Advice for new college students

“Do yourselves, and the rest of us, a favor. Make friends with people you disagree with about politics. And about religion. And about particular issues. And who are from a different social class than you are. And who are from a different race than you. Exploit the diversity you find, to have a richer more diverse array of friends, and talk to them about things that matter. Learn that you can really disagree, and really argue, about things that really matter, with people who really are your friends.”

Your colleague, in an earlier post, describes the people with whom he disagrees (with regards to a European 16 year old) as ‘ignorant and vindictive.’

That sounds like a fun professor and environment!

I’d give them the opposite advice. Don’t talk politics. There used to be a standard piece of social advice: never talk politics or religion. In theory, college is the place where that isn’t the case: its an institution devoted to the free exchange of ideas. In practice?

Like I said: don’t talk politics. Keep your head down and get your degree. If politics comes up, nod and give noncommittal answers. You can talk politics with your friends (surreptitiously, of course), once you graduate- because employers are just as woke as universities, these days.

anon

1/ Set some time aside on a regular basis (weekly?) to spend time in the library with no special project in mind. This works best if the library is open stacks. Wander around , get a feel for the spatial organization of the library, and its mapping to actual topics and subjects, pull out books that seem interesting and just read at random. This may get you interested in topics you hadn’t thought about . If you read a book, take notes and locate references to other works in the text and in the bibliography that seem of special interest to you, in turn locate these works on the library stacks , and read through them etc . In short , browse the library like you would browse the web.

2/ Start thinking about and implementing some kind of system to organize knowledge that will serve you for the rest of your life. Written cards. Computer files with keywords . Use this system to record excerpts, references, thoughts on everything you read or come across .

On knowing what you major is–I think most people who go in ‘knowing’ what they are going to major in are wrong. My wife and I, and both our kids, changed majors–and everybody got through in four years (more or less). About ten years ago, I remember some kind of dean at an orientation for parents of incoming students (one of whom was our daughter) joking about the ‘pre-wealth’ majors, which he rather accurately summed up as ‘all too frequently delusional’.

“Your colleague, in an earlier post, describes the people with whom he disagrees (with regards to a European 16 year old) as ‘ignorant and vindictive.’”
Those people being Andrew Bolt and Arron Banks I think he has a point. Don’t you?”

You weren’t reading closely. ‘Those people’ were people over 60 (all people over 60) who disagree with Greta XXX (don’t know her last name) about global warming.

I don’t know who Andrew Bold and Arron Banks are, so I can’t comment on them in particular. But if disagreeing with the standard academic view with regards to global warming or Greta warrants being tagged as ignorant and vindictive (by your professor!), I think my advice to college students stands. Don’t waste your time with politics in college. Too narrow-minded a place for that.

anon

I’d give them the opposite advice. Don’t talk politics. There used to be a standard piece of social advice: never talk politics or religion.

In a world where, on one side of the Atlantic, the dominant political force believes that only rich white conservatives should have full political and legal rights, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the dominant political force believes that intentionally causing avoidable food, fuel, and medicine shortages is a good thing, avoiding politics isn’t the option it used to be.

Avoiding politics is only an option when everything will work out OK (or, at least with no humanitarian crises or systemic severe human rights violations) no matter who who wins the next election. This isn’t true anymore. Taking a stand is now a civic, and moral, responsibility.

As for general advice for incoming post-secondary students, any student on a professional degree/STEM track should take as many liberal arts courses as they are allowed. The world has far too many STEMlords who can write the next big-data AI-driven panopticon but don’t have the liberal arts grounding to understand why doing so would be a bad idea.

Any student not on a professional degree track should either switch to a professional degree track or quit and go to a trade school instead, especially if they’re paying US or UK tuition prices. The return on investment for non-professional degrees is very poor and the well-paying jobs that boomers insist are there for random BA/BS/other alphabet soup degrees exist only in the boomers’ imaginations.

Harry these are really useful suggestions.

