of tragedy in the Poetics focuses on elements of plot and character that define the tragic play. His method is somewhat empirical, generalizing from the popular tragedies of his time, yet also normative, offering criteria for the "best" type of tragedy. The main element of his analysis I want to borrow here is that the central characters act in ignorance of some crucial fact, and in ignorance embark on actions that produce suffering, failure, and despair, for themselves and for others. The tragic protagonists' actions are often reasonable, given their state of knowledge, and they do not themselves have any sense of tragedy—the audience does. Events in the play move forward inexorably toward disaster, and because we know what the characters do not, we apprehend both the inevitability of disaster and the painful realization that given a few changes in circumstance none of it had to happen. The tragic sense depends on this vantage point, maintaining both points of perspective at the same time. We are compelled to watch the events unfold, unable to tell the characters what we know and they do not. Aristotle stresses the moment of "discovery," when the main character comes to realize the tragedy of his or her own actions and circumstances, but only after the damage has been done—becoming an observer of the situation after the fact.

It is in the spectator's point of view that the tragic sense reveals itself, and an essential element in our response, says Hans-Georg Gadamer, is the realization that "this is how it is" in life; it is not just pity for the protagonist that affects us, but "a kind of self-knowledge" in which we recognize our situation as well: "The tragic emotion is not just a response to the tragic course of events as such or to the justice of the fate that overtakes the hero, but to the . . . order of being that is true for all." In this order, all of our actions take place in the context of incomplete and often inaccurate information; under circumstances that, outside our knowledge, may be working against us; or toward ends that may be fundamentally self-defeating. We observe this in the tragic character, then we recognize it in ourselves.

Lest one think, however, that tragedy is simply wallowing in the sloughs of human inadequacy, we should recognize, as Herbert Muller urges, the ennobling character of affirming our agency and hope in the face of tragic understanding:

[Tragedy] takes on the most awful possibilities of human life, to display the most splendid possibilities of the human spirit. It goes through the worst, and by going all the way through it earns an honorable peace, which is more secure because it is peace without victory. . . . By systematically complicating all issues, stressing the defects and excesses of all values, insisting on tension, imbalance, uncertainty, and contradiction as the essential conditions of civilization . . . we may hope to be at once more humane and more realistic, more generous in our sympathies and more sober in our judgments.

Thus the issue of tragedy is not a simple one of optimism versus pessimism. For the authors discussed here, the "tragic sense" refers to a larger awareness of the impediments to success, the prospects for failure, and the limits to our effort—else we are in the role of the tragic protagonist, striving mightily in ignorance or self-deception about the significance of our actions. By maintaining the tragic sense, we admit to ourselves and to those engaged with us in an activity the inherent difficulties and uncertainties of our efforts—which may in fact bind us together more strongly, inspire more persistent and conscientious effort, and help us maintain a more realistic appraisal of the worth of what we are trying to accomplish.

AVOIDING PESSIMISM AND UTOPIANISM

Tragedy will seem to some an unsuitable characterization of education: too gloomy, too fatalistic. Our most inspirational metaphors of education (climbing, grasping, journeying, etc.) connote aspiration, optimism, and progress; but such metaphors are, whatever their motivational advantages, fundamentally misleading because they promise more than can be guaranteed. Our gains in knowledge are provisional, and countered by an equal increase in awareness of our ignorance. Our greater ability to change and control our circumstances is countered by a greater understanding of what cannot be changed, or changed only at the cost of other goods. Our efforts at the education of others, whatever their successes, run up against the recognition of the many for whom we can do little—or worse, the recognition that in our efforts to benefit some we inevitably neglect others. Education is less like scaling Mt. Everest, and more like the task of Sisyphus.

In education we must try to avoid exaggerating the benefits of what we are trying to accomplish without admitting as well the mixed and provisional character of our accomplishments. We should try to be both protagonist and observer, recognizing and helping others to recognize the complications and contradictions in our situation. By maintaining the tragic sense, we seek to avoid the hubris of believing ourselves to be more effective than we actually are. Kenneth Benne argues that this recognition, difficult as it is, leads to a kind of wisdom.

Maintaining the tragic sense is uneasy and often discouraging precisely because it acknowledges both the opportunities for success and the prospects of failure. We can neutralize this dilemma either by abandoning our hopes for success or by trivializing the prospects of failure. On one hand, we can embrace true pessimism, and tacitly assume that misery in our world is unavoidable. this view makes some sense: Misery for many seems inherent to the world we have made. Conflicts of interest are built into the nature of our distributional schemes, so that ameliorative benefits for some individuals or groups always come at the expense of others. In the case of education, this means that every success is a failure, that every student helped means another neglected. We may respond from a distance with feelings of pity for the plight of others, but this avoids the sense of frustrated personal responsibility that gives the tragic sense its poignancy. By accepting the inevitability of suffering, we would relieve ourselves of this burden of regret.

