But What About? and “Mere Rhetoric”

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I listened to some of President Obama’s Cairo speech this morning, and based on the snippets I heard and the summary and analysis I’ve read so far it maintains his reputation as the most rhetorically effective President since Reagan, and probably since Kennedy. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University in June 1963. Kennedy’s speech wasn’t addressed to his university audience so much as to the Soviet Union, and Obama’s approach today was similar, to build bridges to the potentially hostile audience through emphasis on mutual values and goals while not denigrating American values. I recommend listening to or reading Kennedy’s address if you’re unfamiliar with it, but this is my favorite bit:

So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

I submit that it would be difficult to find a more rhetorically effective paragraph in the annals of Presidential speeches. It acknowledges differences without threat, urges common goals while recognizing that not all of them will be met, and summarizes in brief but compelling fashion the underlying joint humanity even of political enemies. President Obama’s speech today tried to make the same points.

One difference between the speeches is in the specificity of proposals. Kennedy, for example, announced that he and Krushchev would soon begin discussing a test ban treaty, and that the US wouldn’t conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere if other states also refrained from such testing. Some commentators and pundits have already begun criticizing Obama’s speech for not articulating more concrete proposals. He didn’t do this, he didn’t do that. He said he was opposed to this, but didn’t say what he would really do. Depending on the perspective, the list of things left out is long: he didn’t denounce Muslim terrorists or dictators, he didn’t articulate a clear solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he didn’t talk about civilian casualties in Pakistan. (Of course, there’s a raft of more inarticulate criticism. If you want to descend into the morass of what passes for common opinion in America, you might sample the comments here.)

The criticism that he didn’t address everything in one speech is a ridiculous one, and one that has been plaguing Obama since the beginning of his Presidential campaign. For one thing, it’s an example of what I recently saw referred to as the "but what about" fallacy. (I thought I’d read this in philosopher Jonathan Wolff’s Guardian blog, but I can’t find it there. If anyone knows the source, I’ll be happy to link to it.) The idea of the fallacy is that whatever claims, arguments, or assertions someone makes, instead of addressing them, it’s easier to evade them and just say, "but what about X topic you didn’t talk about?" That response appears to point out a flaw in the opponent’s position but is really just a variation of the red herring fallacy. "But we’re not talking about X; we’re talking about W," might be the best response.

The other major criticism that has dogged him from the beginning is that his speeches are "mere rhetoric," as if a speech is ever anything but rhetoric. Criticism of this sort is different from the "but what about" fallacy, but it’s still usually a nonsensical criticism mouthed by people who don’t understand how language works. Language is symbolic action. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, often through argumentation, and according to Chaim Perelman the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent." The goal of "mere" rhetoric is to persuade, to win people to our positions, to eliminate barriers of distrust and dissent, to reduce threat because, as the psychologist Carl Rogers argued, threat hinders communication. 

Rhetoric is more than just argument, the logical appeal. There are also the emotional and ethical appeals, and Obama is a master of the ethical appeal, the appeal based on character. The character manifest in this speech, and in many of his other speeches, is of a person who understands the world is a complicated place, who recognizes difference and reaches out to the "other," who presents positive values while not dismissing those he doesn’t agree with as evil or stupid, who is so strong in his own convictions that he doesn’t need to demonize the opposition through divisive rhetoric and inane catch phrases, so balanced and calm that he doesn’t feel compelled to rise to the challenge of blowhards. It’s this rhetorical appeal in particular that so many politically motivated people in America neither have nor understand. The demonstration of hatred, the obvious unwillingness to consider the positions of others, the inability to even understand difference, the incapacity for empathy or sympathy, the unrelenting hermeneutic of suspicion, the utterly obvious willingness to say or do anything to win regardless of truth or principle – all of these traits undermine the ethical appeal and yet are rife in our political culture and manifest in many of the critics of this President and his speeches.

The problem for these critics is that they just don’t know what to do with such a politician. If you’re an overweight, multiply divorced, substance abuser, it’s hard to attack the character of a healthy man in a lengthy stable marriage with two loving children. If you’re a blowhard who knows only how to manipulate social divisions and is so rhetorically challenged that you’re considered merely an evil joke by your opponents, it’s hard to smear the character of a man who quite obviously shares none of your cynicism or passion for the complete destruction of people of good will with whom you happen to disagree. Regardless of any specific problems of Obama’s policies that could be articulated, so many of his critics just seem like spoiled, screaming youngsters compared to him. A glimmer of hope for America – seen fleetingly in some Republican reactions to the nomination of Sotomayor – is that the nuanced worldview and the balanced, measured rhetoric of President Obama may by some miracle elevate the level of political discourse in the country. It’s never been particularly elevated before, but there’s always that hope.

Professional Metareading

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Today I read a lot of Dilevko and Gottlieb’s Reading and the Reference Librarian: the Importance to Library Service of Staff Reading Habits (which I’d never heard of but found out about here). It shares some perspectives (as well as the LCSH "Librarians — Books and Reading") with Peter Briscoe’s excellent Reading the Map of Knowledge: the Art of Being a Librarian, though the former analyzes survey results while the latter is more a personal manifesto on being a librarian. Both advocate wide reading as a goal to become a better librarian. Dilevko and Gottlieb focus, in my opinion, too narrowly upon the reference librarian and on the specific effect of reading habits upon library reference service, but then again they do what they do well, and it’s unfair to criticize a book for not doing something its authors never intended to do just because I would have liked to see them tackle other areas of librarianship.

The first chapter deals with the deprofessionalization of reference, especially with the rise of the reference call center of the LSSI model and the way it deliberately focuses on the simplest and most common queries and ignores the rest as a way to reduce professionally trained and educated staff and cut costs, and compares that desire to the way Amazon.com ran their organization until they outsourced everything to India. The  Amazon call centers sound harrowing, with loud buzzers and lights flashing when workers weren’t answering emails fast enough, or forced overtime with managers giving out candy bars to motivate and infantilize employees. At least now when we buy from Amazon we can all be relieved that the harrowing and humiliating jobs are  done in some foreign country by people totally unlike us for a tenth of the cost, so we don’t have to feel bad about them. The book was published in 2004, based on research done in 2000-01, and I wonder if that’s still as much of an issue. I know LSSI is still around, but I haven’t heard much of a buzz about outsourcing reference for several years. However, that could be because it’s become so common as not be worth mentioning.