One problem students have now is reading, and I mean reading at all beyond texting and such, which even then they truncate to the least intelligible bits. The world at large now so concentrates on video and audio that communication by larger texts via essays and books is not only largely bypassed, but creates a culture where extended reading is seen as a kind of character defect. You teach at an R1 where the average ACT is around 27 or so–but the vast majority of higher ed going on now is at institutions like my old one, where no “R” is appended at all, and entry ACTs average almost 10 points lower. Most R1 entrants have pretty good experiences with texts (that’s how they got most of that 27 ACT)–most others at so-called “teaching institutions” don’t, and that has a good deal to do with those around-20 and below scores. I assigned significant extra-credit in reading quizzes to try and see who would do required reading and encourage it in any case. Of course the good students–10% and less for me–would snatch some good points that they didn’t need anyway because they did the readings. Most of the others simply would not, even for brief assignments. Colleagues who actually required reading quizzes for credit in the course reported the same failure of most students to engage college-level texts. Most students I saw especially in the last decade of my career actively detested reading, and many freely admitted to that. Maybe this is an indication that ambitions to higher-ed have been taken too far in US culture, and that we’re attempting to educate people in old standards of literacy that fail to apply to most people anymore.

My point is that if we wish to push ahead with producing extensive reading literacy in most higher-ed students, we need to find some way to do that. I have no real suggestion about how.

But to see how far things like this have come, we can see that this has been coming for a long time. When I was a college student, if you’d have told me what’s happening now, I’d not have believed it. What if you asked me then: Hey Al, do you think we’ll see a day when we elect a President of the United States who not only lies just about everything, and hasn’t read a book before his election probably for the better part of two or three decades (though claims to have written some, though that turns out to be a lie too), and so doesn’t know history or geography, and only views and listens to videos and reads and writes only short text messages and never writes his own speeches at all? Think we’ll ever see a President like that?

I’d have laughed in your face. Well, apparently the joke’s on me, though I have lots of company.

Excellent piece. Quick points. Maturation is a process. I don’t give first-year students any advice in the first few weeks. I give them specific tasks designed to build success and self-confidence. Most of us would rather see a sermon than hear one. All students participate in peer-interviews for the first week or two until each student has had an opportunity to exchange basic information with each other.

Topics outside the bounds of sensible discourse and which are likely to be regarded as unwelcome are covered by common sense and good manners – no direct questions regarding, politics, religion, sexual preferences, family-family health, and income; for example: do you go to church, have a girlfriend/boyfriend. General impersonal questions on these topics are fine: do many people from your town go to church? etc. Students must understand boundaries and respect the right of others to hold values, ideas, and opinions – short of actively and explicitly advocating violence of any kind.

Outside class students are required to log time spent engaged in developing required skills: eg. how much time spend learning about available information systems and databases. Which? How many hours per day, week? How well/often are students learning to improve skills using phones, or tablets?

Around week two, once the class is settled I explain that they, not I, will be doing all the work throughout the term; and that their success will determined by how well they apply themselves to completing a set of standard tasks. The logs of the first two weeks provide students will concrete evidence of how they manage time. We remind ourselves that time is finite – that wasting the first week of a fifteen-week term complicates the challenge of achieving success by adding to the workload and increasing stress.

Students must pre-read all text sources at least twice before we cover the material in class – page numbers circled and dated in pencil, which are peer-checked before I discuss all the cited activities with each student individually around week 4.

Finally, in my undergraduate major (Eng and Amer lit) students were expected to read/prepare for a minimum of 3 hours for every 1 hour of class time. Organization and time-management are the most effective ways to ensure a happy and successful university experience. I loved mine. Young people can be very mature if we lay out the challenges and opportunities for them clearly, and get them on task from week one.

Doing, not telling.

Sorry Harry, one point on the logs. These are completed in note form on B-5 paper in pencil and are submitted at the beginning of each class. I review all of these and either return them at the end of class, or in some cases keep them for a week for close review. Students receive no grade for their study logs. Normally, first-year students excel at this activity once they understand that they are in complete charge of their outside class work. It’s the second-year students who lose focus and often struggle. Anyway, great topic.

anonymousse

I wonder whether perhaps you were the one who wasn’t reading closely enough. After all, you announce that you don’t know Greta Thunberg’s last name, and yet it was clearly stated in the post you were commenting on. So it’s possible you also failed to notice that the words ‘ignorant’ and ‘vindictive’ were both hyperlinked. They were hyperlinked to articles one of which was citing Arron Banks and the other of which was citing Andrew Bolt; so even if you don’t know who they are, if you followed the hyperlinks you could have found details of the attacks they made to which John Quiggin was reacting.

