What is Left Unsaid
I teach research writing – which often means that I’m teaching young people to find answers that are staring them right in the face. I question whether I’m that good at it, though there are observations that I’m coming to that may or may not make me better at it in the future.
The information I use largely comes from a rather fine, free textbook called Bad Ideas About Writing – it’s a creative commons publication out of the West Virginia Department of Education. Part of why I like it is that the titles of individual pieces are things like “Some People Are Just Born Good Writers” or “The Five Paragraph Essay is Rhetorically Sound” – the titular “bad ideas”. The sorts of students that don’t read will assume that the title tells them everything they know and they can just make up what it says. They miss, of course, the fact that the pieces in question say the opposite of the titles.
One of the pieces that I use is entitled “Research Starts With Answers”. This, oftentimes, accurately describes how people use research: they decide what they want to say, and they hunt for sources that say the exact thing that they want to say. Given the fact that the internet is producing “content” at a fantastic rate, they can generally dive into the word slurry and find a quote that seems to support just about anything. Who cares if you have a sentence from a pre-Civil War Supreme Court Justice in your paper on Social Media? Brainyquote (or wikiquote, or any number of quote-centered websites) spat it out for you, so it must be valid. The website has “quote” right there in the title.
But I don’t teach causistry or sophistry. I teach research.
My approach is simple when I have the time: by the second week of class, students must articulate a research question. For the next six weeks, they research that question — both by going through the library databases and through on-the-ground research of their own choosing — and only after they have done all of that and summarized their findings without interpreting it can they take the step of articulating an answer to their question. They then need to make a thesis statement for their paper out of that answer and prove it.
The necessary thing here is reflection. You cannot figure out what you actually think if you’re under pressure to have a take. Failing to recognize this is one of the great burdens of Freshman writing: you feel that everything you put to paper must be the most consequential thing you have yet written. You will then never read back over what you have put down on paper, and most likely be embarrassed by it within six weeks.
Many people — and I acknowledge I regress here myself, though I flatter myself to say only from time to time — never really leave this stage. They have a take they came up with off the cuff, now they must defend it with their life by any means necessary, or it means that they are a Bad Writer and a Stupid Person. It is virtuous to stick to one’s guns.
Failing to stick to one’s guns, of course, means the worst fate possible: being immortalized on novelty footwear.
This is, frankly, not the case.
True intellectual virtue comes from weighing the information and coming to a conclusion. Crucially, it means changing your position when you learn new information.
This is why I cringe when I hear the phrase “Do your own research!” it often bespeaks of such a bad research process that it hints at what I might call a mutant epistemology. Largely because the impulse, for many of the people who say this, is to go to YouTube.
However, there is another problem — one that I have failed to fully control for in the past and which I am trying to figure out how to address properly. That’s the problem where there is what appears to be an obvious answer after you consult the information, but for one reason or another, the right answer is somehow forbidden.
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Okay, look, let’s start with the basics: I’m fat. I may have big bones, I may have broad shoulders, I may be making an effort not to slouch, but — beyond all of that — I am fat. For some reason, one of the favored topics for students in my classes is obesity, which tends to be framed as a sin on par with smoking (I am also a smoker, but for some reason they rarely write on this topic. Apparently smokers know what they’re doing will kill them, but the morbidly obese need to be informed.)
Shout out to the Maintenance Phase podcast. It’s been keeping me sane.
Importantly, I have never read a bad paper about smoking but I have never read a good paper about obesity. The reason for this is that smoking is a behavior and obesity is a physical trait, but it is impossible for the students who want to write on this issue to conceive of the distinction. Interestingly, I have never read a paper implying that another character trait that has similar negative health effects — such as, say, left-handedness should be surgically corrected, but there is one students every few semesters that seems to think they can get a good grade by suggesting that I should have my organs surgically rearranged to correct a defect.
I am, admittedly, very salty about having to give space to such discussions, but it illustrates my issue: we can acknowledge that calories in, calories out is garbage science, we can acknowledge the problems with BMI, including the fact that millions of Americans were relabeled overweight or obese without gaining a pound, presumably based on a very large donation from pharmaceutical companies with an interest in weight loss medication. The big Other says you’re fat and should be punished for it.