Divelko and Gottlieb argue that wide reading of newspapers, magazines, journals, books fiction and nonfiction improves reference service for both public and academic librarians. Some chapters focus exclusively on academic librarians and the benefits to professors and students when librarians read broadly as well as deeply in some academic discipline. A little knowledge of a lot of topics and a lot of knowledge on a few topics help in reference, instruction, collection development, and liaison activities, and the professors interviewed recommended taking classes, earning degrees, reading journals, learning languages, or at the very least reading introductory textbooks in the areas they work with so as to know something about the organization of knowledge in the discipline. In other words, professors want academic librarians to act like academics, to have academic fields of inquiry and an intellectual engagement with the world of scholarship. Go figure.

Sometimes the expectations seem unrealistic. The ideal librarian would be as knowledgeable as every professor about every subject. At some point I made a mental list of the ideal candidate for my job. That librarian at a minimum would have PhDs in philosophy, religion, and history, as well as fluency in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese. When that candidate comes along, I’m doomed. Good thing I have my quasi-tenure. Nevertheless, in general, I think the point is that the more academic an academic librarian the more successful that librarian will be in several areas of librarianship, and I wholeheartedly agree.

The final chapter, "Reading as a Species of Intellectual Capital," analyzes changes in reference work through the lens of Bourdieu. "To use Bourdieu’s terms, advocates of digital reference services are deploring their ‘species of capital’ — their belief in the efficacy of technological innovation as represented by the call center model — in order to render less valuable the ‘species of capital’ of reference librarians whom they accuse of being concerned only with ‘"reviewing the professional literature" and other odd tasks’…." The authors conclude that these "supposedly valueless tasks" contribute a lot to a successful library experience for the users, but that some librarians are attempting to discredit ‘"the form of capital upon which the force of [an] opponent rests.’" Ignoring call centers for the nonce, does this strategy seem familiar? "Techonolgical innovation has become a weapon allowing one group of individuals to exert power and influence on their own behalf while marginalizing the contributions of those who are skeptical of the ultimate value of such technological advances. It allows the first group of players to paint themselves as innovators in the profession, and it renders the second group a ‘negligible quantity’" (211).

Dilevki and Gottlieb are not impressed, and clearly articulate the point of this familiar rhetorical strategy: "The terms of the debate thus permit any skeptic of technological innovation to be branded an opponent of progress and thus an impediment to the field’s survival" (211-12). These accusations, though often in mild enough form befitting librarians, seem rife enough in library discourse. The advocates of constant technological innovation often look for any sign that library users are moving in their direction, while ignoring the overwhelming organization of a considerable portion of academia. In the humanities, those might be the librarians who praise and wonder at a tiny flowering of "digital humanities" while ignoring the undeniable able fact that most humanists do now and have always engaged in the study of texts without accompaniment of multimedia. Confirmation bias is rampant in this company. However, at least in the humanities, how easy might it be to turn the tables? To reply, when challenged about the latest technological innovation or sad, shallow method of connecting people, "No, I’m unfamiliar with that tool, but tell me, what’s the last scholarly book or article you read, or what academic field of study do you have any mastery of?" Since it’s clear that faculty and students benefit from having librarians with subject knowledge of academic fields, it’s quite possible that the current terms of debate do a disservice to our users and ourselves by urging librarians to be computer support and keyword searching specialists rather than academic subject specialists.

 

Updating My Status, or, A Blog Post is a 1,000 Word Tweet

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I read John Dupuis’s response to my last blog post, as well as the comments generated by his post  Someone actually suggested regarding Twitter that I should try it before I say I won’t like it. Instead, I say, give it to Mikey. He’ll try anything.

The "don’t knock it ’til you try it response" is problematic for many reasons (not that I was knocking anything). To echo one person who commented on my blog, I haven’t tried cannibalism or genital piercing either, but I don’t want to. The response also smacks of an irritating paternalism, as if a grown man who’s reasonably bright and educated is like a child who needs to be told to eat his vegetables. "How do you know you don’t like cauliflower until you’ve tried it?" Not being a child, but instead a rather large man, there’s a temptation to suggest the inquisitor take the cauliflower and insert it somewhere very uncomfortable, like the back seat of a Volkswagen. Mostly, though, the response is flawed because it assumes that any given social software application is somehow sui generis, when in fact they are all just variations on a theme. Twitter, for example, is analogous to all sorts of other things, and even if it weren’t it’s not like it’s some difficult concept to understand.

There is in fact an analogous service I have tried: Facebook. I’ve been on for two or three years and find myself going to it less and less frequently. It’s been okay, but nothing especially life-changing. I’ve been in contact with people I haven’t seen since high school, which has been pleasant. I’ve played a few games of Scrabble. I know some people use Twitter and their Facebook status update the same way, and one thing I’ve never done is update my status. I’ve never told people what I was having for lunch, or posted a Youtube video of some funny antic, or tried to come up with a clever epigram or aphorism to show people how interesting I am.

Why? Mainly because I don’t think anyone would care, just as I’m interested in very few of other people’s postings. On a moment to moment basis, I, like most people, am just not very interesting. I’m not necessarily boring, and I do think I have my good qualities, but I really can’t figure out what I could say in a few characters that would be worth reading. Writing nothing worth reading may not bother most people, but I try to keep an audience in mind and not bore you too much.

However, I’m going to give this "status updating" thing a try. Would you really like to know what I’m thinking about right now? If not, stop reading! But if so, I’ll tell you.

I’m teaching another writing seminar in the fall, and I’m changing the topic to "justice" instead of "liberalism" and revamping the readings. For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how to present a coherent story about the extremely active philosophical discussion about justice since Rawls’ Theory of Justice in the equivalent of about 8-10 essays. Keep in mind, the goal of this course isn’t to teach philosophy, but academic research and writing. It’s just that to write anything worth reading, students need something to write about.

