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Let's Talk About SACS, Baby!

Since returning to South Florida one of the inevitable questions I’ve been asked by friends and family is “Where are you working?” and my response has been “Right now, I’m not because I can’t. I re-enrolled in graduate school so I can.” While I’ll not go into the reasons why I’m not pursuing non-academic career options right now, suffice it to say people are confused by this response as I’d received a Masters degree from N.Y.U. What I want to accomplish with this article is explain to in some detail why this is so and to mention an objection to the new regulatory framework outlined by the Department of Education (D.O.E.) as manifested in the form the Southern Assocation of Colleges and Schools (SACS) that has resulted in my inability to obtain a position in Florida.

At the beginning of my second year at NYU, in 2010, the hiring guidelines for university professors that had held across America for more than seventy years was changed. As I was focusing on my graduate studies, I was unaware of its adoption. In a largely unreported policy shift, colleges across the country were given two years to align themselves with the new guidelines and those that failed to comply to them would result in punishment appropriate to the severity of the infraction. A warning could be given for something small or DOE accreditation could be revoked for something large. Schools not yet accredited via DOE affiliated institutions or who have had their licensure revoked, it should be noted, are ineligible for government funding. Ostensibly, lacking the ability to directly impose it’s will upon state and local educational institutions, the federal government threatened to starve those that did not comply. The new regulatory framework was not overly drastic nor contemptible, but this does not mean that they are insignificant either. In fact for students, professors and administrators there’s a whole lot that has changed.

For one, the passing of the reforms backed by the Obama administration resulted in the consolidation of various collegiate accreditation agencies by stating that only a few of them would be eligible for federal funding. The quasi-governmental bodies which report to the Department of Education were reduced in number to regional bodies, which would now be in charge of all the schools and universities in their district. There are several reasons for doing this, the most obvious being a reduction of redundancy as there are a large number of institutions that deem themselves licensing agencies for colleges and universities. Examples of these could include the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Commission on Collegiate Nursing (ABN), the International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education (IACBE), the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). While previously each of these would have been involved in the accreditation of a college or university’s Nursing School or Business School – their pre-existing requirements are now subsumed under the policy guidelines of the regional commissions on colleges. Those schools must follow these guidelines as well as those of the regional Commission on Colleges.

Creating a set of guidelines which applies to these various enterprises doesn’t mean they have been divested of crediting power, but simply increases standardization of grading for schools across various regions. This policy thankfully provides increased ease for students wishing to transfer credits to other universities. With curriculum and standards at one university basically aligned with others there is less likelihood that transfer credits would be denied, thus making credits received at a community or state college valid at another should a student decide to transfer to a state or private university.

While I’ve had no personal experience with this, my wife’s dual-enrollment experience is illustrative of the problem some students have faced. While in high school, prior to the adoption of the new SACS standards in 2010, Josselyn entered a dual-enrollment program at Broward College. She received twenty-four university credits while enrolled, but was unable to use only nine of these credits when she transferred to Nova Southeastern University. The time that she had spent in attending and studying for the classes and the money spent by the state for her education were, in essence, wasted as she was forced to retake those classes which she had already passed.

Today, this would not happen due to this form of stronger consumer protections. Also worth mentioning in passing is the additional function the new regulatory regime has is: giving it the power to prevent schools not authorized by the DOE from advertising that they are an “accredited school”. This is in large part a response to the proliferation of online diploma mills that have hoodwinked those that paid for courses and received degrees which other, more reputable and established accrediting agencies don’t view as valid. To accomplish this type of academic credit compatibility amongst the universities requires a degree of standardized hiring practices and movement towards a uniform curriculum. If this process sounds familiar, it should. The consolidation of regional values and goals into a singular, national pattern is based on the federal government’s initiation of K-12 school curriculum standards and learning goals.

In my discussions with university representatives on Broward College, Palm Beach State College and FAU, I’ve learned that many of the professors in the humanities were dismissed prior to the start of this academic year because their academic record was not on par with the newly adopted SACS rubric. Professors that had been hired to teach American political science on the due to their having graduated law school rather than an M.A. or Ph.D. in that field have been let go. History professors who were teaching introductory level political science classes without 18 graduate credits in that field were cut – even if they’d taught the class any number of times before. Speaking with professors, those that have degrees specialized in a certain area are no longer allowed to teach classes on something else.

This means that someone like me, who focused their graduate studies on political science and history (24 of 32 total graduate credits plus my masters thesis) but did not have 18 credits solely in either are not eligible to teach either. While I do find the situation I’m in loathsome, I am generally in favor for such a model of credentialing as subject area expertise emerges from a significant amount of field research and those that are only partially familiar with a subject should not be passed off as someone that has mastered the material and is thus able to teach it. What I do take issue with these standards for accreditation are the certain ambiguities of assessment not addressed by SACS or the COC. Simply put, people who actively pursue academic careers do not just read field literature for credit but as part of an ongoing enrichment process and the current model doesn’t account for this.