So, on a close reading (and the above evidence suggests my reading was closer than yours), it appears to me that John Quiggin was not suggesting that everybody over 60 is ignorant and vindictive (a particularly unlikely reading given that he is, as he announced, over 60 himself), nor that everybody who disagrees with Greta Thunberg is ignorant and vindictive, nor that everybody over 60 who disagrees with Greta Thunberg is ignorant and vindictive. He was suggesting that ignorant and vindictive are fair characterisations for some of the attacks made on Greta Thunberg (and, he wrote, other young climate activists), and therefore also (in context) for the people making those attacks (of whom he cited Arron Banks and Andrew Bolt as illustrative examples, so that readers can judge for themselves whether the attacks are ignorant and vindictive); and he was further suggesting that it is not a coincidence that these ignorant and vindictive attacks come from people over 60 (although not, obviously, from all people over 60 since, to repeat, John Quiggin is himself over 60).

Get a job: you might not need the money, but you will need the employment reference.

Thanks for this Harry—I shared it with my freshmen, and then noticed them introducing themselves to each other more than normal before the first class session this afternoon.

Hello everyone!

If it would be OK for you (and the blog host), I was hoping you could indulge me a little and give me your thoughts about two separate points?

1) Discussion and disagreement in Universities

For me, I feel that the question sometimes asked “is it OK to disagree at Universities?” is a bit too broad, as things are quite context sensitive. It is important, I think, that discussion and disagreement happen in an environment where understanding is actually furthered.

To clarify this in (probably unnecessary) depth:

Firstly, I think it is important to consider the approach to disagreement. For example, I feel there is a difference between “I don´t agree, but I´m willing for you to change my mind if you present sufficient evidence”, “I disagree, and will never change my mind”, and “I want to disagree to troll you, and just make your life unpleasant”. To put it simplistically, I think there is a difference between discussing a disagreement when it is being made in an honest attempt to develop a better understanding, and when it is being made disingenuously.

Secondly, I also think how you approach disagreement is important. For example, I think it would be perfectly fine to go to your professor and say “hi, I´m not sure about topic X, do you have time to explain this to me, offer sources for further reading, etc.?”, while it would be less good to barge into their office and say “can you debate me on topic X right now” (as it is a little unreasonable to expect people to drop what they are doing to discuss things at your convenience), and it would be quite bad to stand up in the middle of class and say “you are lying about topic X, and I demand you stop this second!” (as that is quite antagonistic as well as being disruptive for all the other students).

Thirdly, what is the environment it is happening in? Is this a welcomed debate, or not? To put it simply, if I am hosting a debate club it seems reasonable to expect a disagreement, whereas it is less so if someone comes to my house at 3 in the morning and demands my time to debate topic X. If it is my job to host a discussion group, that is a little different to someone asking me to spend my own time doing so at their request. If I am posting my thoughts on a blog (like this, for example!), that is different to being paid to tutor someone. Or, to try and put it simply, I don´t think someone has an intrinsic right to demand my time – unless there is a contractual obligation of some sort, it is generally unreasonable to demand someone engages in discussion.

Fourthly, it is also quite important to think about the “level” this is happening at. In fact, in my experience, it seems as though there is often discussions regarding points of disagreement at universities (sometimes to a fault!). For example, as a 1st year undergraduate maybe I would be more seeking clarity in a professor´s tutorial group (perhaps a simplistic explanation was given in class, due to limited time, and I would ask about this and so have a longer, more detailed discussion “out of class time” which would illuminate matters), while as a PhD student I frequently would discuss and disagree with my professor (as I often understood the specifics of what I was doing more than they did) or undergo the process of peer review when submitting a research paper, and as a Post-doc leading a research team being able to defend my position in group meetings was considered a requirement of the job. Of course, I´d be expected to justify my positions (with evidence, sound and reasonable arguments, etc.), but I don´t think anyone ever prevented me from talking.

anonymousse (and anyone else who would like to chip in!), could you offer your thoughts on whether you think this is (in a sort of broad-brushstrokes approach) mostly reasonable?

As an open question, do people have thoughts on how discussion and debate happens and should happen, ways to improve to facilitate a good level of discussion with it falling into antagonism etc.? Obviously I am shaped by my experiences (i.e. UK science undergraduate, not US humanities), so I´d be interested in people´s thoughts and other perspectives.