As a research project, it’s been an adventure. Building upon my previous knowledge, I’ve been using encyclopedias, anthologies, surveys, reviews, articles, bibliographies, footnotes, and even Google Scholar to develop the reading list. (I’ve been using the "cited by" feature in Google Scholar, not the discovery feature so much.) The goal is to give students a general overview of the subject using only primary texts while tracing a scholarly conversation over the course of four decades. I think I have a good list. The students will read excerpts or full essays by some heavy hitters, and in one unit every source we read will cite all of the previous sources we’ve read, in order to show how a scholarly conversation develops over time. A seminar should tell a story about the topic. This is naturally only one story among many possible ones, and I make that clear, but in the summation at the end of the semester it should be obvious that we’ve outlined an important and engaging dialog about the topic.

In addition, the readings have to lend themselves to the teaching of writing and research. I’ve also been thinking about that topic, and have formed some rough opinions. These classes are supposed to teach argumentative academic writing. Thus the best sources provoke argument. Often writing/ composition/ rhetoric is taught in English departments, and just as often the courses are focused on interpreting literature. In a course like that, the students get a novel/ poem/ play/ film to discuss and write about. There is a clear difference between primary and secondary texts, and the students are writing secondary works while studying primary works, for the most part.

It seems easier to me to teach primary sources that are themselves examples of argumentative writing, and political philosophy works very well in this regard. Philosophers are trained to argue, not interpret. And political topics tend to be engaging to a lot of people simply because they’re an inescapable part of life. So in my class the students are reading the sorts of essays they’re writing. There’s not much of a distinction between a primary and a secondary source. If everything works well, the whole course coheres. My goal is the perfect writing seminar, in the sense that A argues in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that Don Giovanni is the perfect work of music because it best exemplifies what makes a classic work of art: an absolute correlation of form and content. Every text we read in class is both something to write about and an example of how one should write argumentative academic prose, and they’re all arguing with each other.

Is this interesting to you? It’s more about writing pedagogy than librarianship, but I can see where it might be. Teaching writing and research has certainly made me a better librarian. The skills I’ve gained carry over into research consultations and instruction sessions all the time. Thinking about the nature of scholarly exchange in an academic discipline is the sort of thing lots of academic librarians do.

This is just the merest summary of activity, though I’ve been considering further developing some of these rough thoughts into posts or articles. What’s here says little of substance, and yet I still can’t figure out how to condense it to 140 characters. To be clear yet again, I’m not knocking any of this, even if I haven’t tried it. I just know what I want to read and how I want to spend my time and interact with others.  Maybe instead of macro-tweeting, I should just write:

Wayne Bivens-Tatum just dropped in to see what condition his condition was in.

 

Neophilia, Diversion, Networking, Sharing, and Discussion

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Recently a couple of people have asked why I haven’t joined some of the social networking services they find interesting or useful, particularly Twitter and Friendfeed, but the question could probably apply to more of them. The simple reason is, I don’t see any way I would benefit from these services. Some people would consider that statement an incentive to either persuade me that I would benefit or dismiss me as a Luddite who just doesn’t "get it." But I do get it. I know some of the ways people benefit from these services. It’s just that I don’t want those benefits. Partly, it’s a personality issue. I’m not very social, and I don’t have interests in common with many people. For example, I have almost no interest in: television, pop music, celebrities, fashion, food, cooking, new movies, sports, contemporary fiction, cars, gardening, crafts, diets, scandals, or the weather.

However, just in case it’s true I don’t get it, I’ll discuss some of the things it seems to me people get out of Twitter or Friendfeed or even Facebook, and why I’m not especially interested in them. Maybe there’s something I am missing, and if so, feel free to point it out.

As a caveat before I begin, I want to add that I’m not ridiculing or dismissing any of these motives. I only say that because I’ve noticed in many discussions that if you don’t find value in something someone else does, they tend to think you’re criticizing or attacking them. For example, in my life those assumptions often come up around commercial television and meat, neither of which I consume. It’s amazing how many carnivores and television devotees get offended if you don’t share their values. So, if I don’t share your values, don’t get offended. If your values are worthwhile, it shouldn’t matter if other people share them. And so, some motivations for social networking.

Neophilia

Neophilia, or love of the new. I understand this desire, and am as susceptible to it as anyone, just with a different focus than many people. What "new" I track is often for professional reasons. Most days I skim a handful of news sites, especially the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but even these very selectively. Mostly I do this because I consider it a professional obligation. A reference librarian should keep up with current events. My interest in politics and political philosophy also requires some basic understanding of what’s going on in the world. However, there have been years of my life, and some of the happier years, in which I read almost no news. The pre-Internet days weren’t a burden on me. Some of my happiest memories are sitting in cafes reading and deliberately not keeping up with what’s going on. My sympathy was, and to a great extent still is, with Thoreau, who had little time for newspapers because so little new ever happened. If I’ve read of one fire or murder, will I find out anything significant reading about another one?

Say, for example, some new techie tool comes along. I pick it up and examine it, classify it, query it. What are you good for, I ask of it. If it does something good for me, I use it. I keep up with these things for the same reason I keep up with some current events. It behooves me as a professional librarian to know about these things, but to know isn’t to champion. Recently I gave a workshop on emerging search tools, and one participant said at the end that she’d expected a "best of" list, as in, "Here are the 5 best new tools!" What she got instead was an examination of several of these new tools and a final critical discussion in which we all talked about what would be useful about them for our jobs or why we would want to know about them even if they weren’t useful. There are new things I should know about, even if I don’t particularly care about them. However, this is merely pragmatic professionalism, not neophilia.

The new things I am interested in are often not new, but only new to me, usually some book or article that I haven’t read before but that develops something I’ve been thinking about. I have no interest in the new trends in pop culture or the latest celebrity scandal or happy hours near me or what people think of the new Star Trek movie or the latest Zen koan on techno issues. Often I thoroughly enjoy footnote chasing and the discovery involved, but the joy I get there doesn’t translate well to most social networking tools.