On average, I read from three to seven books a month and according to these new standards, my “personal research” isn’t within the framework of SACS credentialing and are thus are not “credited” to me. It is this situation that has caused me to start writing responses to most of the books that I’ve been reading in the past several months.

With this in mind I feel that there needs to be other options for university professors to develop their professional standing without being forced to pay for courses in or out of their field – especially at a time when the humanities are under attack and thus the options available for “crediting” via free tuition benefits are reduced. If this seems somewhat abstract, let me give you an example.

Because of their historical and political relevance to my own field of expertise, I’ve read quite a large number of utopian and dystopian novels as well as the historical context of their emergence and comparative literature responses to them. While I wouldn’t qualify myself as “comparative literature” professor per se, I would not only feel comfortable leading a undergraduate level class on this topic but would do so without any sense that I was providing them a sub-par education. A similar standard holds true to Nietzsche’s philosophy, Marxian interpretations of society, etc. and especially in the situation I find myself in now where I have to take more credits to become a SACS credentialed history and political science professor.

Now I don’t know whether or not SACS will make room for this in the future, but I would imagine that as they are still coping with the transitions of the new regulatory frameworks I don’t think it will do so soon. However I do think this is something to be considered seriously now rather than seventy years down the road.

Review of "A New Earth"

There are few books with which I have had more difficulty in getting through than A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. It was not the density of his prose, my inability to grasp what was being written but that I was constantly writing critical comments in the margins next to absurd propositions conceived of as esoteric nuggets of wisdom and my constant state of surprise at the logical leaps that he made, not to mention it’s lack of academic rigor. While adherence to generally standardized regulations for intellectual compositions aren’t something most people use when making value judgements about what they are reading, especially in the realm of popular literature, caring more for the “feelings” it gives them instead, it is worth noting those objections in order to better ascertain the validity of Tolle’s position.

There are a total of thirty citations found in the Notes section of A New Earth and of these there are a total of twelve different texts. 19 of them are from the New Testament, two are from Shakespeare, and there is one each from works by Hafiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, one of the Upanishads, A Course In Miracles, a New York Times article and a statistic for the U.S. Department of Justice. While it is common to relate one’s own positions to the literature which came before it in order to show knowledge and mastery of material – we see here that Tolle doesn’t do this and that one of the intellectually troubling aspects of the book is in its use of other people’s perspectives to justify his own position when they fundamentally disagree with him.

One such example of this occurs on page 235, where Tolle quotes Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For happiness, how little suffices for happiness! … the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance – little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.” Just as there are lies, dirty lies and statistics – any person who has been trained with high standards of academic discipline will tell you that it is quite easy to misrepresent someone by decontextualizing a quote. This Tolle does by saying that this is evidence that Nietzsche, a seminal authority on human thought as the forefather of depth psychology, justifies his position that it is the simplest things in life, like nature, which lead to the greatest happiness.

For one, there is the explicit claim that a character through which Nietzsche used to clarify some of his own positions, Zarathustra, is in fact Nietzsche himself. As a variation of the bildungsroman and as other scholars working of Nietzsche’s oeuvre have noted, it is clear that all that Zarathustra says is in fact not meant to indicate Nietzsche’s final position as it evolves over the course of his life any more than we are to take Werther to be Goethe, or Kierkegaard to be any of his many pen names. This is not to say that Nietzsche did not use Zarathustra as a mouthpiece for some of his ideas, but Nietzsche’s use of irony and writing style defies any such cut and paste hermeneutics. We able to discern this not just through Tolle’s misattribution of who spoke the text but by looking further in his work to see if the two actually share the same notion of happiness.

It is widely noted by Nietzsche scholars that as a result of his philosophical and psychological investigations he did not propound that the type of “happiness” which Tolle describes (and ascribes to Nietzsche) was the ideal to which human being do or ought to aspire. As noted Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kauffman puts it in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, in a statement that seems almost to anticipate Tolle’s misreading: “Every pleasurable sensation, however trivial – the smell of a flower or the taste of cold water – is valued for his own sake. The indefinite addition of such pleasures, however, does not make for happiness…” (Kauffman 279). The dissonance between their notions of happiness is not unique and there are many other points of departure.

In addition to this quote used by Tolle, there is other evidence of his misprision of Nietzsche as a supporter of the “inner space” happiness that Tolle claims is a state to which people should aspire. Shortly following this quotation, Tolle writes that people should focus just on the “being conscious” and “add nothing to it” so that all of the physical attributes fall away and you thus connect to the “spacious womb of creation (Tolle 236). While Nietzsche recognized that one could attempt to negate oneself though such a practice, he felt that doing so was not a sign of spiritual strength but of weakness. Tolle wants to negate conflict and drama, whereas Nietzsche sees these as the human, all to human qualities which can lead people to greatness and self-overcoming. The areas of divergence between the two are myriad, yet the reader uninformed of them reads not of it and thus assumes that the two are in agreement on this point. Unfortunately Nietzsche is not alone in receiving this type of aggressive misreading that Tolle imposes on them in order to justify positions that is fundamentally at odds with their own work.