Finally, as just a general comment – it seems to me that disagreement happens all the time at universities, between friends over a pint of beer, student clubs arguing over the hot topic of the day, all the way to well-respected experts battling it out in publications. While I am no longer at a University, I still take an interest and have yet to see sufficient evidence to warrant the belief that there is a systematic suppression of ideas, politics, etc. If people have such evidence, I would be interested to see it.

[Edited as you suggested, to facilitate a more coherent discussion thread]

One of the biggest challenges about university life is being away from home for the first time. It can instill students with a sense of freedom that goes to their heads or it can overwhelm them with a sense of fear and loneliness. This is such common theme that there are countless helpful articles with ideas for dealing with a sense of missing your home. I wrote one for international students who come to study abroad in London for the first time. It applies globally.

I think it’s hard to give one-size-fits-all advice, at least in the U.S. context (given the diversity, on a number of dimensions, of institutions and students), though some of Harry’s points, e.g. on going to office hours and getting to know your fellow students, do apply pretty much across the board.

Anyway, here are some pieces of advice many of which are aimed specifically at students who enter college with serious academic interests (esp. though not only in the social sciences and/or humanities), whatever their career aspirations are.

(1) Do not drop the study of foreign languages in college, even if your high-school studies have been enough to let you satisfy whatever foreign-language requirement may exist at your college/university. Individual circumstances and aptitudes vary and this advice can be tailored to fit them, but the general point holds.

(2) Unless you were a super-efficient reader in high school, you’ll need to become a more efficient one in college to get the most out of the reading and studying you do (even if required reading loads on average have decreased over the last few decades for undergrads, which may or may not be true but I would guess is probably not true at the so-called elite institutions, though I’m not sure). This doesn’t mean speed reading necessarily but rather some basic things like knowing how to get an overview of a book or article before plunging into the details, knowing when to read really slowly and savor something versus when to take a different approach. In this connection, Timothy Burke’s advice on “how to read in college,” available at his blog site, is probably worth a look.

(3) On similar lines, and following somewhat on Antoine’s well-taken comment @3 about browsing the library, learn how to do research if you don’t already know. Everything is not available on the internet (though increasing amounts of material are). Librarians give advice sessions on research; go to one of them. (When I was in college a long time ago, I was handed a mimeographed set of pages by Barrington Moore called “advice on reading, writing, and using the library,” or something like that. My copy has faded to near-illegibility and it’s a pre-digital-age thing so in some respects outdated, but I’m sure there are contemporary rough equivalents of it [though perhaps not written by scholars of Moore’s stature]).

(4) Reinforcing one of Harry’s points, a main consideration in choosing courses should be who is teaching them (largely ignoring this point is one of the many things I did wrong in college). If you know someone is a really good teacher — and you will find this out through the grapevine or otherwise — take or consider taking his/her course, even if it’s on a subject that you think you’re not all that interested in.

(5) For that relatively privileged group of students who don’t have to work during the term, this is probably the last time (or one of the last times) in your life when you will have no obligations other than being a full-time student *and* when the daily time-consuming demands of life that affect most everyone else are at a minimum. You have to find the right mix, for you, of work and play (not that the two are always mutually exclusive), of exercise/sports/whatever vs. sitting at your desk, of staying in the ivory tower versus getting out into the world (in one way or another). There likely won’t be time to do everything you might want to do — e.g., internships, multiple extracurricular activities, volunteering, etc. — so you’ll probably have to make some hard choices about your time and how you use it. Try not to constantly compete with and compare yourself to others, but just find your own path. Easier said than done probably, but worth trying to do.

Although I´m not sure my advice will be that useful, I will just make a comment from the UK perspective.

1) Consider a broader education

As far as I know, there is no really mixing of courses in English universities the way there is in the US. This is, in some ways, a pity as it precludes a broader approach. Consequently, if students are interested in this, maybe consider going to university in Scottish university – the Scottish degree is 4 years (rather than 3), and (if I recall correctly) the 1st year you select three subjects, the 2nd two, and 3rd and 4th one. This allows taking some complementary (e.g. physics and chemistry) and some different (e.g. English literature and biology).

2) Work on developing methodology

As many people have alluded to/said directly, in many ways the information you learn is less important that the approach to understanding something new. As frequently new challenges arrive in life – often completely unrelated to your studies – having a good methodology and epistemology is important (and makes you less susceptible to misinformation). While I´m pretty sure anyone can be fooled, developing ways to mitigate this as much as possible is key.

