How Many Chinas?

I was hanging out with my roommates last night (despite appearances, I don’t spend all my free time on the internet), and when discussion turned to the recent elections one of them mentioned that he views American politics almost entirely from the perspective of Taiwan policy. He’s Taiwanese, so presumably the policies he favors are those that support Taiwanese independence against possible threats by the PRC.

This interested me because I hadn’t really considered it as a way to look at politics before. It makes sense, though, that for a lot of Americans with close ties to other countries the most important thing, even above which party is in power, is American policy toward those countries, something that often cuts across party and ideological lines. My roommate was happy both that Lieberman won and that Pelosi will become Speaker, for instance. You also see this sort of thing with Israel policy among an increasing number of American Jews. Also Cuba. In fact, in retrospect this is a pretty common phenomenon the extent of which just hadn’t really occurred to me before.

Speaking Of Open Minds

So I’ve been thinking over the comments to my series of posts on relationships with perceptible age differences, and I’ve begun to think that my squeamishness about them isn’t really based on anything important.  I think it’s largely a reaction to circumstances in the past when I was just starting to figure out how dating and relationships work and isn’t really relevant now that I’m in different circumstances.  I don’t think I’m quite at the point where I’d actually initiate a relationship with an older woman (these things take time to get over), but I’m probably more likely to seriously consider one if she proposes it.  I remain somewhat uncomfortable with being the older partner due to the associations with power differentials, but I’m young enough that that’s unlikely to be a pressing issue any time soon.

Open Minds

One thing college professors like to do, particularly in introductory classes, is ask questions and make statements that are designed to unsettle their students, to challenge their assumptions and open their minds.  This behavior is generally associated with humanities classes, which are often largely geared toward “expanding horizons” and introducing students to perspectives they haven’t seen before (post-colonial literature, say), and is often the sort of thing conservative critics of academia latch on to when they complain about “liberal indoctrination.”  Obviously, having your assumptions challenged is a good thing generally, and learning to think and respond to new and difficult ideas is one of the main things colleges are supposed to teach.  And, indeed, in a lot of cases kids come into college with biases and misconceptions that need to be undermined if not eliminated entirely.  I do kind of wonder, however, how much this confrontational attitude is really necessary to get the message across.  I haven’t taken a whole lot of classes like this, but the impression I get is that many (though by no means all) professors like to challenge assumptions just for the hell of it, even if the specific challenges they are posing don’t have much substance to them.  I think this sort of pedagogy has a risk of backfiring once it reaches a certain level if students decide the professor has gone too far with a provocative statement they think is obviously wrong, calling into question all the other issues on which they’ve changed their minds.

Although this sort of thing is most strongly identified with the humanities, it’s common in the social sciences too, and indeed it’s there that it may even be more important since the conclusions of many social social sciences can be quite counterintuitive and professors have to break down preconceived notions in their students so they’ll really understand the subject matter.  There is an additional risk here, however, more than in the humanities, because empirical research in the social sciences is always progressing, and previous certainties are constantly at risk of being overturned by new data.

This is particularly true in economics.  Many econ professors, at least in my experience, love to challenge their intro classes with counterintuitive conclusions that demonstrate the usefulness of economic theory.  That’s all well and good as long as the data backs up the theory, but it doesn’t always, and many cherished Econ 101 examples (the minimum wage, for instance) have turned out to not match up well to the data.  This can be harmful in two ways: first, by turning students who see that the data doesn’t match what they were taught against economic theory entirely, and second, by empowering people who only take a little bit of econ with just enough knowledge to sound off about policy proposals without a glance at the applicable data (”the science of economics proves that I’m right!”). Not all of those people are arguing in good faith, of course; many of them know perfectly well that the data don’t support what they’re saying, but they also know that most other people don’t know that.  It’s kind of a mess.

If economics didn’t play such a major role in public policy, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it does; although what academic economists do research-wise is generally pretty different from the simplifications you hear in the media, what they do in the classroom can have wide-ranging effects.  It would be nice if they would be a little more careful with the facts and a little less enthusiastic about opening minds.

Perspective

My great-grandmother was older than her husband.  We don’t know exactly how much older, however, because when they got married she cut her birth year out of the family bible.  It was probably about three years.

On Second Thought

Judging from the response I’ve gotten, I’m thinking my theory about older woman/younger man relationships is probably mostly full of shit. I’m sure there are some couples out there who it describes well, but I think since these sorts of relationships are pretty rare, and don’t fit into any common societal trope the way older man/younger woman ones do, that each situation is probably unique and the result of particular circumstances that make generalizations difficult. I have a tendency to theorize a lot, and it often helps me understand things better, but not always.

More Mrs. Robinson

So the basic consensus on relationships with perceptible age differences seems to be that power differentials play some role in most cases, at least when the man is the older partner.  When the woman is the older partner, however, I’m increasingly thinking that something else is going on.  While I’m sure there are some relationships out there where a high-achieving older woman is with a younger, less ambitious man and the power differential is fairly explicit (someone may or may not have advocated this in an article somewhere), I think in most of these relationships that’s probably not really the case, probably largely due to the way “older woman” doesn’t automatically equal “higher status” in our society the way “older man” does.  Institutional sexism and all that.