Diversion

Some people approach these social networking tools seeking diversion. They seek to distract themselves from their daily routine, pop in somewhere for a chat, read a few posts by someone to kill some time. I understand this desire, and indulge it myself occasionally. In those rare moments where I want to be mindlessly diverted, I turn to Stumbleupon, for example. Less mindlessly diverted I turn to A & L Daily or Bookforum. I am on Facebook and occasionally read the feed of postings or status updates. Often I wonder why anyone would bother posting some of the things they do, and sometimes this is from people who are my actual friends, and not just my Facebook friends. On a daily basis, I really don’t care what they had for lunch or if they’re tired right now. The best ones are those who consider their audience and post items they think will be of interest, and occasionally the things are interesting, but it’s seldom worth reading through a lot for the occasional gem. I see the value in this, and understand why people find this interesting, only I’m not one of those people. Because of other projects in my life and the sustained attention they require, constant diversions–far from being valuable–are instead a burden in my life.

Networking

"Networking" is a word that’s always bothered me. I am definitely not a networker, which is probably pretty obvious to people who know me. I’m a sociable enough person, and I have friends, but making friends is different from networking. Networking involves making contacts with people whom I think might benefit me in some way, whether I like or respect or value the person at all. To me this violates the categorical imperative to treat people as ends in themselves and not merely as means to your ends. This is not to say that I have no "network," or that many librarians around the country haven’t benefited me over the years, but I’ve never gone out of my way to cultivate any of them as members of my "network." They are people I’ve met through the profession and whom I happen to like, and if they benefit me, fine. If not, fine. I’ll still like them. A lot of these people I’ve met through RUSA, and one reason I keep participating in RUSA is that I like a lot of the people there. But people I don’t like or respect, I just avoid, even if cultivating them might benefit my career. And generally, I have no interest in building up a "network" merely to have people know my name. I don’t have anything to sell or a brand to promote, including myself.

A colleague of mine tried to contradict this sentiment by saying this blog was an example of networking, that I was one of "those people."  However, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing in this blog, and frankly can’t see many ways this blog has benefited me professionally or created a network of people who can help me. I started this blog both to participate in what I thought were some valuable online discussions, and also because I had views or perspectives that I didn’t see represented in those discussions. I thought it might be worthwhile to put forward some of those perspectives. Lately, I’ve been less sure of that, but that’s another story. For example, as far as I know, I’m the only library blogger who works in collection development at a large research library or who regularly teaches a non-library school course that nevertheless has something to do with libraries and library research. (And if that’s not the case and I’ve overlooked someone, then light a candle and don’t curse my darkness.) I started writing because I k
new there were other people interested in some of these issues, but I wasn’t seeing any discussion of them. Which brings me to….

Sharing

Some people benefit from these services because they either enjoy sharing their thoughts or what they’re doing at the moment, or they are curious about what other people have to share. I’m sympathetic to this motivation, too. Considering this blog again, part of the motivation was to share. When I was in library school, I thought I wanted to do pretty much what I’m doing now. It would have been great to get inside the head of someone actually doing it, to find out what they thought about, the issues they faced, the concerns they had. In library school I was the self which I was not, in the mode of not being it, and would have loved more guidance. There were hardly any blogs back then, but now, of the library blogs that have anything to do with my job, almost all are focused on either public services or technology or some combination of the two, and those aren’t necessarily the most important parts of my job. In addition, many of the most prominent ones of these are written by non-academic librarians who have a different take on many issues than academic librarians do, or at least different than this academic librarian does.

The sharing that other librarians do benefits me, and it’s possible some people have benefited from my own sharing, but it’s difficult to think of anything worth sharing for me that can be reduced to 140 or 160 characters. I’m not really interested in what you’re doing at the moment, and can’t figure out why you’d be interested in what I’m doing. What would it be? Here’s what I’m reading? I spend most of my free time reading philosophy or writing in my journal. Would any of you really care that I’m currently reading Brighouse, Barry, Anderson, and Cohen on justice? What would I have to say in 140 characters that would matter for those subjects? I’ve searched Twitter for any tweets on topics of interest and found nothing I’m interested in. Nor am I interested in "trending topics" or "nifty queries." One reason I’m writing here less is that I’m reading so little to do with librarianship, and I hesitate to inflict upon readers some of my thoughts on topics that don’t have to do with education or librarianship.

Discussion

Another worthwhile motivation, at least for some of these services. The thing is, I already have an active online life with several friends of mine scattered around the country. I don’t have enough time even for them sometimes.  Most of the people I might ordinarily have virtual conversations with are librarians, but only selectively am I interested in library subjects. Gossiping about the latest trend or scandal can be fun, but it’s just not something that motivates me most of the time. When I discovered that I myself was the subject of at least one librarian gossip fest in a chat room, my only thought was, what a complete waste of time. If this is the kind of thing people are discussing, I’ll stick to my books, thanks. There’s a great quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." I don’t know if I have a great mind, but I do know the further discussion moves from ideas and fundamentals to chit-chat and gossip the less I have to say and the less time I devote to it.

Because of the Roosevelt quote, this is probably the most judgmental of my comments here, but nevertheless it’s the level of discussion that keeps me away. The discussions I find the most interesting and useful are those that develop through thoughtful pieces of writing (and occasionally thoughtful talks), some responding to each other. Sometimes these are blog posts and comments, sometimes blog posts and blog posts, sometimes books and reviews. Whatever the format, the value comes from the depth of the exchange when there’s something substantive to discuss. There are a lot of these conversations in the library literature (broadly conceived), but I don’t tend to get  much personally from oneliners or rapid exchanges. As for discussing problems or seeking help, I rarely have anything practical or immediate I need help or guidance with. Professionally, I benefit from discussions of fundamentals or techniques, but immediate problem-solving from someone not in my library at the moment isn’t something I need.

It’s very possible that I’m missing some great reward that’s out there to be discovered, but after a lot of thought I just don’t see it. The level and immediacy of engagement that most of these tools offer just doesn’t provide much value for me. Again, I see the value for people, but what I need the most they rarely offer. The more brief and immediate the service, the less it appeals to me.