3) Examine what you want to get out of it

This sounds a bit dreadful, but I think we have to realise that education in England is very expensive. While I wish it were still feasible for the average student to do a degree “just for fun” or because they love that subject, I think it is also not unreasonable for them to ask the question “what do I get out of this?”.

This is a result of the ongoing commercialisation of education (which I could rant about at great length given space!), and I don´t think it is a good thing at all, but I can´t find it in myself to blame any student who says “well, I need to do X to get a job, rather than studying Y because I am interested in it”.

Of course, a case could be made that you are more likely to be successful if you are doing something you love – which is something worth considering….

4) Meet people

After university, it is difficult to meet people (outside of work, etc.). This represents a great opportunity to meet people with different backgrounds, beliefs, etc.

The degree to which you want to engage is up to you (for example, if you a LGBT and your local religious studies group is pretty abusive, well I don´t think anyone will blame you if you prefer to avoid them), but it is a good opportunity to get exposed to ideas which are very different to what you may be used to.

5) Discover yourself

It is very trite, but also true, that this is a chance to develop yourself a bit more. You will most likely leave behind all the people who have defined you while you were at school, and now you can (in a relatively safe and supervised environment) explore who you want to be. Keep in mind that this doesn´t have to involve drinking 20 pints in a row and throwing up!

More to the point, it is a chance to be more confident, to explore ideas and behaviour you wouldn´t have previously. And, worst case scenario, you´ll probably be leaving everyone behind regularly, so if you don´t get on with someone you don´t have to put up with them long term.

Anon, my politics — and this is a genuine belief for which I can provide evidence — is that you are crippled by a socialisation deficit and intractable cognitive problems and that the only realistic way to make you “”better” is to utterly smash your self-esteem through a gulag-type program and then try to put you together “better” afterwards, something that I figure has a bigger chance of killing you than working.

This is a political belief.

You… probably do not want to be friends with me.

You would probably resent being told to be my freind, that cutting yourself off from me was just you being precious and all that shit.

But…. that’s what you’re doing. Only difference is that you’re swapping “me” and “you”. Which doesn’t make it valid.

(and that you need this pointed out to you is the socialisation problem that needs fixing. Again, what’s happening is that you’re treating yourself and your experiences as special and more important…. which is fine for guiding your choices but not something you should impose on others. And when you examine your other political choices you’ll see the same pattern of expecting other people to preference your desires over your own, which in turn is a result of a poor understanding of the relationship of yourself and others… and fixing this is, well, pretty likely to kill you. So we don’t. All I think should be done to attack your self-esteem is to subject you to 0
posts like this, which won’t work.

Which is to say:
+ you think everyone has an obligation to be friends with you
+ you don’t think you have an obligation to ve friends with everyone
+ this special casing of you is reflected throyghout your politics
+ this reflects a major mental problem
+ if you won’t fix it yourself all we can — and chose not to — do is smash you into a million pieces and see if you can be put back together better, if at all.

And the reality I think even you have to acknowledge is that sitting across the table from me, knowing that I think these things, isn’t something you’d enjoy or should be forced into. So it goes.

Being unable to disagree with others and engage with them intellectually or socially without risking infection of some sort is exactly the kind of thinking that best describes the “dark ages.”

We need embrace the strongest critiques of our own positions in order to better understand our own arguments. That’s why some of us go to university. That’s why universities maintain traditions of debate.

Here’s Jerry Fallwell Jr. inviting Bernie Sanders (Satan) to address students at Liberty University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5ZB8Lg1tcA

Watch the first five minutes and tell me Sanders is wrong. Only the intellectually weak or fearful refuse to engage with others. To stick our heads in the sand, preach to the choir, is to learn nothing and add nothing to what can be a rich intellectual life.

I much prefer, btw, Sanders 2015 to Sanders 2019.

anonymousse

If you are conservative, or a believing Christian: how does this comment thread look: inviting or abusive*? That’s college.

