Meditation #2 (For the New Year)

December Dirge

This month seems to deny its age--like an old, white-faced dog that, despite its cracking arthritic joints and cataract-cloaked eyes, insists on chasing the trucks that putter down the streets.  I guess its warm in other places too this year, and I admit that its an odd and even unwelcome sensation when I move about outside knowing the water that creeps into the mesh cloth of my shoes is from rain puddles instead of snow drifts.

Of course, even as the year refuses to let winter's bony fingers stretch over it, most everyone else seems to welcome its end, seems eager to celebrate its death, or rather what they perceive as its death, and wretch the new year out into what will surely be a cold January.  I suppose it's natural for everyone to welcome new changes and new beginnings on their own terms.  It's understandable to want to escape from the regrets, indecision, heartaches that strode through 2011, whether they be personal or broad in scope.

I'm hardly an exception to this ritual.  In the past, I've welcomed new changes and new opportunities.  It's nice to get a fresh start every once and a while.

Yet, time is weary for the impatience of those who try to bottle it.  Events and their memory cannot be scraped from the mind like one scrapes frost from a windshield.  And now, in the 22nd year of my tiny little corner of perception, I am less eager to escape the past twelve months.  Though, I'm in no hurry to try and relive them either.  

I'm pleased with myself that I'm finally finding it easier to accept the events of my life with tranquility and not waste time in a fruitless quest to forget or ignore.  Try as I might to forget this year, it certainly isn't going to forget me.  

Happy New Year.

Classes in Dijon vs. Classes in Columbus

How many of you can guess which nations have the best universities?  Usually when I think of the higher education, I think of the long European intellectual tradition, the tradition that gave us Sartre and Kant and Newton.  It makes sense that the best universities are to be found in European nations, right?

Well... that's only partially true.  US News and World Report in their annual university ranking survey ranks the United Kingdom, having four schools in the top ten, and the United States, having six schools in the top ten, as the best countries in which to seek higher education.

The rest of the list is dominated by both the UK and the USA, which, as you can see based on my assumptions, surprised me.  I think that there's a stereotype among Americans that European universities are prestigious and glamorous, but evidently, the data suggests that if you want to get a good education, it's better just to stay in the States.

In fact, my adviser from the Office of International Affairs at Ohio State told me before I left that most French universities "sucked."  I was skeptical of her assertion; I'm not one to take things on here-say, but the research seems to confirm her idea.  France is on US News' list only a handful of times, and lists from different sources show a similar trend.

At the University of Burgundy, I actually don't take classes in the university proper.  I take classes in a program called the CIEF (Centre pour des Edutiants Internationaux de Francais), which is a special program designed specifically for international students who want to learn French.  My class time is split up between language classes, where they simply teach us the raw basics of French, a civilization class about the basics of French history and politics, and culture classes which teach more specific subject areas like economics, literature, and philosophy.

I wonder how much of my experience here is the result of the structure of the CIEF, as opposed to the general university system itself, because much of it is set up very differently from the United States.  Firstly, I'm noticing a much larger focus on classroom rapport and accountability.  At OSU, there are numerous classes in which the teachers never take attendance and in which in the only grades are the exams.  Here, there is homework almost every day, and the teachers grade every aspect of your work, from grammar to expression to handwriting, even if the assignment has nothing to do with these things.

That being said, the work load is actually quite a good deal less than that of my classes in the States.  There are no long reading assignments, and most of the homework is in the form of worksheets that can be completed in a hour or two.  The teachers ensure that the students learn by grading hard and monitoring our progress closely.  In the US, the teachers expect us to take responsibility for ourselves and be disciplined in keeping up without prompting.  I've frequently heard professors at OSU say, "You're adults now.  It's your job to make sure you do well."

This is hardly the attitude here.  One must keep in mind that a much larger percentage of the American population goes to college than the population in France.  There's less of an emphasis here on university being the primary medium for ensuring the well-being of one's future.  As a result, American universities take in more students with a wider range of abilities, and I think that the American university would benefit if its teachers were to suddenly decide to grade harder and scrutinize mistakes.  I think that this would ensure a greater accountability from the students.