While I’ll not speak on behalf of Tolle’s biblical scholarship, suffice it to say it’s worth noting that Richard Abanes published A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller in order to delineate Tolle’s perceived misuse of the Bible. While I’m not qualified to comment on it as Biblical exegesis is not my specialty nor have I read Abanes’ criticism, something that does strike me is his use of Jean Paul-Sartre. Before I speak on this, however, I must contextualize A New Earth so that I don’t give Tolle the same foul treatment that he gives others.

If one looks to find examples of human history on earth in A New Earth, one will find a dearth of them. Discussions on history and social policy are almost staggeringly absent. Tolle claims that because the Now doesn’t have any history it’s not necessary. I would provide the counter-interpretation that as Tolle simply doesn’t know much history, he de-emphasizes it to the point of insignificance. What replaces the struggles for social, racial, ethnic and economic justice are instead comments stating that once enough people get in touch with their inner space and find purpose everything just “gets better”. Be Scotfield’s article Why Eckhart Tolle’s Evolutionary Activism Won’t Save Us at Tikkun presents a number of insightful criticisms on Tolle’s model of social and political change that are worth reading. While Scotfield’s incisive comments focus on a small number of the many errors he makes, he is quiet on the points where Tolle addresses what he cites as an alternative to his own conception of how to bring about a better world: socialist politics.

In the few historical descriptions Tolle writes in a New Earth, no other class of people receive the same sort of haughty disdain as Socialists and Communists. On page thirteen Tolle writes: “The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideas, clearly illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality – create a new earth – without any of the prior change in their inner reality, their state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.” Tolle later goes on to cite Pol Pot and Stalin, two figures renowned for the blood they’ve shed, as examples of applied Marxism and thus evidence of it’s ideological paucity. While no apologist for either of these figures, no historian who has been presented with the evidence would claim that their actions was simply a result of ideas in their head. As it unfolds, for Tolle, Marxism, socialism, communism is just a “materialist” straw man with which to counterpose his amorphous, “spiritualist” enterprise.

Now how does all of this relate to Jean Paul-Sartre? Quite simply, he was an anti-imperialist, reconstructed Marxist. Sartre wrote extensively on how his entire existentialist project was but an offshoot of Marxist models of historical materialism and stood in opposition to the violent excesses of Stalin. Tolle uses another decontextualized and unattributed quote by Sartre to deconstruct Cartesian dualism. However after doing so he then does away with “Sartre’s Insight” a few lines later by claiming that Sartre was unable to perceive the awareness of awareness. He does this to buttress aspects of his intellectual edifice, if one could even look beyond it’s shoddiness and call it that, by saying that following this there is a “new dimension of consciousness which is “awareness of that awareness”, the “egoic mind” defined as it is by a “pain-body”.

Unfortunately, I do not have all of my personal library with me at the moment to pull quotes from Sartre or about him to prove that such a reading of Sartre is false.
Suffice it to say Sartre’s range of concepts, being in an intellectual tradition which includes Marx and Hegel, certainly includes alienation, perspectivism, individual and social consciousness, resentment, different levels of abstraction, etc. In fact not only did they recognize such aspects of the human condition, but they did so while maintaining a position that was deeply at odds with Tolle, thus disallowing any grace to Tolle for his misrepresentation of Sartre due to their valences being different. Where Tolle reifies space and nothingness as the ideal inner state to direct one’s being as according to him it is the only one that brings peace, the philosophy of historical materialist seeks to instrumentalize individual and collective historical agency to bring conflict to a state of peace.

Tolle says people suffer because their “pain-body” sustains injuries due to it’s identifications with the body or ideas at the level of personal experiences or inherited narratives, whereas materialists say that they sustain injuries due to limited access to affordable health care, genocidal policies to dispossess people of their tribal lands and capitalist social relations, etc. As I said before, Scotfield’s article goes into some criticism of this so I won’t repeat them here.

What I will say is that for the above reasons I believe it’s important for readers of Tolle to be aware of his intellectual heritage. His year of graduate studies at Cambridge University was in Latin American literature and what research I have been able to garnish from online articles his emphasis is on ancient and medieval spiritual leaders and mystics. As is clear from the above quotes that I’ve analyzed, if he is familiar with post-enlightenment philosophies, it is only tangentially so and his understanding of them is not just weak but fundamentally wrong. This of course begs the questions as to why it is he would avoid such people considering the giant leaps in human consciousness and experience that have occurred since then. If forced to make an estimation why this is so, and why it is that so many people have taken to Tolle’s A New Earth is not because they want to better know themselves, but as they want to avoid knowing themselves too well for according to Tolle, peace is preferable to drama.

Review of "A Government Out Of Sight"

Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America illustrates how contrary to popular conception of the first century of American as defined by laissez-faire policies, the Federal government used much of it’s purchasing and administrative power to help build the American market in a manner that was largely kept out of sight. The manner in which this was accomplished was through subsidies, legal rulings, injunctions, contracts for labor and goods, the use of the military to encourage western settlement, import taxes and the use of state and local governments as a mediator of Federal policy.