1. I’ve just searched this thread for every occurrence of either the word ‘conservative’ or the word ‘Christian’, and that search produced no examples of abuse directed at either group. Your three quotes were as follows:
”Don’t hang around with right wing people. Don’t be friends with them…”
The reason faustusnotes gave for this advice was that right wing people are destroying the planet. It seems to me that it’s clearly abusive to describe people as destroying the planet if they are not, in fact, destroying the planet. I guess even if people were destroying the planet they might find it abusive to be described as destroying the planet. So I guess the remark can be considered abusive of right-wing people (even if it may possibly be justified abuse), and I guess also that people who think of themselves as ‘conservative’ would experience abuse of ‘right-wing’ people as abuse of themselves. So score one for you.
“But the broader point: you are planning on calling teenage classmates ‘ignorant’?”
Yes “
Chetan Murthy expressed a willingness to describe as ‘ignorant’ people who deny evolution. Describing people as ‘ignorant’ is not always abusive, but I guess sometimes it can be. It’s not clear that this is one of those instances: but in any case, Chetan Murthy was applying the description to evolution-deniers, not at conservatives as such and not at Christians as such. I would guess that many evolution-deniers would find discussion at Crooked Timber a hostile environment (although a few might find it an invigorating challenge), but there’s no basis for generalising from that to conservatives or to Christians.
“I think it’s important to put limits on how civil you’re willing to be with people whose viewpoints are harmful to some of those other new friends you’re making.”
Nothing in Mike’s comment indicated which were the harmful viewpoints being referred to, so there’s no basis for concluding that they were conservatism in general and/or Christianity in general.

One dear friend of mine is a believing Christian. I’d hazard a guess, from my knowledge of her, that the kind of discussion that takes place here at Crooked Timber would not be her cup of tea, but not because she’d find it abusive of herself.

2. This comment thread is not college. There are lots of conservatives and lots of believing Christians in college, and whatever is going on in this comment thread is no valid basis for a conclusion that they are the targets of abuse in college any more than anybody else.

Anonymousse, could you please clearly state whether a person studying biology and refusing to accept evolution is ignorant? Is a person studying medicine who refuses to accept vaccination facts ignorant? If not, what term would you prefer to use for someone in the academy who rejects basic facts and principles taught in the academy?

I will also point out to you that the movie Soylent green (1973) had global warming as it’s assumed future and this was so in line with established understanding of science at the time that no one has ever commented on the fact. Your global cooling claim is ignorant.

anon/portly

It seems to me that faustusnotes is clearly advocating not engaging with some (perhaps not clearly defined) group of people, and possibly one or two other commenters would take a similar line. However, choosing not to engage with some people is not the same thing as treating them with contempt and disdain. I can think of a few people with whom I have shared workplaces over the years and with whom I would not choose to engage, but (as far as I can recall) I didn’t treat those people with contempt or disdain. I can think of a few commenters here with whom I would not choose to engage, but that’s not the same thing as treating them with contempt or disdain: my reason for choosing not to engage is that, on the basis of my experience of past attempts to do so, I have concluded that future attempts are extremely unlikely to benefit anybody (not me, not them, and not anybody else either). On reflection, that seems to me wise general advice: I think everybody should expect over the course of a lifetime to have the experience of encountering people and finding that there’s nothing to be gained by engaging with those specific people, and generally speaking the wise course in those situations is to avoid engaging with those people. I don’t think that’s the same thing as advocating contempt or disdain.

anon/portly

I suppose more than one interpretation of faustusnotes’s advice is possible, but the one that seems likeliest to me is: ‘people with right-wing politics turn out not to be fun or enlightening or otherwise worth engaging with, so once you find out that somebody has right-wing politics, don’t waste any more of your time on them’.

“If you don’t like everyone, you can’t sell anyone.”

Liking most people and liking most situations is easy if we try.

That is something I tell my students. And it’s much, much easier to negotiate through life by finding something we like, respect, and admire in everyone we encounter. That way I can focus on this part of the beneficial aspects of our negotiated time together and offer sincere complements and feedback, where applicable. Each of us has our own special ugliness, (and in enormous amounts if we’re sufficiently myopic). So what? That gets me nothing.

As a pure intellectual exercise I make it a point of finding ten things I like or admire about the people who possess or display tendencies which I can easily find irksome. And once I do that, I can learn from anyone. Lucky me! I don’t have to like, respect, or be interested in everything about anyone. Every serious student should cultivate that skill.