On the other hand, we can escape into utopianism. We can think that the capacity to imagine and describe better possibilities is itself a means of attaining them. Again, in part, this is a defensible outlook: An inability to imagine change for the better creates what Paulo Freire calls "semi-intransitive consciousness," an acceptance of the status quo and a tacit contempt for one's own abilities to transform one's circumstances. Speaking positively, utopias offer a direction for change and a reason to try. Some writers on education insist on the need for utopian ideals to direct and motivate our educational efforts. The danger of utopian thinking is that it minimizes or overlooks serious impediments and limitations to our efforts toward change, which can be counterproductive when it makes us unprepared for the inevitable difficulties that arise. Utopian thinking avoids the tragic sense by substituting our imagination for our sense of reality; it allows us to acknowledge tragedy externally, but refuse to recognize it in our own situation. The tragic sense, I have argued, means to embrace two perspectives at once, without escaping into either one: to undermine our hope with doubt, and to fight against our skepticism with persistent effort for the better.

DANGERS IN UTOPIANISM

A utopianism that does not confront its own limitations can become a source of dire events. Tzvetan Todorov and Isaiah Berlin have written recently on the danger that a utopian vision may inspire action to attain perfection at all costs:

One can dispute Sartre's statement that the role of intellectuals is to create hope and inspire sacrifice in the interest of a just cause. Apart from the question of whether utopias are realizable, are they desirable? . . . Might we not surmise that there is something in the human condition that makes it impossible to find a global solution to our problems, to achieve anything but partial improvements? If this is the case, we should condemn not only specific instances in which new dreams are fostered . . . but the very nature of the projects that raise these false hopes, which in fact offer only the sinister choice between giving up en route or following through to the inevitable end called Terror.

Utopias have their value—nothing so wonderfully expands imaginative horizons of human potentialities—but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal. . . . Sacrifices for short-term goals, coercion, if men's [sic] plight is desperate enough and truly requires such measures, may be justified. But holocausts for the sake of distant goals, that is a cruel mockery of all that men [sic] hold dear.

A second factor that should make us modest about our utopias is what Bernard Williams calls "moral luck": "One's history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not." It is more true today than ever before that we are tied into a network of interrelations that extend throughout the social, political, economic, and ecological domains. A serious reflection on the facts makes it painfully clear that everything we do impinges in a harmful way on someone, somewhere; that for any policy, however well-intentioned, there are unavoidable bad consequences. Simple models of moral responsibility fail to capture the subtleties of co-optation and compromise inherent in virtually every social commitment. We need new moral concepts that allow a better interpretation of collective responsibilities and the shades of gray-on-gray options that most situations actually present us with. Further, we need to know what our moral attitude to this state of affairs ought to be, without succumbing to a cold utilitarianism. How much disappointment can the caring heart bear?

A third condition is that human values are perpetually in conflict. As Berlin states, reflecting on this fact:

The idea that this planted in my mind was the realization, which came as something of a shock, that not all supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another. . . . If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonized in principle . . . we must say that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; that principles which are harmonized in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.

Because of this inherent conflict between goods, says Hook, "No matter how we resolve the opposition, some good will be sacrificed, some interest whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows will be modified, frustrated or even suppressed."

Thus, three conditions of our social and political world need to be kept in mind: (1) the dangers of ideals that, because they are out of touch with realistic possibilities, risk engendering dishonest or draconian methods of attaining them; (2) "moral luck," or the web of complex circumstance and contingency that surrounds and constrains our moral options; and (3) the inevitable tradeoffs between competing values and interests, so that our moral options have less to do with perfectibility than with salvaging some goods at the expense of others. In the face of such considerations, utopianism appears as a naive, misleading, and potentially counterproductive illusion.

