Surveillance and the Eye of God

“Surveillance is sometimes spoken of as a God’s eye view of the world. This idea is explored in relation to the ‘objective gaze’ of disengaged reason in the Enlightenment and its technologically-reinforced modes in the twenty-first century. The rise of the eye-centred viewpoint is coincident with the ‘great disembedding’ of individuals from the social. This in turn also prompted the self-disciplines of modernity, which are now key aspects of the power-base of modern institutions. A crucial moment in this shift was Bentham’s panopticon proposal, in which the knowledge regime of secularism started to shape social imaginaries in relation to surveillance. While secular omniscience was sought through the surveillance gaze, and explored later in the work of Foucault, Debord and others, the eye-centred view is not without critics. We draw upon some biblical resources, notably, the story of Hagar, that query the centrality of ‘objective vision’. Instead, an ethic of care is proposed, based in part on a fresh understanding of the ‘eye of God’. It is argued that the implications of the care ethic go far deeper than current appeals to privacy, data protection, civil liberties or human rights.”

David Lyon, "Surveillance and the Eye of God" Studies in Christian Ethics 27, 1, 2014 - http://sce.sagepub.com/content/27/1/21.abstract?rss=1 

I wrote about this some years ago and will return to it at some point.

Campbell's Law

“The most common problem is that all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decisionmaking processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,’ he wrote, ‘the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’”

"Why Quants Don't Know Everything," - http://wrd.cm/1aqjvdj

As I get ready for another year of metricized higher education, it's always nice to remind myself that social psychologists have already documented how policy metrics are quickly counteracted by the corrupting effects of the measure used. In the HE case, we get measured on student feedback, citations indices, and a range of other Key Performance Indicators (I was once advised to cite myself and colleagues to increase our H-index). In any case, given that the problems with this kind of thing are relatively well known, here's hoping that some wisdom may also filter into the system, as this article suggests. Campbell's 1976 paper can be found here: http://bit.ly/LZ2WcS.

On Comedy

“That comedy is a mansion built on tragic foundations was a theory given credence by Sigmund Freud. “A jest betrays something serious,” he wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious... The first doubled comedians were the first professional comedians, the comic actors who plied their trade as professional theaters emerged during the late sixteenth century. It was these men for whom the word comedian was coined, a designation that sought to describe the nature of their labor by placing them within a strict generic context. Prior to this moment, it was not possible to define comedy so neatly, nor could it be so closely associated with particular individuals. Rather, it existed as part of the much wider category of “fooling,” a diverse and multi-faceted portmanteau of spectacles that might include jugglers, acrobats, and simpletons as much as it did jesters and wits. Medieval fooling could also incorporate a mystical dimension, imagining the fool as both scapegoat and scourge, a quasi-apocalyptic Everyman who stood to remind us of the principle listed by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.’”

Andrew McConnell Stott, "Split Personalities," Lapham's Quarterly - http://bit.ly/1cFqbTq

Academia's Stratification

“We have tended to see the professor as a single figure, but he is now a multiple being, of many types, tasks, and positions... As higher ed has undergone some of the same changes as medicine, a complicated web of academic labor has developed. For the student, the result is similar to the patient seeking health care: When she enters college, she only occasionally encounters a full-fledged professor; she is more likely to see beta professionals—the adjunct comp teacher, the math TA, the graduate assistant in the writing center, the honors-program adviser, and the staff members who run the programs... The chief difference from medicine is the steep drop in pay, benefits, and job security for those who hold beta positions... What good is knowledge if it brings us gross inequality and unfair terms for a majority of those who work, or with whom we work?”