Conservative or religious people worth avoiding – Einstein; Martin Luther King; all African-American religious churches and their work in oppressed communities (believe in God -hate drugs); the Dalai Lama; Marshall McLuhan; Buddhist monks who fight oppression across Asia; Methodists who do the same; Catholic nuns and priests aiding the poor across the globe; all Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Sikhs, all aboriginal peoples and their cultures, etc. etc.etc. and everyone who prays, worships at, or visits a shrine, temple, holy site, all those animated by faith or who simply believe in the divine beauty of creation. – Garbage people, each and everyone of them. Give them all as wide birth and for the sake of our future keep them out of universities and schools. What a world view! Yuk.

My suggestion in the penultimate sentence of 44 (which J-D also suggests in 45) turns out to be correct, I think. However one thing I did not anticipate is that faustusnotes, to my mind at least, isn’t really talking about “friends” so much as people I would not refer to friends but more as acquaintances. “Acquaintance-friends,” perhaps. He refers to “effort,” a concept I associate much more with acquaintance-friends than with genuine friends.

I can kind of relate to his examples. Generally speaking, if someone comes out with something I think is obviously untrue or nutty, I think it can be helpful to respond, if I respond in the right way. Usually that means, for me, pointing out things that the other person isn’t aware of. I find it best to ask questions, to which you know the answer and they don’t.

To take one of his actual examples, if someone was defending Trump’s immigration policy vis-à-vis the treatment of would-be immigrants, I’d probably just be quiet, since although I’d strongly disagree, I don’t know that I have any useful points to make. I don’t really have a good enough knowledge base of the trend of death and suffering over time. I couldn’t quiz them. On the other hand I think I can speak against anti-immigration ideas more generally. I can sympathize with faustusnotes if he’s hearing crappy stuff like that all the time; I’m not.

On the other hand, I can’t at all relate to this:

Being nice to these people takes a little bit of your energy and a little bit of your soul, and over 30 years of us being nice to them, all that has happened is they have become more strident, more cruel and more dishonest. Engaging them has not changed their minds or made them more moderate, it’s just made them think they’re nice people.

I just don’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about; this seems fine in theory maybe but has nothing to with real life, as I’ve lived it or observed it. I have for example a friend who can be a bit of a right-wing nut. He’s very religious. But he’s my friend! He’s a very interesting and generous person. Of course he’s really not very political, he’s into books, film, theatre. (He’s a member in very good standing of a group film blog). I’ve learned way more from him than he’s learned from me. He may not even vote, for all I know, and he certainly doesn’t donate large sums of money to evil right-wing causes, so I can’t think how anyone would think his presence in the world is making the world worse. I can only think of ways in which it’s making the world better.

One time he came out with the idea that since the church only takes 10%, there was something wrong with the government taking more than that, and I was able to immediately explain to him that no, you’re thinking about taxation the wrong way. There are these goods called “public goods” that you want to buy, and can only buy them via taxation. He got it right away! He’s not stupid. Who has stupid friends?

I also have friends or acquaintance-friends who I think can be nutty in a left-wing way. Some of them seem at times to be appreciative of arguments I make against their points, as they are generally people whose background is more “artsy” or “techie” than academic. They tend not to know or understand economics or public policy ideas (left wing or right wing) very well. In general, I can’t think that of people where I’ve put in effort that I have regretted.

Anyway, I want to reiterate what I think is my real point, the “efficacy” or what works one. To me the spirit of the “there’s something wrong with right-wing people” advice is not only something I find difficult to relate to, with regard to life as it’s actually lived, it’s also just plain bad advice. “Let’s make the world a little worse and more petty” is bad advice. Whereas the spirit of the last paragraph of comment 34, which I can totally relate to, as far as life is actually lived, is great advice. “Let’s make the world better and less petty” is great advice.

Also Harry as an afterthought – we are buggered. The planet is done. It’s too late to fix and the wrong people are in charge. It’s too late to engage with these people now, and time to start apportioning blame.

anon/portly

Who has stupid friends?

Father Ted? The Vicar of Dibley? Rocket J Squirrel?

Lots of people, I should think.

faustusnotes

Also Harry as an afterthought – we are buggered. The planet is done. It’s too late to fix and the wrong people are in charge. It’s too late to engage with these people now, and time to start apportioning blame.

Putting it on a personal level, if I had medical advice definitely confirming that I had a strictly limited time to live, I think I could better things to spend my remaining time and energy on than apportioning blame.