Balogh frames the evolution of the American government as emerging from ideological debates stemming from the Federalist and anti-Federalist political campaigns. Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams on the national level and many others on the state level attempt to govern using classical, small state Republican ideals. However in a vast expanse of land settled by people with tenuous allegiance to the government the appeals to virtue and affect often fell on deaf ears. As they wrestled with traders and settlers who held no or only a tenuous allegiance to the new general government, these leaders found themselves in situations that forced them to adjust these a priori valuations to the matter at hand.

One such example of this given by Balogh is in the years immediately following the revolution. “Tanners, hatters, glass manufacturers, and manufacturers of cloth all clamored for protection against foreign imports. Ever with such protection, they faced competition from better capitalized British agents” (174). Such a policy in favor of national manufacturing, however, was not desired by the much wealthier, aristocratic mercantile elite. In a period of conflict with Britain these interest groups has their greatest wish granted by Jefferson when he declaimed an embargo, however the mercantile interests all but ignored them. Lacking the popular support, military powers and desire to potentially reignite direct conflict – such a policy was dropped. The lessons learned from such an experience were not missed and led to policies oriented towards personal interest and the growth of military capabilities justified perhaps most pithily in the modern context by Thomas Freidman who said that “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”.

It was in this context of competing allegiances, to the Republic and to personal interest, that the judiciary began it’s transmogrification of a set of juridical beliefs premised on the commonwealth notion of governance inherited by the British to one of natural rights based individual personhood. As business and government pushed for development of the interior, the value of the “people” was diminished to make way for an increased conception of rule of law and private property. In this context Balogh insightfully points out that states and local governments often fought and won the right to direct development inside the state. It was in this was that the state were able to replace or reform the designs of northern capitalists that sought to specialize farming or manufacture in areas they deemed most fitting to their needs rather than according to those that lived there. Thus while Balogh describes the effects that the economic power of the railroads, the need for greater capital investment for machinery, farmers transition from partial self-sufficiency via crop variety to monocultural practices totally dependent on the market has, he simultaneously seems to ignore the wider implications of having more people involved in market transactions defined by an international scale.

A recurring theme that Balogh references frequently is that much of the taxation powers of the government weren’t “seen” by the people of the time as it was hidden in the price of the imported goods they were purchasing. While during normal times this wasn’t a contentious issue, during periods of conflict with other nations the federal government suspended this “invisibility” and that this was met with opposition and later, during periods of Federally sponsored development the states would assert their prerogative as those knowledgable of a given area to contract out work.

One point that relates to my historical research is the development of the American identity as opposed to the regionally defined one as well as the ideologies and policies of early American Socialist parties. The Knights of Labor are mentioned in passing during the period of the “amorphous stage of the labor movement” however Balogh gives them and their later off-shoots any mention in depth (317). I do not fault him for this as his concern is primarily with demonstrating the manners in which the Federal or “General Government” has consistently played a role in the development of markets and the regulation of commerce, however as his history is institutional and top-down he overlooks how it was that political actors/workers at the time recognized the role the government was playing and desired to take it over to change the tempo of development. Additionally elided are the private corporate security forces such as the Pinkertons whose policing role was in later taken over by national guardsman.

In his concluding section, Balogh lauds the renaissance of an associative order of para-states as being both more pragmatic and attuned to the historical circumstances of America. He sees the attempt of socialists or liberals ignorant of the historical failures of such a policy whereby government takes a more energetic role bound to failure by citing the “spontaneous” growth of professional institutions as regulating bodies. Presumably, all that is needed to counteract the effects of the carceral state and vast economic disparity are paternalistic organizations (which can appeal for federal aid) that redistribute wealth and attempt to alter legislation rather than a government or political party that takes the general welfare clause to signify that it actually cares about the welfare of all the people rather than putting primary concern on it’s corporate citizens. Considering the account that he just wrote that explicitly shows that such organization flourish only on the largesse of business this seems surprising, but as his concern is primarily with the captains of industry and their political counterparts it is less so.

Review of "Hegel: A Reinterpretation"

Walter Kauffman’s Hegel: A Reinterpretation provides a wonderful assessment and contextualization of the Hegel’s entire work. Unlike The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, which I read for my course on Hegel with Avital Ronell and Slavoj Zizek, the book does not focus on a few keys philosophical concepts but provides an overview of his entire work with critical commentary and contextualization of Hegel’s intellectual and historical milieu. Kauffman’s stated intent in doing this is to act as a corrective to what he calls “lazy scholarship,” a trend which he sees as creating a poorly distorted image of his thought.