As a reminder: the big Other is a term from Lacanian psychoanalysis — it’s what he had instead of Freud’s Superego. It’s not exactly your conscience, it’s more the hypothetical person who knows, thinks, believes, and feels what “Everybody” does. Even if no individual person knows, thinks, believes, or feels that way, we imagine this hypothetical “Everybody” to do it.
I can take the time to talk each zoomer who thinks their metabolism is never going to ever slow down through what the problems are with this line of thinking, but at the end of the semester the clock restarts. Because I am bothered by this issue, I have to forbid the discussion or agree to be sealioned through my professional career.
“Sealioning” is a kind of trolling. Term coined based on this Wondermark strip from 2014.
However, there is also the issue that I cannot simply present all of this information directly to such students. They’ll simply take it, write a disingenuous paper based on this research, and continue to believe what they believed before, having learned the lesson that they should simply tell authority figures what they want to hear in an effort to get ahead.
Beyond that, it would simply be improper for me to dictate to a student what they can and cannot write. That doesn’t achieve the goal of teaching them research writing.
(The answer is that, from now on, the topic is forbidden. I don’t want to read it, and they don’t want to have to deal with me while I’m reading it. I’ve done that before, and I got such excellent papers. I eventually dropped the rule, forgetting why I had it to begin with.)
The question is, frankly: how do you get someone to change their mind away from what “everyone” believes without setting up an artificial big Other for them?
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Okay, beyond just the fact that I don’t like having 19 year olds tell me that I’m morally deficient for not getting unnecessary bariatric surgery, the most obvious place where this comes up is in regard to capitalism. Now, this may come as a surprise to many of you, but I’m not a fan. However, while I allow myself snide comments every now and then, it obviously wouldn’t be appropriate for me to make adherence to this point of view a prerequisite to pass my class.
I mean, even if you ignore all of the atrocities of the 19th and early 20th centuries — all the kids killed in factories and forests turned into factory farms — even if we’re just reduced to talking statistics, how could you be a fan of this?
But if a student is writing about climate change and their solution is that everyone should recycle, set up a rain barrel, and ride a bike more, I find it impossible not to point out that individual choices are a vanishingly small part of the problem. I hold my tongue on the conclusion, but it seems — to me — to be obvious that these solutions being proposed are just lifestyle approaches that don’t touch the real meat of the issue. I don’t want to tell young people what to think, but it seems as if they’re being told by everyone else what to think and not really weighing the alternatives.
They’ve decided that they want nothing to change, so they will argue for nothing to change. I despair, because the effects will persist so long as we continue to love the cause.
Outside of the classroom, I can be more strident, but that doesn’t change the fact that I recognize that people are more likely to accept an idea as true if they can arrive at it themselves, but securing the bag means believing that the bag is good and proper, and we’ve all been put in a position where we will be starving, homeless, raving on the street if we don’t secure it. I may survive that situation a bit longer because I’ve got a layer of subcutaneous fat to keep me moving a bit longer, but it doesn’t mean I want to be in that position any more than you do.
Still, if you look beyond your own short-term needs, at the bills that come in every month, aren’t you stuck wondering why those bills show up at your door? We live on the only known planet where breathable air is free and food comes out of the ground if you put in the effort, doesn’t it seem a bit messed up that you’ve got to pay for health insurance that doesn’t actually cover anything? That you have to pay the lion’s share of your paycheck for the right to be under a roof that doesn’t keep you dry when it rains?
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And now we arrive at what’s been plaguing me for nearly a month: the conflict in Gaza. I have heard many people say that the situation is complex. It is not. Genocide is very simple, actually, and I feel comfortable saying that it’s always wrong. The problem is that the dominant narrative in the international order is that this one is perfectly fine.
Before I continue, there are two points I wish to make: I do not support Hamas and the state of Israel is not synonymous with the Jewish religion. The fact that I need to make these statements is precisely the issue. Criticism of Israel in the west is taken to be not simply antisemitism but, specifically, affiliation with or loyalty to its enemy.