And J-D your terminal illness analogy is way off the mark. It would be more like if you had a completely curable but otherwise fatal illness, you had the diagnosis and the brain scans and the prescription for a cure but your neighbour was stopping you getting to the pharmacist, and your family were telling you should put out for your neighbour because he’s a nice person but he’s just a bit misunderstood.

You’d be rightfully pissed in that situation, and you would be apportioning blame. And you wouldn’t be being nice to your neighbour. So why should I be nice to some right wing thinktank jockey who still believes in the laffer curve and some bullshit 1998 denialist junk about “the pause” and is always reciting crap about “cancel culture” and campus PC? You want me to give that dude my time, put heart and soul into being nice to him? Why would I do that?

faustusnotes, did you miss the bit where I wrote ‘Far be it from me to …’?

I’m not telling or even asking you (or anybody) to ‘put out for some stupid racist chick’ (or to do anything else). I’m not recommending being friends with any particular people, or sharing a bit of one’s soul with any particular people, or spending time with any particular people, or anything at all.

I’m not even suggesting that the strategy Daryl Davis adopted is the best or most effective or that it’s better than other ways he might have chosen to spend his time or even that it was a good idea at all. (He himself makes clear that the reason he started out was to satisfy his own curiosity, which isn’t a bad motive, but is essentially one of concern with the self, not others.) My only point was that some of the people he came in contact with changed (not all of them; he explicitly affirms that some people won’t change). I could instead have mentioned people who have changed not as the result of contact with people like Daryl Davis, but (apparently) largely by themselves (although obviously we’re all affected in some way to some extent by the people we come into contact with), people like Ray Hill and Ingo Hasselbach (I’m sure there are other similar examples, but those happen to be two whose books I’ve read and who I know have pages on Wikipedia).

It’s a fact, contrary to what you appeared to be suggesting, that sometimes Nazis, Klansmen, and other white supremacists change. I don’t suggest that this is something that it’s wise to rely on or that it’s an important part of any strategy for improving the world. It may not be a fact of much importance. But a more accurate understanding is always better than a less accurate understanding.

Yes J-D, Daryl Davis was able to draw some KKKlanners away from their madness. While he was putting all his energy and effort into that, America was drifting to fascism, and now has trans women being murdered on the streets, an open white supremacist in the presidency, and concentration camps for migrants on the southern border. Do you think his energies were well spent?

Well, I don’t think that a main reason that trans women are murdered in the streets is that Daryl Davis made an unwise choice of how to use his energy.

But I also don’t think, I should probably emphasise, that the bare fact that hateful people do sometimes change (with however low a frequency it may be) is in any way a mitigation for the horrible, appalling experiences you have been through, or impinges on the legitimacy of your outrage. The experiences you describe are outrageous and appalling, don’t think I’m disputing that.

It would be more like if you had a completely curable but otherwise fatal illness, you had the diagnosis and the brain scans and the prescription for a cure but your neighbour was stopping you getting to the pharmacist, and your family were telling you should put out for your neighbour because he’s a nice person but he’s just a bit misunderstood.

If I were in that situation I would not put out for my neighbour (it feels odd writing that, because there’s no way that’s what my neighbour wants anyway), and I also would not be thinking my neighbour a nice person.

But I still hope I’d find better activities on which to spend my limited remaining time and energy than apportioning blame. I hope I’d be able to find better people to spend it on than that horrible neighbour. After all, regardless of anything my neighbour (or anybody else) does, I do have to die some time, and I can’t see the percentage in aiming to die angry, bitter, or vengeful.

faustusnotes, you don’t seem to have considered the possibility that a situation in which racism is promoted by people holding positions of power is partly a product of structural political and economic developments.

I find it possible to believe, at the same time, (1) that the choices made by holders of power are influenced by a political and economic context not entirely of their own making and (2) that the choices made by holders of power are still choices, which they could have made differently, and for which they are morally responsible.

I want to learn more about the political and economic context because I desire a deeper understanding, not because I want to excuse or palliate the evil choices being made by powerful people.

For example (one of those you mention): it is true that the Queen could have refused Boris Johnson’s request for prorogation (I doubt it would have done much good if she had, but it was still possible for her to do so), but it was never a realistic expectation that there was any chance she would. If you understand how the system works, you can recognise that, and not pin any hopes on a fantasy; if you don’t understand how the system works, you can get caught, disadvantageously, by surprise.