 

The Usefulness of the Liberal Arts

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Inside Higher Education making the case that while business people sometimes make the case for the usefulness of a liberal arts education in business, humanities professors rarely do. It contrasts the views of management guru Peter Drucker with those of English professor Stanley Fish. Drucker values the usefulness of the liberal arts (and, though the article doesn’t mention it, wrote an essay on management as a liberal art) for life and work, while Fish claims they serve no purpose and do nothing to improve people.

In a way, I can see Fish’s point. The liberal arts are so designated because they are the arts appropriate to free persons, that is, persons who do not have to work for a living and have the leisure to pursue their interests in literature or philosophy. At the very least, it gives those people something to talk about. People with jobs can always talk about their work, but people without jobs need something to occupy their time and have conversations about.

However, things have been different since the Renaissance. Rhetoric and other liberal arts began to flourish anew in the republics of Renaissance Italy because they were useful. Rhetoric is necessary to persuade, and persuasion is an important component of politics and law, as well as business. People were seeking out teachers of rhetoric and other liberal arts because they were strivers who wanted to improve themselves to get ahead, not because they were layabouts who needed to find enjoyable ways to kill time before the advent of television. This model of the liberal arts has just as much relevance today as it did then.

I suspect that the main reason humanities professors don’t play up the usefulness of the liberal arts for business is twofold. First, anything that smells of trade is looked down upon. We all know what shallow money-grubbers business people are. After all, we’ve been shown in numerous novels for the past two hundred years how awful they are, novels all written by people unsuccessful in the business world. Also, humanities professors rarely have much knowledge of what is necessary to succeed in the business world, because they’ve rarely spent much time outside academia. It’s a rare occurrence to find a humanities professor who has spent much time working in the business world in any but the lowest positions for brief times long ago. It’s hard to say if the liberal arts are useful for some profession if you’ve never worked in that profession.

Librarianship sometimes seems like an in-between world. It’s not quite academic in the way that teaching is academic, and parts are much more administrative than most professors would like. Even in non-managerial jobs, there’s a lot of paperwork and administrivia. Whereas I value the academic in academic librarianship, there are also plenty of librarians who thrill at the parallels between libraries and businesses and look to the business literature for inspiration. Regardless, what we do is more like what might be done in a business than what most professors do.

Even with that, it’s hard sometimes to articulate the usefulness of a liberal arts education for some library jobs. Because my job is working with humanities faculty, students, and collections, it’s obvious the knowledge and acclimatization gained through such an education is useful. Rhetoric is probably the most practical, and I get the same sense from non-academic friends. Whether you’re building a case for a budget increase or trying to sell someone a widget, the ability to construct persuasive arguments is important.

I’m less sure about the immediate usefulness of having read a lot of literature or viewed a lot of art, though, because such things seem to be most useful when the literature or art provides a shared context for people and allows them to communicate more effectively because they have something in common. In a discussion with a librarian once, I said the only function of the human appendix was to serve as a memento mori, but the joke lost its point when I had to explain what a memento mori was. Because of the various backgrounds of academic librarians, I’m already careful about making certain cultural allusions in conversation or assuming the shared values a mutual liberal education might provide. Out in the world it’s even harder to make such allusions or count on a shared culture created through education.

Thus it would seem that the skills, and not the content, of a liberal education that are the most valuable for business, which might be another reason it’s harder for academics to make the arguments for the usefulness of the liberal arts. In the humanities the emphasis isn’t so much on skills but on content. It’s not, "Professor X sure is good at putting together a persuasive PowerPoint presentation," but "Professor X is a leading authority on topic Y, and she also knows a lot about topic Z as well." Mastering a subject, or many subjects, is valued for its own sake, and not just because it’s good for sales. Mastering a subject is also a synecdoche for something larger as well. Mastery of a subject is also mastery of the self, of achieving or striving to achieve a kind of perfection, of overcoming the shallowness of popular culture and ignorant opinion and seeking to know and understand.

The article finds it surprising that business people are better at defending the liberal arts to business people than academics are, but this shouldn’t be surprising at all. Without shared values and a shared culture, communication is difficult. For better and worse, the cultures are too far apart to communicate well.

On the Vision Thing

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Somehow today I stumbled upon this commentary by Carl Grant, the president of Ex Libris North America. In it, Grant expresses his disappointment over a lack of leadership or vision for librarianship. "As a librarian in the United States, I’m growing more and more upset and outraged about the lack of a national vision for librarianship. Where is our professional leadership in this time of economic crisis? Who is describing a vision that inspires us and that we can support?" Given the recent "Darien Statements" and my own occasional ruminations on the subject, there is evidence that some librarians desire a large and meaningful discussion about vision and purpose, and I can certainly understand the frustration Grant feels.

What I’m not so sure about, which I also discussed concerning the "Darien Statements," is whether there can be such a "national vision for librarianship," because it’s not clear that librarianship is itself a unified field. Grant discusses a Chronicle article calling for a national educational agenda that considers higher education a public good again rather than as a place for states to save money by cutting it to the bone. Grant comments: "There are some wonderful messages and ideas in that article that can be applied directly to libraries (frequently, with little more than a word swap)." I tend to agree, but it’s not clear that "librarianship" as a field is even as coherent as "higher education," and "higher education" itself verges on incoherence these days if we included Harvard, the University of Phoenix, community college systems, and your local Bible college.

For there to be such a vision, there would have to be some agreement on what it is libraries in theory should do, but what libraries do in practice varies considerably. It’s relatively easier to discuss academic libraries, but even within academia libraries play greater or lesser roles, and the importance of the library is very different for an historian and an astrophysicist, or to an on-campus liberal arts student and a part-time distance ed student.

One thing that seems clear when such discussions about meaning or purpose come up is that they can’t be divorced from the educational and political mission of libraries. Grant at one point says "our fellow educators" and considers the profession of librarianship part of the "core infrastructure of America, of its society"; the "Darien Statements" state that the Library "Encourages the love of learning" and "Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty; even the Annoyed Librarian likes to quote the motto of the Boston Public Library on educating citizens, or at least she used to. To the extent this is true, then perhaps academic libraries are not so divorced from public librarians after all.