Maybe call and tell off the democratic representatives who voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American representative who is watching her community be destroyed.
I am trying to educate myself on the situation, but the more I learn about it, the more it seems to me that there is no complexity to this issue, there is simply an unwillingness to say that Palestinians should be allowed to exist in their homeland and should be allowed to do so free of interference. This is why — as Edgar noted in their book reviews last week — we encourage everyone to donate to Doctors Without Borders or Jewish Voice for Peace. I might also throw in there the Palestinian Red Crescent, and suggest that you call your congressperson to insist on a cease fire.
This is not to say that I can’t understand the Israeli position — it’s simply that I don’t fully sympathize with it. I think a very telling window into this comes from folk singer and scholar of diasporic Judaica Daniel Kahn’s song ”The Jew In You”, where he writes:
If victimhood was always part of what it means to be a Jew,
then security was the kind of offer that we could not refuse,
who wouldn’t want to win, when all we had ever done was lose?
And so we turned our backs on what had brought our people through.
In short, it is entirely understandable for a people who have been historically persecuted to such a degree would want the safety of a homeland. But does not “never again” mean “never again for anybody”? As Kahn notes in yet another song, “Dumai”:
Without justice, without peace
just a dream become a beast
Where will exile draw the line?
in Israel or Palestine?”
The desire for safety and security is understandable, but the wrongs cannot be fixed by replicating them. You cannot dispossess one people to give another people a homeland, and call that justice. You cannot act as if both parties are culpable when one party has the ability to turn off the other party’s water and electricity at will. You can’t say that both parties are equally guilty when one party has spent the past month bombing hospitals.
Of course, there have been stories about atrocities on the Palestinian side, but the most notable ones have been walked back. In any case, the sheer amount of misinformation has spawned a long and growing wikipedia page.
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But, you might ask, doesn’t that mean that the United States — also a settler-colonialist state — should be broken apart? After all, aren’t Americans the descendants of outsiders who came and stole the land of the Native Americans?
Well, here’s the thing: morality is sort of like that topology problem about the hairy ball: it’s impossible to comb it flat, there’s always a cowlick. You can’t construct a system of moral or ethical postulates that doesn’t have an inconsistency in it. It just, simply, cannot be done.
See? Now, if you’ve got a hairy donut, no problem. The topologists have solved that one, but a sphere? No.
With that being said, the answer to the above question is “yes”.
The position is called decolonization, and it has many adherents the world over. It even has specific nations who take a decolonial stance on many issues — including the Republic of Ireland (I have problems with Ireland’s corporate law, but it seems to me that they’re a damned sight better than most other states.)
Decolonization, however, is not simply about packing everything European onto a big boat and sending it back to Europe — what would x% of me go back to France, y% back to the British Isles, and z% of me go back to Germany? — it’s not even fully about trying to undo the harms of the past: it’s about trying to correct them for the future. This cannot be done while the indigenous population is marginalized. This cannot be achieved when they are forced off to the side and prevented from exercising power.
This piece is long and rambling, but this is the same issue: if a thief takes something, they don’t get to keep it. This is something taught to children. Our ancestors stole this land, so why are we keeping it? Is this not, also, an obvious answer that we simply don’t want to give?
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Of course, something being the “obvious answer” is the problem. Just because it’s been proven to me doesn’t mean that the proof will satisfy the person I’m talking to. What is obvious to me might be alien gobbledygook to someone who’s begun to slide down the opposite political trajectory, and more than once I’ve been told by a friend who has done no research on the subject that “yeah, but that’s not really how it works, surely,” when I do something like read the text of the 13th Amendment to the US constitution and point out that we never got rid of slavery.
It makes me feel like Copernicus, holding up the simple math proving the heliocentric model, talking to someone who just shakes his head and says “what do you mean, the sun’s so small, how could we be going around it?”
I don’t know, man, maybe do some research before deciding it’s fake.
And I come back here and type up a post like this, and — as I hit “publish”, I hear Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s voice in my head, saying “You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.”
But maybe, one day, it might actually add up to something. It might actually prove something.
Possibly.
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