Interacting with Texts: An October 2, 2004 Update

My question in this lecture:  What do you do with a novel, or a play, or a movie, or a story, or a poem—when you see one?  That is, how do you interact with texts?  A second point:  What’s so important about reading, anyway? 

At the outset, a key point to remember is that you do not learn to read well by listening to lectures like this one.  The only way to become a good reader, or a good cyclist, or a good computer user, is practice.  Only practice makes perfect.  So, the most important advice I can give you is: READ BOOKS.  Once you do that, the comments I am going to make here may help you become a better reader.   

 

Retellling (=summary=synopsis)

Mike Rose says:  I couldn't imagine a more crucial skill than summarizing; we can't manage information, make crisp connections, or rebut arguments without it. The great syntheses and refutations are built on it.

To summarize, I close the book—repeat, close the book and--straight from my head to the keyboard--retell what I’ve just heard.  Points to remember:

·                       Focus on important aspects, not trivia—separate wheat from chaff

·                       Don’t say too much

·                       Don’t say too little

Let’s practice this for a second, looking at yesterday’s headline from our very own DFP:

 

INSURGENCY VIOLENCE: 35 Iraqi children die in suicide attack

U.S. troops had been giving candy to kids  October 1, 2004

By Patrick Kerkstra And Yasser Salihee (Free Press Foreign Correspondents)

àLet’s now close the “book” and recap the headline.

 

2.  Interpretation=moral of story=point author is trying to make.

Whether we realize it or not, we don’t tell stories to just enjoy ourselves.  We tell them to make a point, to instruct, to enlighten, to champion a cause of some sort.  Let’s illustrate this through a few examples:

·                       3 Little Piggies (build your house on solid foundations; invest in the future)

·                       Sometimes it takes a tremendous amount of reading skill to get the point.  In other words, sometimes the point is lost on almost ALL readers (that is how you can tell the ladies from the girls):  Joke:  (our text, p. 233-234)

·                       Sometimes, interpretation involves reading between the lines, deciphering the hidden assumptions that underlie the story.  Also, sometimes the writer deliberately tries to get us to form a certain impression.  Every advertiser uses this trick.  Let’s look at the DFP headline again.

 

3.  Connecting to your own life

Whether you realize it or not, everything we read or watch or hear forever changes us, if ever so slightly.  It changes our way of looking at the world, and it sometimes even changes the way we react to it.  That is why people write, because they want to transform us.  If they are decent, they try to transform us because they think this transformation is good for us.  If they are selfish, they try to transform us because they think this transformation is good for them.

Now, can you connect Asimov to your own life?  Did it change you ideas about what intelligence is?  Does his joke help you boost your own self-confidence (that is, help you feel that we are all intelligent, each in his own unique way)? 

 

4.  Critical Thinking

 

 