TRAGIC CIRCUMSTANCES IN EDUCATION

I believe we encounter tragic circumstances in education all the time. We often find, for example, that helping students consider a radically different way of viewing their circumstances involves challenging their incoming preconceptions and frameworks of understanding. Unless these change, half of what is discussed will be ignored and forgotten, since the students have no context for assimilating new insights; the other half will be misunderstood, since students will simply reinterpret the insights to fit the categories and beliefs they already hold. Hence a teacher must actively work to alter the frameworks students come with. The problem here is that certain ways of viewing the world are invested with enormous significance (religious beliefs are a clear instance), and to challenge these is often to deprive students of an important source of security and significance in their lives. Another instance involves ethnicity, where cultural traits may constitute an impediment to learning; sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, we cause students to question habits and values that tie them to important communities within and outside the school. The losses here are real, and it is not enough to tell oneself that it is for the student's good—for one thing, this is extremely patronizing. More than this, it may be for the student's good only viewed from a long-term educational perspective, which includes the reconstruction of a better and more comprehensive world view. In the short term, however, the actual process can entail tremendous internal conflict and confusion. It will not always be possible to convince the student (or ourselves) that this is all for the best. Furthermore, the educational process is imperfect and incomplete. We interact with students for a relatively short time in their lives; in that time, we are often more effective at tearing down their preconceptions than we are at enabling them to reconstruct something more complete. When the process is unfinished, as it usually is, how then do we argue that it is for the best, having robbed students of something dear to them and given them so little in return?

A related issue, especially difficult for those of us who espouse radically different or unconventional points of view, is that to the extent we do influence our students, we are asking them to accept a life in which they will often feel ill at ease, maladapted, and frustrated (that is, a situation much like our own). Working with students who are adults, it is easy enough to relegate this to their own autonomy, their own choice, their own destiny, but it is not that simple. Working with preservice teachers, for example, we understand the nature of the institutions in which they will work, the patterns of socialization they face, and the substantial body of historical and sociological evidence indicating that the circumstances they will encounter are highly resistant to change—that it is far more likely they will adapt to fit in, or quit, before the structure and aims of schooling will change. Yet we persist in our efforts, taking solace from the few students we feel a sense of rapport with, even as we recognize the vast majority for whom we have had little or no lasting effect.

Another issue concerns power relations in schools. Elsewhere I have argued that schools and other social institutions exist in a web of conflicting interests among individuals and among groups. These are a result of unequal access to the goods of society, a condition exacerbated by scarcity. Against that background of conflicting interests, social relations take on the character of power relations, whether the persons involved are aware of it or not. Such circumstances of scarcity compromise, and in most cases frustrate, whatever ameliorative aims we might wish to pursue; we help some students necessarily at the expense of neglecting or inadvertently harming others.

As a relatively open public institution set up with a rhetorical (and sometimes real) commitment to human development and social improvement, the school is one of our few hopes for a progressive influence on society. Even as we strive there, we are confronted day after day with reminders of how far from its rhetorical aim the school remains, and how little we can rely on most actors in that setting to offer consistent support to our educative ideals. Moreover, we are changed by the interaction, made more suspicious and skeptical, thrown into doubt about our own ability to maintain a consistent commitment to those ideals. The tragic sense of education requires us to continue our efforts in full awareness of such impediments, without escaping into either fatalism or utopianism.

PRAGMATISM AND UNCERTAINTY

The point I want to make to make with these examples is that this is the nature of things in education. As a process it is at best two steps forward, one step back—and often just the converse. The pragmatists wrestled with this issue:

Pragmatism . . . stressed the efficacy of human ideals and actions and at the same time their inescapable limitations. It foreswore the promise of total solutions and wholesale salvation for piecemeal gains. . . . It acknowledged the reality of piecemeal losses even when we risk our lives to achieve the gains. No matter how intelligent and humane our choices, there are, William James insists, "real losses and real losers . . . something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup." . . . As I understand the pragmatic perspective on life, it is an attempt to make it possible for men [sic] to live in a world of inescapable tragedy . . . without lamentation, defiance, or make-believe.

Pragmatism, for Hook, involves a "categorical imperative . . . to inquire, to reason together, to seek in every crisis the creative devices and inventions that will not only make life fuller and richer but tragedy bearable." Unfortunately, Hook, while acknowledging the tragic, uses his faith in science and reason as a refuge in the face of relativity. Even Benne says that we should view tragedy as a kind of experimental trial and error, like the "laboratory method." This is not what Muller called, previously, "going all the way through" tragedy to a new kind of attitude toward life.

The culprit here is what John Dewey called "the quest for certainty," the hope for a knowledge that is clear, uncontroversial, and unchanging. From this vantage point uncertainty is seen as bad, as something to get rid of; most people grasp at the nearest plausible rationale rather than struggle with their doubt. Such an attitude is, I believe, hostile to the process of education, in which uncertainty and doubt are inevitable. Yet saying this is easy; it is difficult in reality to accept the provisional and transitory character of knowledge, insecure in the realization that the next discovery may bring more confusion than clarity, more frustration than relief.

Richard Rorty's reformulation of the pragmatist position begins with the premise of uncertainty as the normal state of human affairs:

[Pragmatism] is the attempt to free mankind from Nietzsche's "largest lie," the notion that outside the haphazard and perilous experiments we perform there lies something (God, Science, Knowledge, Rationality, or Truth) which will, if only we perform the correct rituals, step in to save us.

