Category Archives: Writing

A psychoanalytically inclined friend of mine once told me that you can tell the important dreams not because you know what they mean, but because you can’t get them out of your head. As an anthropologist I’ve noticed something similar about ethnographic fieldwork: You live through moments that immediately seem important to you, but it is only after chewing them over that you realize why. I had one such moment recently that taught me, deep down, that I firmly believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. This insight came to me late last month in the course of having my ass kicked repeatedly by Kael’thas Sunstrider, son of Anasterian, prince of Quel’Thalas, and servant of Kil’jaeden the Deceiver.

Fear and Humiliation as Legitimate Teaching Methods.By Alex Golub

This is one of those ‘academic exercises’ that pop up now and again, perfectly designed to bring out the cynic in my professorial soul. In the end, it’s a circular argument: in a game designed to encourage people to see themselves as violent competitors, people tend to respond to humiliation and fear. As if a game called World of Warcraft would encourage loving cooperation.

The best way to gain publicity and become an academic star is to say things that sound ‘shocking’ to the very staid U.S. intellectual community. I say ‘sound’ becuase in most cases, like Camille Paglia’s wild and wacky ways, nothing said is really particularly unusual outside the ivory covered Puritanical walls. Maybe I am wrong and Golub is simply trying out a rough thesis, poking a stick in the ant pile to see what might happen.

The ‘fear and humiliation’ that he finds pedagogically effective in W.O.W. is nothing new in a competitive, arguably falsely meritocratic education system. Even the nicest teachers are forced to use the ‘fear and humiliation’ of grading; tenure is no bed of roses. Education may not be war, but it’s methods are hardly benign. As he suggests, it’s one important way we all learned how the world worked.

McCain Hammers Away at ‘Spreading the Wealth’

Elizabeth Holmes reports from Manchester, N.H., on the presidential race.

John McCain continues to hint that Barack Obama’s economic policies teeter on socialism. He harped on the Democrat’s “spread the wealth” line at a New Hampshire rally Wednesday.

“Before government can redistribute wealth, it has to confiscate wealth from those who earned it,” McCain yelled to the crowd of about 2,000 at Saint Anselm’s college in Goffstown, N.H.

“Whatever the right word is for that way of thinking—” McCain then paused slightly, allowing someone in the crowd to fill in the blank. “Socialism!” a voice shouted.

McCain continued: “The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now. In these tough economic times, we don’t need government ‘spreading the wealth,’ we need policies that create wealth and spread opportunity.”

Washington Wire – WSJ.com : McCain Hammers Away at ‘Spreading the Wealth’.

When I got my first computer– an Apple IIe, bought with the money left me by my Uncle Benson– it was both a novelty and a very useful tool. If someone wanted to come over to my house and use it to write a resume (a nightmare on a typewriter) that was fine. More than a few of my friends took me up on the offer.

That seemed more like common sense than generosity. Why should the computer sit there unused when it could be used to take a tiny little bit of headache out of the world. I was reminded of that computer several times over the last several weeks, beginning with Governor Palin’s mocking, even angry sarcasm about community service.

The rhetoric of selfishness, always a staple of Republican economics, has reached a kind of crescendo recently; McCain is now mocking Obama’s reasonable idea that in hard times we need to be willing to “share the wealth.” They’ve even brought back some good old cold war sniping, calling him a near-socialist (what we once jokingly called a “pinko”).

This argument against generosity goes back to Nixon, at least, but flowered during the “greed is good” Reagan administration, around the same time I bought that first computer. It’s a kind of radical market libertarianism that has brought us most of our current economic problems, as even Alan Greenspan now admits. It can’t be allowed to win again.