I think it’s pretty clear that older woman/younger man relationships are not very common and probably stigmatized to some extent (presumably again due to sexism).  I’m beginning to think that for some people, at least, that’s part of the appeal; it’s vaguely transgressive and independent to be in one of these relationships, and I can see how that would be attractive to people who sort of feel left out of society as it is for whatever reason.  The word that keeps coming to my mind in this regard is “eccentric.”  It seems like this kind of relationship can be a way to set oneself apart from the masses while at the same time having a partner who is doing likewise (sort of a “you and me against the world” thing).  I think this works for both partners, although the specific pressures they are escaping may be different.  I’m not claiming this is the case for all couples like this, but I suspect it’s true for at least some.

As always, of course, I don’t really know anything about this and would appreciate insight from people who do.

Notorious

I don’t generally watch a lot of movies.  I don’t have anything against them, but, much like novels, they take up a lot of time and there are other things I’d rather do.  My mom, however, does like movies and often wants to go to a movie as a family activity.  These are the circumstances under which I usually see movies.

This summer, we went up to Durango for a few days as a family; this seems to be the new thing that my parents do for a short vacation.  We stayed in the Strater and just sort of hung out (unusual for a vacation planned by my mother, who is generally of the pack-in-as-much-as possible school when it comes to leisure time).  One night, she decided we should see a movie.  Durango’s a very small town, so our options that night were limited to Akeelah and the Bee and The Notorious Bettie Page.  It probably says a lot about my family that we settled on the latter.

It was quite good, as I recently mentioned to SnackyCakes at Unfogged.  For such a controversial subject, it tells the story remarkably straight, with very little moralizing from any perspective.  In fact, after watching the film it’s not entirely clear what the filmmakers think of Page’s life, the pornography industry she was an important early star in, or her eventual turn to religion.  I found this refreshing.  It allows viewers to draw their own conclusions, and different people will see different aspects of the story as being of primary importance.

Anyway, I thought it was a good movie.  Highly recommended.

Alt-Text Restored

Megan is on fire today.  Now if only I could find one of these awkward college girls…

Isolation Is Bad

At work today I helped several patrons.  I haven’t been doing that much lately; I’ve been doing a lot of barcoding and other stuff that requires sitting in the office for long periods rather than going out into the stacks.  Today, however, there was a lot of stuff to shelve so I was out and about for my entire shift, and people asked me for help with various things.  Since it’s been so long since I did this a lot, I made some mistakes in demonstrating how to do things, which was embarrassing and cut down a bit on my air of cool competence.  Everything worked out in the end, though.

I can’t believe how much this helped my mood.  I’m a lot happier than I was this weekend.  I generally think of myself as not very social, but that’s not strictly true; I do like interacting with people when I’m in a comfortable environment, and problems only arise when I’m not comfortable where I am (which is, unfortunately, a rather large portion of the time).  I also find helping people very satisfying.  Overall, it was a good day.

What Prodigious Armies We Had In Flanders

It’s been a bit slow around the blogs the past few days, so I finally went back and reread A White Bear’s Tristam Shandy posts (and also the comments, which I didn’t read at the time because I hadn’t yet finished the book). She says some interesting things that bring out some aspects of the novel I hadn’t really considered at the time, and the commenters add their own impressions, some of which were familiar to me and some of which were not. One thing about all this discussion that kind of puzzled me were the repeated mentions of the fact that a lot of people, even grad students in English, can’t stand the book, finding it to be frustrating or too self-consciously clever or otherwise irritating. At first I found this bizarre, because I absolutely loved Tristam Shandy. I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and I didn’t have any trouble getting through it at all; in fact, at some points I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could dislike such a wonderful and creative effort.

But then I saw this comment, by The Modesto Kid, and I began to develop a theory of why some people hate the book while others (including me) love it. Among other things, he says:

I want characters with whom to sympathize and through whom vicariously to feel passionate; and Sterne is not giving them to me. His characters don’t have any depth, they are just cardboard cutouts with a tape recorder pasted on the back of the cutout playing Sterne’s ramblings and jokes.

This is, of course, true; the characters are wooden and generally unsympathetic, and they mostly serve as conduits for what Sterne wants to say. I think for someone who reads a lot of novels and has a good idea of what they like in a novel, the way Sterne brazenly flouts so many narrative conventions could be upsetting and make the book nearly unreadable. For TMK, the important thing is well-developed characters. For someone else, it might be a coherent plot. There are many reasons people who read novels have for reading novels, and when confronted with a novel that doesn’t meet their expectations they see no reason to keep reading.

I, however, don’t read novels. I can’t even remember the last one I read before Tristam Shandy. It’s not that I dislike them, it’s just that reading a novel takes a long time and I’m generally not interested enough to make that commitment; I’d rather be doing other things. As a result, I don’t approach novels with any particular expectations for what they’ll contain or any clear sense of what I want from them. The drastic breaks with convention in Tristam Shandy don’t bother me, because I’m not attached to those conventions in the first place. In fact, it’s precisely the unusual nature of the book that I like the most about it. It’s interesting and different, and there are sudden surprises everywhere.

Obviously, plenty of people who read novels like Tristam Shandy, so I’m not claiming that this theory covers everything, but I do think it explains why a lot of people who are otherwise great bibliophiles have so much trouble with this particular work.