The goal of the Library or the vision of Librarianship cannot be separated from larger goals of society, and the larger goals that seem to stir people the most are related to education, politics, and economics. Educational institutions are here to teach people and allow them to fulfill their potential as well as shape them into good citizens and productive workers. If there is to be a grand vision, it seems it would have to have this as the goal.

But would a vision like that guide every library and every librarian? Where I work, such a vision seems natural enough. The students we serve are bright and movitivated and are likely to fulfil their potential while being good citizens and productive workers. That, after all, is the natural goal of a liberal education, and some purpose like that is part of why I do what I do where I do it.

Are public libraries necessarily different? Public libraries have different relationships to their communities, and serve many functions that academic libraries often don’t. I’m thinking about hosting book clubs or acting as community centers, things that might be rough parallels to seminars or student center events on a college campus. Still, it’s obvious that with the traditional and current emphasis on providing information and guiding people to it that an educational function is built into public libraries. School libraries as well. Special libraries have some claim to making people into more productive workers, though I’m not sure how well they fare on making people better citizens or fuller human being, but everybody can’t do everything.

Is something like this the de facto vision of librarianship that we’re just not talking about much? Near the end of his essay, Grant opines that "an effort to find [a strategic plan] for libraries in general, National Libraries and/or Public Libraries can leave one exhausted and unsatisfied." I agree completely. I’m just not sure the problem is a lack of vision. I think if there can be a vision it will be something like I’ve described, and that any of us who think on the matter and want to find a larger purpose to our profession eventually work our way to something like this: libraries and librarians create more complete human beings, better citizens, and more productive workers. If that’s the case – and keep in mind I’m merely speculating – then we have the vision in the sense of purpose and goal. Do we have the will to implement that vision, or can we come up with a specific plan? On that I have as many doubts as Grant.

English Only, Please

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A couple of weeks ago my colleague Mary George published an article in Inside Higher Education about student confessions related to what they didn’t know about research. (For the record, I am not the "Academic librarian" in the comments section.) Some of these are typical missteps many of us probably see with students all the time. They try to find periodical articles in the OPAC, or believe (or maybe just hope or even pretend to believe) that if an article isn’t digitized they won’t be able to get it. It’s a good list of some of those tidbits of knowledge both professors and librarians might take for granted, but that somehow never got passed on to the students.

This could signal many things, such as a breakdown in communication or instruction or a failure to integrate research skills into the curriculum. I suspect as much as anything it signals our inability to unlearn and get back into the mindset of a novice researcher, especially one used to Google or Yahoo who suddenly encounters the sometimes unnecessarily complicated world of the academic library. (I mean unnecessarily complicated in a theoretical sense, because after all why shouldn’t students search for periodical articles in the OPAC; had librarians begun indexing a century ago instead of relying upon commercial indexes, how different the library world might be.)

One topic that didn’t make it onto Mary’s short list of misunderstandings is language, but it’s one I’ve seen many times. We’ve all encountered the students who believe that everything is online, whether it’s a recent article from the New York Times or a church bulletin from a small parish in England in the late nineteenth century. In some ways this doesn’t surprise me as much as the double assumption that everything will be both online and in English, no matter what it is or when or where it was published. Long after I’ve gotten used to the misconceptions related specifically to library research, I have to admit this one still astounds me.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, there’s the old joke: "What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages: Bilingual. One language: American." Still, I am surprised, not because students seem to have no familiarity with any foreign languages. I think I’m more surprised by the assumption that there’s some organization somewhere that takes every document created anywhere in the world at any time and immediately translates it for American college students. The Babelfish Institute does this for everything, regardless of the origin or likelihood of being used.

The reasons for the misunderstanding seems to vary. One I heard recently made at least some sense to me. Someone had seen citations from a conference proceeding and wanted to track down the articles. The proceeding was from a technical conference in Germany in 2007. According to Worldcat, only two libraries held the proceedings, both in Germany. It looked like they were available from the institute that hosted the conference, and had time not been a factor I would have suggested requesting we purchase them since they weren’t expensive. Then I discovered the student didn’t read any German, but thought that since some American scholars had cited them maybe they had been translated. This definitely shows a misunderstanding of the world of scholarship, but I could sort of see the logic in this, because often scholars not writing in English have to be translated to make an impact in America. In all seriousness, how much of an impact would existentialism or poststructuralism or other French philosophy have made in America had not Sartre or Derrida or Foucault or Lyotard been translated into English?

Sometimes the assumption seems considerably less grounded even than this. "I’m looking for primary documents in Soviet archives written by Russian spies." "Do you read Russian?" "No. Would I need to?" "I want to study the local French response to riots in the banlieues of Paris." "Do you read French?" "I need newspaper editorials from Mexican newspapers about the drug wars." "Do you read Spanish?" I think you get the idea. In some cases, the fact of sources being in English or even translated into English would seem inplicit in the request. Russian spies wrote in Russian. The French respond to things in French. Etc. If we find news articles from Djibouti in English, they’re probably from the BBC World Service.

So many questions suggest themselves to us that probably don’t occur to students. Why would this particular document have been translated into English? Who would have translated it? The same questions apply to digitization. Who would have taken the trouble to digitize this obscure document from this relatively poor part of the world? Do students have any sense of the time and effort that goes into digitization or translation, how many people have to work together to get something digitized or translated, how much funding would be involved, or how that typically there has to be some commercial benefit or assumption of broad appeal before such projects are launched? Of course they don’t, and there’s no reason they should have thought about this. I’m not ridiculing the students, but only pointing out another area of understandable ignorance that has to be dealt with.

Thus when I work with students, I’ve learned to counsel them about a neglected rule of scholarship. if you’re going to work on historical or cutural topics about some other place in the world, you need to learn the language. If you don’t know the language, either learn it or change your topic. I try not to make it a harsh lesson, but somewhere along the way students have to learn that despite the popularity of English, most people in the world are not communicating in English in their local communities, and that a lot of people even in the United States don’t communicate in English in their local communities. People in non-English speaking countries are involved in living their lives and being in their worlds, and never pause to think that some American college student might want to study them for a research essay.

This lesson might be hard to communicate to most students. It might be easier to just digitize every document in the entire world and have it translated into English. Maybe Google can take care of that for us.