Kauffman opens with description of the ambitions, atmosphere and main concerns of German romantic literature. He delves into some of Hegel’s contemporary influences, Goethe, Kant, Schiller and Lessing, in order to show the evolution of their projects as well as the manner in which Hegel formulated his own ideas in response to them. Primarily, these thinkers were looking at the social and individual effects of incipient industrialism and the increase of capitalist work relations and expressing disdain towards it. To them, and Hegel, the increasing commodification of social relations led to a decrease in individual’s autonomy and general social unrest. Their skepticism, however, was not of the prevailing British variety but that found in several of the schools of the ancient Greeks, which was distinct by it being not only destructive of values but also able to construct new ones. The restoration of the values that made the life of the Greeks so appealing to all of these German intellectuals, however, was to be “shipwrecked by the conditions of modern life” leading to the restoration “fleeing into the form of idealism, into the form of philosophy” (83). Hegel’s philosophy, however, was not going to merely cobble together several intellectual pleasing aspects he found but to address the conflicts within these schools as being a part of a cumulative process of continual unfolding of the truth. Thus, even prior the Phenomenology, he was concerned with the sectarian criticisms and contextualizing them in such a manner as to avoid repeating the mistakes.

The extension of this preference for the Greek model of spirituality implied a corresponding degradation of the Christian one. These criticisms, collected in T. N. Knox’s collection of Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, were never published in Hegel’s lifetime. Kauffman differentiates these writing, characterized by their clarity (a quality lacking in his later work), psychological insight and criticism of Christianity to such a degree that he thinks it surpasses Nietzsche’s writing on the same themes in The Anti-Christ. However, for Hegel, this is merely the exposition of viewpoints that were to be refuted and transcended by Hegel. Quoting material from his unpublished notebooks, Kauffman shows how Hegel conceived of these being written so that he could overcome them. While Hegel’s positions of non-separation from God, the desirability of a strong, coherent community of peers, etc. are still seen as praiseworthy, many of these soon become transmogrified into the radical, crypto-Protestant theology that would later be remixed by Marx into socialist ideology. Thus his ethical foundations based upon the possibility of a beautiful, harmonic order remains within the concepts of the Greeks, specifically Aristotle, yet adjusted itself to the conditions of a “modern society”. One such conceptual result of this is the prioritization of the ethical realm, exemplified by art, religion and philosophy, over that of the state. Another important result of taking such a position is the conceptualization of philosophy as therapy – something found in the Stoics and Spinoza.

In the section on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Kauffman mobilizes a wealth of close reading against those who would call Hegel as an idealist or simply a German Metaphysician by showing how he did not merely consider the content of consciousness in the abstract but was concerned with discerning what type of human spirit would hold such propositions and what were the preconditions of their evolving into something else. As Kauffman words it “Every outlook… is to be studied not merely as academic possibility but as an existential reality” (115). Kauffman shows how the spirits in the Phenomology are in fact a number of people, the text is highly allusive and that there are many insights and that are still quite worthwhile. This is not to say that Kauffman is all praise. For one he does not find Hegel’s developmental process as being necessary, inclusive of all the positions of consciousness that are possible and being extremely difficult to read. Kauffman cites last aspect as something that sharply contrasts with the introduction to the Phenomenology. All of the positive aspects of the Introduction, such as clarity of terminology and rationality of development, Kauffman sees as not being as present in the rest of the text – which as someone who’s read it I would energetically concur.

One of the key terms of the Phenomenology that Kauffman highlights is the “dialectic,” as it is a term that has gained wide currency despite Kauffman’s belief that it lacks definition and major significance in this or any of his works. For Kauffman, while Hegel used the term, there is no “Hegelian dialectics” and Marx’s claim that he was able to turn this method on it’s side in order to arrive at the form of analysis called historical materialism is simply false. He does admit to the primary role of struggle amongst positions and forces passionately propounded by people in Hegel’s writing and says that this is in fact the Hegelian dialectic. The natural course, which Kauffman follows, is an examination of the categories and claims found in Hegel’s logic which on the whole is seen as highly satisfying. In his Logic, Hegel shows the absolute intellectual bankruptcy of positivism and, before this became a trend in universities, illustrates how the segregation of academic fields is a specious process.

One of Hegel: A Reinterpretation‘s strengths, and at times point of excessive flight, is its engagement with Hegel’s lifeworld. Hegel’s personal and professional relationships of course played a large factor in the development of his thought, however at times Kauffman can get sidetracked in explaining minutiae that, while tangentially important to the matter at hand, can take away from the flow of intellectual analysis. One such example is in relation to the long explanation of all the stressors that Hegel was dealing with while writing Phenomenology and thus led to it being a rushed work. Where a list would be sufficient to get the point across, Kauffman takes several pages to do into details related to the development and effects of personal (H’s procrastination in writing, having a child out of wedlock, etc.) and political (Napoleon) upheavals.

Though Kauffman does not shy away from exposing what he sees as Hegel’s weakness, for the most part he views him in a positive light. For one Hegel’s embrace of passion as a motivating factor in human behavior and history is lauded as a welcome inheritance from Goethe. Additionally he states that Hegel’s developmentally oriented metaphysics provides the meaning and content for the best philosophers today and acts as a significant corrective to the positivistic categorizing that goes on in various humanistic discourses. While he only makes passing reference to the fact that it is Hegel’s Logic that laid the foundation of subsequent discourses such as sociology, psychology, and ecology (as evidenced by Engels book Dialectics of Nature) the recognition is present and thankfully I’ll be able to read more about this in the next book in my Hegel studies series Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology.