But all this is chickenfeed, practically, compared to the most important level of interacting with texts.  Whatever we see, or hear, or feel, or smell, or touch must be screened, filtered, safeguarded against, analyzed.  First example is trivial, and yet telling.   Examine the Detroit Free Press’s October 1, 20004 weather chart.  Now, bearing in mind that they have a choice of 6,000 cities, do you see anything peculiar here.  In case your geography is weak, let me help you.  First, Africa is a vast continent, mostly inhabited by blacks.  Yet, there are only 2 African cities in that map, and a significant proportion of both is NOT black.  Here is something even more peculiar—Israel, a country the size of Rhode Island, is mentioned twice.  Now, you can walk from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in ONE day, and they always have roughly the same weather (except that Jerusalem’s weather is drier and more pleasant).  What is going on here? Second example: Commercials.  They belong to the category of propaganda, of language that is being used to take advantage of us, to swindle us, to cheat us, to make us lose our critical faculties.  They appeal to the snake part of our brain, not to the human part.  The underlying assumption of every commercial is that we are dumb, that we can be swayed in whichever direction.  Well, commercials work, which shows that, in some ways at least, they are right and that we’re pretty stupid.  And this is the first step to wisdom:  Knowing that indeed we’re not all that smart.  Once we know that our brains are imperfect, we can take precautions.  Tom Paine, the most courageous and idealistic founding father, said:  My Mind is My Church.  So, one critical stance: avoid commercials.  That is what I do.  I know they are brain poison, so I avoid them like the plague!   For instance, I listen to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (FM 89.9)—the only commercial-free radio in Michigan I know of, and not to National Public Radio--which, despite the name, has commercials galore.  I haven't had a TV set for the past 30 years.  I protect the only church I have, the best part of me, the only part of me that a chimpanzee doesn’t have.  Another tactic:  THINK.  What is important to you in a car?  Environmental friendliness, reliability, durability, MPG, safety, cost.  FORD studiously avoids talking about all that.  Why:  because their cars are not environmentally friendly, not reliable, not durable, not safe, use too much gasoline, and are too costly.  Fix Or Repair Daily.  Found On the Road Dead.  These are not jokes!  Ford assumes that we are too stupid to tell junk from quality, that we’re too smugly self-confident to seek independent expert advice.  They wholeheartedly agree with Bertrand Russell that "there is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority."  Prove them wrong!  Think! Third Example:  The Punch & Judy Show (contemporary politics):    An election is no more than a gratuitous Punch and Judy show, offered by the rulers to distract the attention of the ruled--Aldous Huxley If Huxley is right—your task:  Do not let them distract you.  Fact, 1% of Americans own half of America. Fact:  They like it that way.  Fact:  They want 60% of America, if they can get it, then 70%, 80%, 90%, 99% . . ..  Fact:  They own the media. Fact:  Every item in the news is meant to distract us from this unchristian, un-Buddhist, indecent state of affairs.  They never tell us we could turn Detroit into a paradise!  They make us forget that it’s a crime to have people sleep under a bridge in -10ºC; that it’s a crime to have millions of hungry children in America and hundreds of millions the world over.  They make us forget that the USA kills, every day, a score of Iraqi children, and that by now, our embargo of and wars against Iraq killed over 500,000 children.  Let’s divide 500,000 by 3000—167 World Trade Center (a critical thinker always has a calculator handy—they are not going to calculate anything for you). Fact: it’s always been like that:  Tom Jefferson (1807):  I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.

 

 

What can critical readers do? 

a. Unplug, unsubscribe, disconnect.  You’d be better off going to college, reading books, fishing, standing on your head, smoking even (I mean this--if forced to read the New York Times every day or smoke a pack of cigarettes every day, I'd reluctantly smoke--better poison my lungs than my brain), than having anything to do with the media, or with Bush, Kerry, et al.  You call that a debate?  Huxley calls it a Punch and Judy show.  Huxely says we’re already living the Brave New World he thought would be 600 years in the coming.  But disconnecting from the media is a tall order.  If you don’t have what it takes to disconnect, the second best remedy is CRITICAL THINKING and BOOKS.

Let’s illustrate this with yesterday’s news.  And let’s look again at our own DFP.  Here are the beginnings of 3 news tidbits, all from October 1, 2004, DFP

Fla. storms delay burials, add to grief:  FT. PIERCE, Fla. -- The four-in-a-row hurricanes that have disrupted lives across Florida have also delayed life's final journey for many. Funerals have been put off for weeks in some places because the ground is too soggy for burials or scattered family members cannot be assembled.

Metro Detroit record: 23 days without rain: Today's weather in metro Detroit will break records. . .  23 consecutive days without rain -- the longest stretch of dry days in metro Detroit since records have been kept.

Meari death toll hits 19: The death toll from tropical storm Meari rose to 19 Thursday after searchers found more victims, including two men buried inside their homes beneath mud and debris that barreled down a mountainside in southern Japan.

àCan you detect an oddity here?  A pattern?

Now, most people stumble across such information and go on to something else.  A critical thinker doesn’t.  Instead, she asks herself, “Whatever happened to the weather?”  She is not just passively taking things in, but filtering them, connecting one story to another and trying to make sense of the tabloid mess.  DFP inadvertently provides the first clue, still on the same day:

Approval near on global warming pact:  Russia's cabinet approved the Kyoto Protocol on global warming Thursday, clearing the way for worldwide adoption of the pact -- despite U.S. opposition -- once the Russian parliament ratifies it as expected.  The protocol must be ratified by at least 55 countries that accounted for at least 55 percent of global emissions in 1990.

àI looked around for some clue about the meaning of this in yesterday’s USA’s press.  Nada. So I went to the Australian. 