Preserving the Integrity of Civilization

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I emerged from a long period of intense work to find the Darien Statements popping up all over my Google Reader. They seem like worthwhile enough statements, if  grandly stated. Readers of this blog know that I’m not averse to grandiloquent overstatement in the search for purpose. They didn’t evoke in me the visceral reaction they seem to in others, and I think I occupy the middle ground somewhere between the acid cynicism of the some bloggers and the sunny optimism of others. Mostly, I wonder about the meaning of the first statement that is supposed to support the others. "The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization." When I first read it, that sentence really grabbed me. Yes, I thought, that sounds good. However, as I thought about it more and unpacked the sentence, the meaning seemed to dissolve before me, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

The first problem for me was the Library. Maybe it’s something about the singular and the capitalization that bothers me, the assumption that there’s some essence common to all libraries, the librariness of the library existing in the mind of God or something. One of the reasons I focus on academic libraries is that I don’t think there is a Library; there are libraries of all sorts and all types, and there doesn’t seem to be much that they have in common. We might say they all provide access to information of some kind to some set of users as a common denominator. That seems to be about it, and that doesn’t seem enough to warrant the singular, capitalized noun. In my mind I always contrast the tiny public library that serves my grandmother and the largish academic library I work in. They are vastly different libraries with very different goals. If we add in school and special libraries, the variety becomes even greater. Though public and academic libraries have a lot in common, it seems to me that these days public libraries consider their missions to be broader than the educational mission usually assumed of most academic libraries.

If there is no one Library, then there can be no one purpose. But even if there were one Library and one purpose, would it be to preserve the integrity of civilization? In addition to implying that there’s a Library, this statement also implies there’s a civilization, and that this civilization has integrity. In one common sense of the term, there are many civilizations, and ours (if we share one) is but one of them. If we are talking about our civilization, which one is that? Let’s assume for the sake of argument we’re talking about Western civilization. This makes sense. The statements are written in English and are undoubtedly written from the perspective of librarians who are the products of Western civilization. This is a troublesome phrase to some. What might I mean by Western civilization? I’m not quite sure, other than the current state of the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-Germanic mishmash that has defined so much about Europeans and the places they have colonized.

Which leads to my next question. How much integrity does this civilization have? What do we mean by integrity? Etymologically it means something whole, undivided, complete, possibly pure. I’ll ignore the moral protests against Western civilization, because they tend to ignore comparisons with other civilizations. Just trying to look objectively, dispassionately at Western civilization, in modern times it seems to be the most porous, divided, unintegrated civilization in existence. This civilization, born amongst the commingling cultures in the ancient Mediterranean, has always been impure and open and unintegrated and grows more so every year. Rarely in the West has there been an active decision – as there once was in Japan, for example – to retreat from contact with other civilizations. There was some isolation during the early Middle Ages as the structure of the Roman empire collapsed, but otherwise the West has been porous.

Even what is sometimes popularly considered the most integral period of Western history, the apex of Christendom during the high middle ages, was much more internally divided than most people realize and was also deliberately and aggressively open to Islamic civilization through the Crusades. Since the Reformation, Western civilization has begun an endless process of splintering and dividing while growing ever more open to outside influences while also overwhelming other civilizations with Westernization.

But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Could it be civilization in some moral sense that is meant, as we might use it when we say people are civilized, which in some senses we would say only of a subset of a civilization in the first sense. ? Or in a related sense, using civilization as Matthew Arnold used "culture"? Culture for Arnold was the best that has been thought and said, and the human mission to perfect ourselves through an immersion in this culture. In this way of thinking, the mission of The Library would be a cultural mission, a civilizing mission. The Library preserves the integrity of civilization by civilizing us, by preserving culture in the high Arnoldian sense and allowing us access to it in a way we wouldn’t have if The Library didn’t exist.

This understanding makes sense of many of the statements,for example the phrases about "personal enlightenment" and "love of learning" and "creative expression," as well as the liberal content of some of the exhortations to promote openness, kindness, or trust. This Arnoldian interpretation is high-minded, and to some can be inspiring. It is what I myself think of my own library and its educational and research mission in my prouder moments. However, if something like this is meant, especially for all libraries, it seems to go against the grain of some popular thinking on libraries and librarians, especially the idea that librarians can or should be "neutral," or the relativistic "every book his reader" of Ranganathan. If The Library has a civilizing mission, then librarians must act accordingly, and become the guardians and promoters of this civilization. Civilization loses any neutral sense it might have. Such a civilization has a content, a philosophy, an ethic, a framework to choose what is worthwhile to be preserved or promoted and what isn’t.

This doesn’t bother me at all. Something like this was implied in my arguments for the librarian as filter. In those posts, I argued that it was the librarian’s job to select and thus to choose what to preserve, and that librarians can not and should not be neutral, but I was talking about academic libraries. I wonder if librarians in the mass are ready for such a charge when they’ve been taught for a long time to be neutral providers devoted to "access" in the abstract, but not access to particular items of value. If my Arnoldian interpretation is right, then this statement means that all librarians and all libraries have a positive, substantial educational and civilizing mission. This means that public libraries and librarians would need to move away from the usual policy of giving the public what it wants to giving the public what the librarians think they need. This already happens in academic libraries, but it seems foreign to what I know of public libraries.

I can’t say for sure if this is what the authors of the Darien Statements meant by "preserving the integrity of civilization." This is the interpretation that seems to me to make the most sense of the document. If it is what they meant, it’s a powerful statement that cuts d
eeper through the thinking of a lot of librarians than perhaps they meant to. If this interpretation veers too far from the authorial intentions, perhaps more clarification would help me understand the statements better.

Innovation and Waste

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I gave a workshop Tuesday on "emerging search technologies," by which I meant roughly searching for just about anything on or via the Internet using means that went past just the text-based websearching of Google or Yahoo. Thus I mentioned sites like Grokker and Hakia and a new (to me) tool, Chunkit. We spent a lot of time on so-called "social search," ranging from Wikia and Mahalo to Worio and Sidestripe (which work with Facebook Connect) to Aardvark, a tool so new and hip I’m not even allowed to use it yet.