Review of "Autobiography of a Yogi"

One of my supplemental readings for my F.I.C.A.M. courses was Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which from a quick Goggle search I learned that the book is listed as one of the top 100 most important books in religious literature and was re-read annually by Steve Jobs. Of all the lives that one could read about, be it famous artists with rich and illustrious personal lives, great leaders who play decisive roles in world-historical affairs, etc. the one of a guru is perhaps not the most immediately interesting due to the strict personal discipline required of such a life. Rather than a boring tale, however, Yogananda writes compellingly on his spiritual journey and the wealth of insight and beauty that lay underneath the surface of his life. These words are as deep as those found in the Upanishads, and due to the story which frames it helps show how these ancient Vedic insights are still pertinent to living a fulfilling life today.

Overall I was impressed with the book for the insight that it provides into religious attitudes in India and ashram life, the latter of which I have experienced only as an outsider in India for a short time, but it is clear that the reason for the books popularity is it’s constant engagement with Vedantic thought. As befitting someone that has devoted their life’s work to the propagation of such knowledge, the book is littered with aphorisms and reflections that would cause a good reader to question the assumptions upon which they live and to at least get a glimpse of the profound peace that is possible by becoming master of oneself. Because of this it is impossible to separate these two aspects, something that monists like Yogananda would deny is impossible anyway, though I think it is fitting to say that taken solely as a narrative it is uninteresting though as an expository work of yogic thought it is brilliant. Almost every page is adorned with golden phrases giving insight into the human condition and though at times Yogananda seems overly pre-occupied with justifying his thought by quoting or alluding to other thinkers it is never so much that it becomes overwhelming. His meetings with various spiritual thinkers known (Gandhi, Tagore) and unknown (Yukteswar, Lahiri) allow him to put wise and concise descriptions of the Vedic viewpoint in their mouths that, framed as it is as steps in his spiritual development, don’t come off as didactic.

All of these compliments aside, one of the issues with I have with Hinduism in general and this book in particular is the preservation of beliefs and traditions which have been discredited as lacking in any material basis. This criticism applies to most if not all religious dogmas, and in the context of the book it is prominent in several sections where other yogis are described. In a several of the meetings with the “divine personages” Yogananda describes them as having siddhis, or “special powers”. While there are several siddhis that I would categorize within the realm of scientific possibility, there are also those that defy possibility and which for me ends up detracting from the narrative. For instance in Yogananda’s travels in India he claims to meet people that, haven’t eaten food in years, have been able to turn a wild lion into a vegetarian pet, and are able to transport their image over hundreds of miles to relay messages to someone else. Then there is Babaji, not a person but an immortal incarnation of the divine that works in humble obscurity in order to keep the knowledge of yoga alive. I recognize that to focus on this and neglect the other, positive and powerful aspects of the book I described above is to do it a disservice, however an objection to these kinds of miracles must be raised most specifically as their supposed “powers” take away from the significance of the core tenants they are voicing.

A brief on the political aesthetics of "Step Up: Revolution"

The newest film in the Step Up franchise, Step Up: Revolution piqued my interest as one of the writing projects I’m currently working on concerns the depiction of political radicals in American cinema during this, the post-Soviet epoch. The first two films in the series addressed issues of class in a facile way but generally progressive way: mutual love of dance and sexual attraction are able to unite people with vast differences in social standing to winning a contest. This installment keeps the poor boy meets and falls in love with a rich girl narrative framework, here the stakes towards which they unite are much higher. In this film the class element in the Step Up series refers not just to the notion of “stepping up” to win a place in a dance company or a street contest but also refers to issues of social mobility. The final goal which unites the two lovers, Ryan and Emily, is to keep capitalist gentrifiers from taking over a working class neighborhood in Miami and the means by which they attempt to do this is organized, direct action.

To say that the dancers in the film are socialists would be an overstatement. The initial organizing impetus for the dance troupe and production team known as “The Mob” is to win a YouTube contest rewarding money to whichever group can get 10 million views on their channel. While this is incentive, we learn from the group’s co-founder Sean that they are more interested in having “a voice” and we see through their action a socialist mode of political subjectivity that becomes framed in such a way that they become populist heroes fighting against capitalism.