Still, the amount of busy work and the hovering over shoulders in France is off putting.  There are days when I feel like I'm back in high school.  Two weeks ago, one of my professors noticed the way I was taking notes in her class and proceeded to harangue me about bad study habits.

I admit that I took it a little personally.  I don't think that many people would find me unreasonable if I were to say that it's none of her goddamned business the way I take notes,  all of which were completely in French and have served me rather well in the past, thank you very much.  Of course, after I calmed down, I realized that there no way of her knowing that I found them effective.  Yet, the fact that she felt the need to monitor my habits lingers in my mind as needlessly invasive, and based on what I've heard about other teachers this attitude about monitoring our progress is pretty pervasive.

I'm also finding the teaching style to be more disjointed and less focused than in the US.  It's not uncommon for teacher to go off on tangents and jump around between subjects.  The culture classes, which are all lectures, are sometimes difficult to follow and discussion of the ideas being presented, that is asking questions of the students or asking for input, is rare.  That's not to say that there aren't teachers who ask for discussion or encourage us to question.  However, these things are such prominent parts of American educational pedagogy, that their relative absence is bizarre.  Even if a subject itself is interesting, a course can make it boring or difficult to understand without active participation from the students, and if there's something that I don't understand in a class, it's never because of the language barrier.

Again, I wonder if this is due to the French university system itself, or if it's the result of the CIEF.  I imagine that a lot of the classes are deliberately slowed down in hopes of accommodating for language skills. I've been tempted to sneak into a lecture hall during one of the regular classes and observe to see if it's any different.

I'm not trying to sound ungrateful.  I've learned a lot during my time here, and my language skills have improved.  Still, the classes here aren't nearly as rigorous as the ones at OSU, and I wish more than anything that the teachers would give us a little credit.

On Post-Nationalism and Globalization

In the movie Network, there's a great scene where Beale, a disenfranchised news anchor who's been able to turn his angst into a Glenn Beck-like political commentary show, is given a speech by one of the corporate executives (played by Ned Beatty) who owns the news network.

"You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.  There are no nations.  There are no peoples.  There are no Russians.  There are no Arabs.  There is no West."  He continues, "We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies...Our children will live in that perfect world where there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality."

Despite the promises that the executive makes, many people find the prospect of the world being run by nebulous corporate entities rather frightening.  In the end, the movie is hardly optimistic, and other mediums have expressed this worry as well, from books to music, and even video games.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the PS3 and Xbox 360, the main character fights against  a vast corporate conspiracy.

In the late David Foster Wallace's novel, people's lives are dominated by distraction and entertainment from corporate entities.

In Pink Floyd's tenth album Animals, they compare the corrosive effects of capitalism and despotic political rule to various animals, notably business men being likened to dogs.

I've talked before about the effects of globalization on my experience here in France.  With the presence of the internet and the ease with which people can travel and access information nowadays, old concepts of nation-hood, human identity, and political relationships are collapsing and being replaced with something new.

Economics is one of the ways that this transition is being facilitated, specifically corporate capitalist economics.  I've worked on trying to understand economics better lately, but, given my background, I can understand why people would not find me the most credible source on this issue.  Luckily, what I'm going to talk about doesn't really relate to raw economic and commercial theory.

Usually when I hear people criticize transition and change as the result of globalization, it's often in the form of cliched and inarticulate rants about "the corporations, man," but I think that there are some legitimate concerns about the effects globalization, or rather coporatization, has on peoples lives.

One thing that bothers people about this prospect of corporate power is the effect that it can potentially have on the emotions.  Businesses are profit driven, so they try and cater their strategies to people who feel that they must have something that they may or may not necessarily need.  David Foster Wallace talks about this in both his book and in interviews.  Businesses exploit people's unhappiness by offering products and services that will temporarily slake their emptiness.  This, in turn, stokes an endless feeling of unsatisfaction which can only be quelled by buying more shit.  This is sales 101: create an atmosphere in which your potential customer feels that he will regret not buying what you're trying to sell, and the ideas above are just a huge expansion upon that principle.  While this is very good for stimulating economic growth and material prosperity, it doesn't address deep-seeded emotional needs and can arguably contribute to feelings of emptiness and isolation.