Jeffrey J. Williams, "The Great Stratification," The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/1d6FgKj

Professor vs. Frycook

“The high cost of college makes people think that most faculty are overpaid. Let me debunk this myth...My total gross: $621,652. That’s it—25 years in universities, including nine part-time jobs. Annual average gross income: $24,866. McDonald’s suggests that employees find a second job. Since I did not take that into account, we should not count my income from jobs that were outside of universities. If so, my academic earnings were $609,413. Compare that with $581,450 at McDonald’s. Predictably, I earned more as a professor than I might have made as an employee at McDonald’s. What is really surprising is that it took me 25 years to do so.
”

Alberto A. Martinez, "Who Earns More: Professor vs. Frycook," - http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=6283

Politifact on Religion

Politifact recently checked a claim that the founders of the American republic thought religion only referred to Christianity. They deemed this a pants on fire lie based on the following:

“Thomas Kidd, professor of history at Baylor University and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, said ‘the founders were certainly aware of other religions besides Christianity, and discussed them at length in their writings.’

Kidd pointed us to a 1818 letter from John Adams: ‘This country has done much. I wish it would do more; and annul every narrow idea in religion, government and commerce,’ Adams wrote. ‘It has pleased the providence of the first cause, the universal cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews, but to Christians and Mohomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.’

Benjamin Franklin also weighed in on the subject. Jan Ellen Lewis, professor of history at Rutgers University, cited Franklin’s autobiography, when he praised a new meeting house built in Philadephia. ‘The design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general,’ Franklin wrote. ‘So that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.’

In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson spoke directly to the debate over the crafting of a Virginia statute for religious freedom. Jefferson describes a proposal to add the phrase ‘the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion. The insertion was rejected by a great majority,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘In proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.’”

"Fundamentalist: When Founders Said Religion They Meant Christianity," Politifact - http://bit.ly/1leHdc5

I find it odd that Christian people today seek constitutional rights to oppress other religious groups. It is equally absurd that radical secularists seek to exclude religious groups from all public reason. The form of secularism the founders seem to have had in mind in the above quotations generally promotes the State's even handed-ness towards different groups rather than their total exclusion. The aim seems to be the best way to promote freedom as broadly as possible. That it has turned out to be rather difficult to figure out the best way to foster a reasonably fair expression of religious difference in a practicable manner over the past few hundred years, is beside the point. As it happens, the founders did not say that the task of balancing freedom with equality and fraternity would be easy. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age provides a lengthy recent contextualization of these matters. 

On Writing Routines

“The best inspiration often came while walking. Beethoven always took a pencil and paper with him in the Vienna Woods, and Kierkegaard often came home and started scribbling again still in his hat and coat. Some always wrote standing up - Hemingway and, I think, Virginia Woolf (who is not covered here). Nabokov started standing up, then progressed to sitting and finally lying down. Few seem to have practised any more violent exercise than walking, apart from Byron with his boxing and riding and, rather surprisingly, Joan Miró. The dreamy surrealist was an ardent practitioner of boxing, running and ‘Mediterranean yoga’. He detested going to parties, telling an American journalist, ‘They get on my tits.’”

Christopher Hart, "Rise and Shine" - www.literaryreview.co.uk/hart_12_13.php

Book Scanning Accidents

“A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books’ scanning process, in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble upon some glitch that hasn’t yet been unearthed...

Soulellis calls the Library of the Printed Web ‘an accumulation of accumulations,’ much of it printed on demand. In fact, he says that ‘I could sell the Library of the Printed Web and then order it again and have it delivered to me in a matter of days.’ A few years ago, such books would never have been possible. The book is far from dead: it’s returning in forms that few could ever have imagined.”

"The Artful Accidents of Google Books," The New Yorker - http://nyr.kr/1csSx32

Papyralysis

“But why is a scrolling blur of disembodied letters closer to the supposed essence of literature than a spoken performance or time spent in the presence of charismatic objects? Manuscripts communicate in ways electronic texts, and even printed books, can’t. They speak to presence — to the presence of a person, to the physicality of their body and the instant of their creation. What’s more, the meaning we derive from any text is inextricable from the web of perceptions and impressions that structures our reception of it: the heft of the paper, the smell of the binding, the shape of the handwriting. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze called this tactile intermediary the logique du sens. Pace Parks, there is no ‘essence of literary experience’ that precedes its embodiment.”

Jacob Mikanowski, "Papyralysis," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/17R4iAT

Sartre and the FBI

“The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.”

"The FBI Files on Being and Nothingness," http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=1099013653123741779