One of the most visible ways we see the groups anti-capitalistic core is where the group practices. Taking no heed to property laws that make trespassing illegal even in areas not used by their owners, The Mob practices in one of Miami’s many unoccupied or partially constructed buildings. Additionally the similarity between the name “The Mob” and “The Masses,” the early 20th century American socialist politics monthly, is noteworthy. While it’s unlikely that the authors planned this, it is yet another of many qualitative overlaps with socialist organizations. Furthermore the idea of a dance troupe being a revolutionary avant-garde is evocative of more early 20th century radical history, this time in the form of anarchist Emma Goldman’s famous quote: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

As Sean introduces Emily to members of “The Mob” we see that the group is an approximation of a good model for an international socialist organization. For one, thanks to the ethnic population of South Florida, the membership is truly international in origin. Secondarily, we see a skilled division of labor amongst the group to maximize the efficiency of their production. Additionally we see that the dancers, like good socialists, are not prone to the vices of excessive drinking or smoking as it keeps them from being able to perform their labor of love. Whether or not they have to abide by a “Points of Discipline for Party Members” would be purely conjectural, but it is worth noting the difference between this group and that found in The Anarchist Cookbook. While the message the group puts out may be ambiguous, at least as Sean’s voiceover narrates, “When the Mob speaks, everyone listens.” Though not at first explicitly political, as the group develops they receive positive, populist expressions of sympathy and solidarity as a result of their actions, which would presumably lead to greater community involvement. Finally, we see that The Mob’s joy is dangerous. In the opening dance scene they stop traffic outside of Ocean Drive, Miami’s upscale shopping area, and the one following they invade SoHo Studios, one of the more famous Wynwood art galleries. In the first case normal business activity is interrupted by spectacle while in the other the hallowed halls of culture are briefly occupied, alluding to practice outlined by anti-capitalist, Situationist theorist Guy Debord.

After Emily has been told by her perspective Wynwood dance company leader that she needs to be more unique, seeing this dance performance, and reading the note that “Sometimes you need to break the rules” given to her by Sean that she decides to try to join The Mob. Emily is immediately given the role of lead dancer.

Following the revelation that a developer, who happens to be Emily’s father, wants to buy up local businesses and homes from renters the group diverges from it’s initial plans for “be heard” and becomes something of a proper socialist undertaking that instead wants “to be listened to”. While previously The Mob’s events were for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, they decide they want to try to protect their neighborhood from capitalist investment.

While terse and lacking theoretical depth, the dialogue following this revelation could be taken from socialist debates on the nature of art. While I doubt that Duane Adler and Amanda Brody, the authors of the script, bothered to research this it doesn’t take away from the substance. After Sean and Emily learn of her father plans to purchase and redevelop the working-class waterfront area she proceeds to exercise directive control of the group their her revolutionary exhortations:

“You’ve got four million viewers but you’re not saying anything that actually matters. It’s not ok to make art for fun anymore.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Enough with performance art, it’s time for protest art.”

Following this decision the group decides to “mob” the planning meeting that decides the fate of the projected gentrification area. After stopping the meeting by pulling a fire alarm, the group dances in hats and business attire. Reading direct messages into their dance is the beyond the realm of my interpretive powers, however it is worth noting that one of the sampled songs in the quasi dub-step song the DJ stitches together is by the notoriously anti-corporate musical group Radiohead. The grand finale of this particular Mob dance production? A giant metal sculpture of an executive holding a briefcase that opens and has spray-painted on the inside: “We are not for sale.”

While Trip, developer Bill Anderson’s protege, is undaunted by this performance the Mob is awash with pride as now they have achieved the national recognition they so badly wanted as the YouTube video of the performance is viewed by millions. The wave of euphoria is short-lived. Eddie discovers Emily’s real identity and decides to have an “mob” performance without Ryan’s authorization. This performance, at a private banquet, results in arrests and the group’s expulsion from the contest. Emily upbraids them both for the stunt that outed her as an anti-capitalist sympathizer and activist to her Dad. However she soon realizes the Ryan had nothing to do with it and her just formed sentiments against the group are reversed, leading her to greater resolve to halt the gentrification process.

The Mob unites despite the attempted (Stalinst?) grab at leadership, and the film closes with the capitalist developer Bill Anderson taking a paternalist role to enhance and develop the community that already exists rather than kicking them out for a richer group of tenants. The new goal of the group accomplished, the leads kiss.

While it would be acceptable for the film to end here, it’s not. The Mob faces one last test of their “socialist” identity and fails. Given the opportunity to work as part of a promotion team for Nike, The Mob immediately assents to the offer and thus becomes commodified. This isn’t surprising as the dance team was never truly socialist in orientation, but that a group that had just fought so hard for the working class would so quickly and happily join forces with an trans-national corporation widely known for it’s child labor and incredibly pay is telling – not of the group itself but the relations which produced it.

Review of "Explosion in a Cathedral"

Alejo Carpentier’s book Explosion in a Cathedral has the distinction of being amongst Lolita and several of Henry Miller’s novels as books which have required me to reference the dictionary in search of rarely used words. It is in these terms for shipping that the layman doesn’t know and in architecture and science terms of the time as well as the gothic descriptions of surroundings that causes this book to be seen as one of the ur-text’s of Latin American magical realism. Set in the island of Guadeloupe during the time of the French Revolution, the novel’s main characters are three wealthy orphans, the siblings Sofia and Carlo and their sickly cousin Esteban, and the adult Victor Hugues. While the youths are fictional, Victor was in fact a historical personage who was the French Revolutionary government’s military leader of the assault to retake the island of Guadeloupe from the British and later Governor of various French holdings in the Carribean.