It’s enjoyable to see what some obviously very clever people are developing every day, and I had a great time researching the workshop, but I was also struck by how much wasted effort there is in any innovation. I’m not sure I have enough of a social network to take advantage of things like Sidestripe or Aardvark, though they look pretty nifty. But who really needs Stumpedia? "Human powered search"? What were they thinking? Is this going to be any improvement over the old but still useful concept of a web directory? I don’t see how. Or Truevert, the "green" search engine? Is anyone really likely to find more informtion about composting toilet systems on this than on Google or Yahoo? Or Delver, with the dubious claim that "your friends know best." With all due respect to my friends who are reading this, I’m not sure you really know best about any topic I’m likely to be searching the Internet for, and I’m almost positive that I don’t know best about whatever you’re searching (unless you happen to be searching for stuff about me, in which case I probably do–but what are the chances?).

Even sites I kind of like pitch themselves as solving a problem I don’t have. Consider Rollyo, which allows you to create customized search engines a lot more easily than Google Coop. Rollyo asks, "Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want?" To which I’d have to answer, nope. Google does a pretty good job of giving me relevant sites on the top page. Or, "ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust?" Almost never, to be honest. Those sites I just go to directly, usually using Google Bookmarks.

Obviously I’m not the target audience for search engines and sites that claim to solve the problem of too many irrelevant resources, but I do wonder how many people really are these days. If people can’t get relevant search results on Google or Yahoo, how likely is it they’re going to do much better asking their friends for help with Aardvark or Sidestripe? Chances are that my social network, such that it is, contains a lot of Internet savvy people, and if I actually had a question, someone might be able to point me to something I hadn’t discovered. But it’s at least possible that the people who are the least Internet savvy are going to have an entire network of unsavvy friends, none of whom can help them.

I’m not even sure how much the people using Rollyo can be trusted. I searched one specialized search engine for guitar tablature, and noticed that it doesn’t have Chordie, which is far better at finding guitar tabs than the Rollyo engine and any of the websites it searches. 

I was thinking about the waste because I remember reading a few months ago about some controversy regarding libraries building innovative search tools to rival Google, and wondered how much of our effort we might waste doing things like that. It’s not because I think that out of this waste good things won’t emerge, because I believe they will. It’s just that there are so many people out there wasting a lot of time and money and effort to come up with the next new thing that it seems hard enough for most of us just to keep up with what’s already going on. There absolutely has to be wasted effort to produce useful innovations. I guess I’m just glad there are a lot of clever working on things like this so I don’t have to.

Practicality and Adaptability

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Since this post is inspired partially by a brief mention of my ACRL Virtual Conference presentation, I want to begin by thanking those of you who responded with advice on that presentation when I asked for it. Some I ignored, some I took to heart, but I carefully considered it all. Especially useful was perhaps Steven’s caution to remember that in a virtual presentation like this, the audience has nothing but the slides and my voice. That was a little strange for me, and helped me realize how much I depend upon immediate audience feedback both to guide my presentations and to end with a performance high. I thought the presentation went reasonably well, and people stayed until the end and asked questions, so at least they didn’t fall asleep during my talk. (The slides are here, if anyone’s curious; at some point I’m planning to write up and develop the notes.)

The Library Journal gave a short roundup of the virtual conference, and had this to say about my efforts: "’Cultivate Your Bottom,’ had a clever title but, as even the speaker himself acknowledged, focused on what many people would consider obvious: it’s important to focus not on leaders but librarians and staffers at the bottom of the hierarchy, empowering them to act, and ensuring that they share their knowledge. Only near the end of the session were concrete examples—e.g, seminars, wikis —offered."

Though I’m not sure how much I said was really that obvious, my caveat with the description, which for the most part seems accurate, is the word only." "Only at the end of the session were concrete examples…offered." The assumption here seems completely unwarranted. Are conference presentations supposed to be only lists of practical and specific things to do in your library? Is abstraction bad? If so, then there were certainly worse "offenders" than me. Jim Neal’s portion of the "Subject Liaison 2.0" presentation, for example, was very theoretical, his assumption I’m sure being that if we consider certain generalities about what to look for in a subject liaison, then the particulars of any given librarian will obviously fit or not fit the theory.

The "only" bothers me not because it implies a judgment on my presentation (it does, but it’s not a severe judgment, and not one that would have changed it). Instead, it bothers me because it bespeaks an undercurrent I sense in the entire profession. We’re all supposed to work within the dominant pragmatic ideology and make little effort to theorize or philosophize about our practice. Theorizing is supposed to be left to someone else, though I’m not sure who that is. LIS professors, i guess. This anti-theoretical stance that seems so practical is, however, highly impractical. It assumes that we can act responsibly without having reasons for why we act, or that we can act coherently without understanding the theoretical coherence behind our actions. I’m just not satisfied plunging ahead with every gimmick and trend without knowing how they fit into the larger scheme of goals to be achieved and problems to be solved.

Once the theoretical framework is in place, the practical implications seem easy enough to work out. If, for example, one believes an organizational problem is to figure out how to maximize and exploit the knowledge dispersed throughout an organization, then specific practices are rather easily judged in light of this theory. Administrative decisions that don’t take into account the knowledge on the ground: bad. Training sessions that share knowledge among colleagues: good. Organizational structures that depend upon one person or a small group of persons to have the relevant knowledge and power to act: bad. Empowering knowledgeable and well trained frontline staff to act: good. The list could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the point.

What seems to be common throughout the profession is an overvaluation of practical tips and a resistance to abstraction. I’m not criticizing practical tips, but a bullet point approach to library  education isn’t the best way to develop thoughtful and adaptable librarians. Specific daily practices or technical solutions become outdated. Adaptability requires us to evaluate the usefulness of practice within a broader theoretical framework, to focus less on the concrete details of library practice and more on the reasons why we do what we do. If we keep in mind the reasons we act in certain ways, then it’s easier to change those actions when they’re no longer relevant or appropriate. If we act without reasons, we’ll never be able to adapt easily to new circumstances, nor justify our existence to ourselves or to anyone else.