US resists Russian embrace of Kyoto
A correspondent in Washington (02oct04)
THE US stood firm in rejecting the Kyoto Protocol on global warming yesterday despite renewed pressure to yield after Russia ended years of hesitation by moving to ratify the treaty. The protocol requires industrialised signatories to trim output of six "greenhouse" gases by 2008-2012 compared with their 1990 levels. Those changes carry an economic cost to consumers, a threat to vested interests and a challenge to lifestyles. Kyoto has run into a fierce crossfire from the oil lobby and from conservatives such as US President George W. Bush. The US, which by itself accounts for a quarter of global carbon pollution, walked away from Kyoto in 2001, saying the pact was too costly and unfair because developing countries were not bound to make specific pollution cuts. Australia, too, has refused to sign the treaty. Without the US on board, the overall reduction in emissions is likely to be 0.6 per cent if Kyoto is honoured, well below the initial target of 5.2 per cent, according to the US-based environment group World Resources Institute. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hailed Russia's move. "This is the essential first step in tackling the planetary challenge posed by climate change," Mr Annan said in a statement.

àNotice that the story is still sympathetic to the US position—after all, the Australians are our allies, colonizing with us in Iraq for example, and they too refuse to sign the treaty.  They do not, however, have oil. 

So far, reading the newspapers—lots of them, from all over the world—helped us develop a sense of unease:  What’s going on with the world’s climate?  Hurricanes galore (worst in over 100 years), record draughts, the world is warming up maybe.  An insane Kofi Annan ?  Albert Einstein himself would be helpless to decipher the meaning of this disconnected mess.  He too would need to add something to the equation:  Selectively reading.  He would conduct an intelligent internet search and find this: 

1,575 scientists signed the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity in 1992, including more than half of all living scientists awarded the Nobel Prize. More and more add their names to this momentous document. We must all broadcast this alarm. The imminent ecological collapse facing the natural world cries out for immediate global action.

World Scientists' Warning to Humanity

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage to the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision.

àAh!  Collision course you said?  Could the MI draught, CA fires, and FL hurricanes be merely symptoms of that collision?  Could it be that the two worst terrorist nations on earth (and we’re talking about billions of people) are the USA and Australia—who refuse to sign this treaty.

But wait a moment, a critical thinker might say, didn’t the Australian imply that the USA is right, that “the pact is too costly”?  It sure did, but ask yourself? Who owns The Australian?  Readers beware!  So, let’s continue our exploration of what independent scientists say.  To do that, we must give the corporate media (e.g, DFP) the slip.  Let’s see what 95% of all scientists say. 

According to the National Academy of Sciences (1994, p. 240), "a consensus is emerging that, for the United States alone, a cut in total CO₂ emissions by some 18% would save some $56 billion per year.   A US Department of Energy study (1997) agreed, but felt the savings would be lower. 

Other estimates put the net saving at $200 billion or more.  That is what >95% of the world’s scientists say.  Saving the earth and our health would cost us LESS than nothing.

Critical thinkers now pause in amazement.  Are all these scientists saying that we can stop the hurricanes, draughts, flooding in low coastal areas, melting glaciers, AND rising cancer rates, rising asthma rates, rising ozone alerts, AND SAVE MONEY?  Let’s grab that calculator again:  $100,000,000,000/100,000,000 households gives us $1000 a year, healthier air, and a future?  How could that be?  Am I a Hotel California inmate masquerading as a Saturday Afternoon Lecturer? 

Well, once you are awake, once you get hold of books, a calculator, and a critical brain, you can answer such questions on your own.  Remember the Asimov joke?  If given a chance, we’re all intelligent.  Sleepwalking is not a natural state. 

We shall one day recover our ability to put 2 and 2 together, or to know an equality sign when we see one (Bush=Kerry=Oil business).  The tragedy is that, by then, it may be too late  Everyone is happy to use the gifts of science, but not the critical thinking that made such gifts possible. 

History, H.G. Wells said, is a race between education and catastrophe.  He might have been right, and now we’re getting close to the wire (25 years? 100?)..  So, don’t plant white pines.  Don’t buy FL real estate.  Don’t buy Maldives real estate.  Don’t buy southern CA real estate.  Don’t buy LA real estate.  Get out of England if you live there, while the getting out is still good.  Escape Bangladesh, Haiti, the Maldives.  Don’t buy any real estate; live instead in a hotel, with 2 suitcases and a gold bar, ready to move on, to a less hot, less “patriotic” place.  Move some of your money to a Swiss bank, before the USA goes into Chapter 11.   Educate yourself, not as if your life depends on it, but because your life does depend on it.  Educate your friends.  Read books, not newspapers.  Talk to wise people old enough to speak their mind.  Take a good critical thinking class.  Filter everything.  Chuck your TV.   And, for heaven’s sake,

READ GOOD BOOKS!

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