The novel begins “I saw them erect the guillotine again to-night” and then follows by telling of the death of the family patriarch. The children isolate themselves from the local community and begin purchasing through catalogs the newest literature, scientific instruments and fine arts that they can fit into their house. They amuse themselves with games of the imagination and experiments with the scientific equipment until Victor comes knocking at the door, bringing with him all of the conflict present in this age of Atlantic revolutions. We quickly learn that though a businessman, Victor idealizes the classical Republican conception of virtue. This aspect of Victor’s can be seen in his quotations of Roman orators while playing pretend with the children as well as his stated manner of identifying his motivations as stemming not from private interests that causes him to profit off of others, but from a notion of universal brotherhood. Such a set of beliefs at such a time sets him in league with a number of interesting characters who make brief appearances amidst the turmoil which soon commences. Voodoo doctors with Masonic ties, and a corrupt Catholic executor of the dead father’s estate are just two examples of the island population. In his characterization and description, Carpentier is deft in showing that each of these characters are not simply representatives of fundamental energies of the age but are also individuals. Through this stylization, he is able to illustrate the social complexities of the global system in a very personal manner.

The play that characterizes Victor’s first appearance in the orphans house soon vanishes as rumors strike upon their idyllic shore that those involved in the Masonic lodges may soon be expelled from the French dominions. Forced to choose between abandoning their new friend and going with him and his black, voodoo practicing associate Oge, they leave and begin an adventure that will cause them to be separated for years and mature in ways that they never thought possible. The characters rich internal life that is shown to be constantly at odds with the situations in which they find themselves. For instance Esteban finds himself trying to navigate the dangerous position of being a Guadeloupean working for the French on the border of Spain with Revolutionary sympathies for the party that has just been ousted in the Thermidorean reaction. Though he has been nothing but felicitous to their cause, as he sees the heads start to roll from Paris outward and surveys the task he’s been assigned as impossible, his beliefs are sorely questioned. Sofia, though loyal to the rhetoric that Victor embodies, abhors the violence that comes with it’s ascent and is empathetic with the Africans who now no longer slaves are forced into capitalist market relations with a mother country that has brought them naught but suffering and compulsive labor.

Timothy Brennan suggests in his introduction to the novel that the book was a prescient defense of the Cuban revolution’s values, an interpretation that I agree with. Unlike, the novels by Rizal that I reviewed earlier, as the above should suggest the novel succeeds not only as a thinly veiled defense of Cuba’s new political powers but as an aesthetic work itself. As a defense of the revolution, it constructs the framework of the conflict impelling the youths out of the comforts of their home as originating amongst foreign powers vying for control of islands viewed as little more that rebellious forced labour populations. Lacking the industrial goods and capacity, the population, history of armed self-defense on the scale with which foreign powers could bring to bear upon them – the island of Guadeloupe and the others around it are de facto tributary vassal states. Such a terrain of complex relationships is not something that is not merely described but narrated, to use a distinction made by Georg Lukacs, in such as way that shows the deep historical research that Carpentier put into the book. One of the issues that I have with Brennan’s interpretation in the introduction is his conception of Sofia as the “only positive character” by citing an interview where Carpentier says that she represents praxis. Praxis understood via Marxist categories is something that is broad and applies to all individual and groups actions that are based upon their beliefs and material situatedness. As such she is not the only positive character. Victor is as well, though in his role of cleansing the inherited oppressions and inhumanity by using those same tools he is deeply alienated. Sofia, from the Greek word signifying wisdom, however sees this as both necessary AND horrible and thus represents the second stage of the transition to a new society.

Also worth mentioning is that in addition to the historically veiled defense of the revolution, the book is also a call to the intellectuals of the period to remove themselves from the confines of their houses and studies, which the children were once in, in order to take an active role in the management and direction of the newly created polity, as Esteban and Sofia do. Victor, a charismatic leader, is the point of convergence for Esteban and Sofia’s respective sentiments of admiration and romance and alludes to the many historical circumstances where intellectuals have rallied around an energetic leader that seeks to level the inherited norms to make way for greater material progress.

One of the methods that I have for a novelists in determining how good a book is if after reading it it makes me want to read their other works, in this case it’s a resounding yes and as soon as I make my way through the other books I have on my list I’ll definitely make an effort to pick up Carpentier’s other renowned novel
The Kingdom of This World.

Book published!

I’m a little behind in getting notice of it, but the book Attention Dynamics Program that I co-authored with my father Dr. Brian Sheen is now available for purchase.

This is a great book for guiding adults, children and their immediate social network to realizing their full potential for happiness, well being, health and peace by utilizing the most effective, evidence-based therapeutic techniques currently available in scientific research today. These include a wide variety of cognitive-based and behavioral oriented techniques.

Readers and participants will learn how to enhance their retention and self-management skills to be able to make better connecting choices at home, work and/or at school. Children will increase their level of self-motivatation, become more organized as well as increasing their effective communication skills by learning and applying the tools they learn.