Overall, I've found France to be much less consumerist than United States, with the exception of Paris, but international economic interests are still present.  Another aspect of globalization that frightens people is the idea of homogeneity,  that everything in life will be turned into one monochromatic parade of mass-produced simplicity that, again, works to serve the profit motive.  Anyone who has access to as much as a newspaper stand will tell you that people are pissed off by  corporate powers.  The biggest example is the Occupy movements happening in the United States, though their grievances extend to other things as well.

These are a couple of the legitimate problems, though there are certainly more, posed by mass, consumer culture that need to be addressed.  Other, more vocal criticisms aren't so well founded.  There is a difference between corporate interests using lobbying and donations to push their agenda, and the existence a shadowy capitalist conspiracy that has its fingers in everything.  I've found that conspiracy theories never hold up under scrutiny.

Furthermore, there are things that foster globalization besides economics.  Communication, namely the internet, has breached borders in every area from politics to arts to science.

For whatever the reasons, Earth seems to be entering into what optimistic thinkers, like Michio Kaku, call a type 1 civilization, or a planetary civilization.  This civilization is defined by planetary unity, in which politics are not dominated by national interests, but rather by more collective interests.  If I were to speculate about the far future of this sort of civilization, I could imagine a universal language, a universal currency, and even singular government system.

Evidence for this transition is everywhere.  There haven't been any large-scale wars between nation states in many years,countries crowd themselves into trade agreements like the EU and NAFTA in order to better compete, English is becoming a common language everywhere, including even places like China where students are required six years of it before even entering high school, and I can pull up my computer and speak to someone who lives half-way around the world and to whom I've never spoken right now I wanted.

At the same time, one must consider that perhaps this transition will be slow or not happen at all.  Turmoil in the EU is the biggest illustration of the possibility.  Whereas I was quite convinced in an earlier post that Europe would seek to strengthen their economic bonds, a lot of the research I've done is predicting disintegration rather than federalization.  More locally, NAFTA has been criticized by thinkers on both the left and the right as ineffective.

Furthermore, there's no way of knowing that English will become a universal language or if there will even be one.  Common languages in the sciences and in trade have existed for a long time, notably Latin and Greek for about five hundred years, but these were reserved to only select spheres of people.  Most others functioned only on the vernacular of their own context, and I think that for the most part, especially in parts of the world with poor education, this is still the case.

In addition, the internet, which has frequently been hailed as the great communication bridge, may in fact be doing more to split us into teams than unifying us.  Algorithms on both social networking sites and search engines base what they put up on screen on prior interests and keystrokes.  You can try it right now.  Pick a keyword and type it into a Google search bar.  Then, go to a someone else's computer that you don't use ever and type in the exact same keyword.  I can guarantee that the results will be completely different because the internet tracks the users' past activity and filters its results based on that.  This aspect of the internet may serve to only confirm old prejudices and biases and make us more separated ideologically.

The criticisms are varied and many, but still the biggest hitch into a post-national world is identity.  National and regional origin is still such a determining factor in how people see themselves, and, in reality, who they are.  If there is anything that living in a foreign context has taught me, it's that so much of my own identity has been determined by where I've come from and where I've been.  It's not easy to dislodge that the role that place plays in people's lives.

Yet despite all these reasons, I think I'll repeat myself again and say that this is the period of transition.  It's difficult to know the future of politics, economics, and identity at this moment.  Large scale changes don't always translate down into the details of an individual person's life.  I doubt that mankind will be unified within my lifetime, but I remain convinced that the aspects of modern life are breaking up the paradigms of what used to dominate mankind.  At some point in the future,  in the far far future, whether someone or something is American or French or whatever will not only be thought of as irrelevant.  In truth, it won't even be part of the conversation.  With this sentiment come news sorts of progress and... new sorts of problems.