In place of utopias, pragmatism offers at best moderation and tolerable trade-offs, while acknowledging that in some cases even this little may be more than we can expect. Having noted the dangers of grandiose hopes for social perfectibility, Berlin concludes his reflections on utopia with a call for greater modesty:

The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices—that is the first requirement for a decent society; one that we can always strive for, in the light of the limited range of our knowledge, and even of our imperfect understanding of individuals and societies. A certain humility in these matters is very necessary.

CONCLUSION

Having brought you along this far, what do I have to offer in conclusion? Too little, I am afraid. It seems to me that there is something unique about the process of education that enables us to substitute a commitment to that process and to the value of the educational relation in place of a faith in its potential outcomes. We think, we speak, we listen, we seek to learn together, because this is how we naturally choose to live. Education stands alone as its own raison d'être, as its own justification—imperfect, incomplete, and inadequate as it is. What shortcomings it has can only be addressed by more of the same: more dialogue, more caring, more effort at mutual understanding. We adopt these methods not because they are sure to succeed, but because they are the only decent methods available to us. To adopt them intelligently is to admit their imperfection, incompleteness, and inadequacy in transforming the larger moral order that confronts us—overwhelms us, really.

Pragmatism takes a skeptical attitude toward enduring claims of knowledge and value; our beliefs, like any other invention, are made by human hands and minds, expressed out of lived situations, and concerned with problems encountered in a social world. As a form of lived practice, our search for means of understanding and action should be directed not toward a "quest for certainty," but toward attaining, if possible, workable solutions and decent human relations. In this we must persevere without falling into either cynicism or utopianism—both offspring of a faith in absolutes. As Ian Hacking wrote, "optimism, pessimism, nihilism and the like are all concepts that make sense only within the idea of a transcendental subject," and to this Rorty replied that Dewey wanted to provide "a kind of hope that doesn't need reinforcement from the idea of a transcendental or enduring subject . . . [an] unjustifiable hope and an ungrounded but vital sense of human solidarity."

Dewey believed that the quest for certainty and its attendant ills arose only because in the Western intellectual tradition a split emerged between theory and practice, between the supposedly pure development of ideas and their application to human purposes and activities. A consequence of this split was the mistaken notion that the human activity of building and testing ideas was necessarily more pristine and enduring than, say, the human activities of building and testing a bridge, running a farm, raising a child, maintaining a friendship, and so forth. Education, of all human activities, most clearly shows that the theory/practice split is fallacious; we develop new ideas in ourselves and in others through practical activities of joint investigation and communicative interchange. This mutual search for knowledge and understanding is entangled in a web of institutional imperatives and constraints, political allegiances and struggles, resource allocations and scarcity, and conflicting aims and interests—to the extent that we may be successful in challenging or altering this web, we simply replace it with another.

To view education from the standpoint of tragedy is to abandon foundationalism and to believe that doubt and uncertainty make us better educators—in part because they reemphasize our dependence on each other, including our students, and in part because they insulate us somewhat from false claims for the value of what we have to offer. It means to focus less on specific outcome standards, and more on creating opportunities for discovery, discussion, and development in our teaching. It means to recognize our limited capacity to accomplish educational aims without fostering more cooperative relations with students, their parents, and other partners in the educational process. Most of all, it means to adopt a much greater modesty in our claims of social transformation or reform through educational processes.

The tragic sense of education requires us to continue our efforts without deceiving ourselves about the complications and contradictions inherent in the endeavor—"for there are many who, while they go around looking out for I know not what ideal—that is to say, fictitious duties and responsibilities—neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living."



(end paste from Burbules)

To this essay I would like to add a brief quote from Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of my favorite writers:

( paste)


At the heart of Berlin's philosophy was an awareness of the awesome variety and complexity of reality, which we can only begin to comprehend: the many strands that make up human experience are “too many, too minute, too fleeting, too blurred at the edges. They criss-cross and penetrate each other at many levels simultaneously, and the attempt to prise them apart […] and pin them down, and classify them, and fit them into their specific compartments turns out to be impossible” (1978b, 119).

These two closely related propositions—that absolute certainty is an impossible ideal (Berlin once wrote that, if his work displayed any single tendency, it was a “distrust of all claims to the possession of incorrigible knowledge […] in any sphere of human behaviour”; 1978a, viii), and that not everything can or should be reduced or related to a single ideal, model, theory or standard—might be considered the centrepieces of Berlin's philosophy. They are central to his view of language and knowledge; they are equally important to his ethics and his philosophy of the human sciences. Also central to these different facets of his thought was Berlin's individualism or nominalism, his emphasis on the importance, and indeed priority, of particular things as objects of knowledge and of individual people as moral subjects.

(end paste)


A link to a summary of Berlin's life, intellectual development, and works:


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/


Finally, a nice, general piece by Anthony Lewis in DAEDALUS on how to deal with international violations of human rights:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_n9189668



--Z

[mnaz]

I keep hearing "dark ages" mentioned. Should it be the "moral mission" of the West to unilaterally remove by massive brute force only those tyrants who stand in the way of its expanding economic and imperial interests? How much long-term success is this sort of self-serving approach bound to generate, I mean, in the real world?

And even if we accept that fighting tyranny unilaterally, at the sole discretion of the US/Britain, is to be our policy (questionable, at best), then such policy should at least focus on actually fighting tyranny, and not playing geopolitical monopoly. What gives the the US the right to build 14 new military bases in a country it simply came to "liberate"?

And how long should this "liberation" process take? Saddam's been gone for almost two years. Might there come a point at which the "liberators" themselves, by their increasingly unpopular, violent, and protracted occupation, essentially become the entity from which the people require liberation, more than any other factor? Civil war basically already exists in Iraq. For the troops to stay put to "stave off a civil war" may have made sense a year ago (I doubt it), but it makes much less sense now. You can't save people who don't want you to save them.

How long should Western troops fight in this near-quagmire? How much worse could it get in Iraq after troop withdrawal, or at least substantial draw-down? It's not like the troops couldn't be sent back in if the situation deteriorated significantly. Why don't we just let the Iraqis have their country back and see if they can do a better job of it without Saddam?

[knip]

Knip you are a lifer. You have to see things the way you do. That seems to be your personal experience.

bullshit...don't assume i'm incapable of making my own judgments on things because of my profession...that's a weak sign-off

[stilltrucking]

( it took the "forward looking US" from the end of the 18th century until 1920 to give women the right to vote .

It took the forward looking Swiss until 1971 to give women the vote.

1971: Swiss women get the vote
Swiss women can now vote in federal elections and stand for parliament after a national referendum.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/date ... 738475.stm


Knip, call it bullshit if you want. I have a dear friend, a brother actualy, he spent twenty years as a flight surgeon. During the south east asian war games we just did not have certain discussions. You been going on making excuses for this diasaster for over three years. I am talking about this tragedy that George Bush and his corrupt incompetent cronies have inflicted on the world. I do not wish to threaten your peace of mind.

"When William Penn was convinced of the principles of Friends, and became a frequent attendant at their meetings, he did not immediately relinquish his gay apparel; it is even said that he wore a sword, as was then customary among men of rank and fashion . Being one day in company with George Fox, he asked his advice concerning it, saying that he might, perhaps, appear singular among Friends, but his sword had once been the means of saving his life without injuring his antagonist, and moreover, that Christ has said, "he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one." George Fox answered, "I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst." Not long after this they met again, when William had no sword, and George said to him, "William, where is t hy sword?" "Oh!" said he, I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could." This anecdote, derived from reliable tradition,* seems to be characteristic of the men and the times. It shows that the primitive Friends preferred that their proselytes should be led by the principle of divine truth in their own minds, rather than follow the opinions of others without sufficient evidence.

[knip]

here is why it is bullshit...that is the second time you've mentioned me going on about this for 3 years now...the problem with that point is that i've flopped no less than 4 times on this, and have not been shy to post my changes of heart as they change

so if you keep harping on about my 3-year rant, after i have been on both sides a couple times now, i am only left to assume that you haven't been paying attention...you say it, but you don't know it, because your 'facts' about what i have been saying are clearly wrong


and that certainly smells like bullshit to me, s/t

[stilltrucking]

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I am the worse and you are the best amigo. Maybe we should leave it at that.

[stilltrucking]

Z
I am very interested in your post about tragedy. Just too long for me to deal with on screen. Going to print it out. I will be gone for a couple of weeks. I got into a test program for insulin pumps and will be in a hospital for a couple of weeks. Going to print it out and get back to you later. Just off the top of my head I am thinking of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit Of Music and his comment about the Greeks, "how they must have suffered to bring forth such beauty" paraphrase from memory.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Still:


Miguel de Unamuno's "The Tragic Sense of Life", from which Burbules takes many of his ideas, is available online from the Gutenberg Project, here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14636/14 ... 4636-h.htm


The book can be downloaded and printed, though it is available in many public libraries. I recommend it strongly if you are studying the concept and effect of tragedy, and tragedy as a literary and philosophical genre.


--Z