Dave Badtke’s Blog

From the April 2012 Atlantic

Michael Sandel, the author of Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do?, and the inspiring professor of philosophy at Harvard whose course on justice can be viewed online, poses an interesting problem in The Atlantic, April 2012:

The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued into the 1990s with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.

Today, that faith is in question. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.

Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.

This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.

And the spread of the market and its potentially morally corrupting influence, since everything in the market, including human values, is viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, leads Sandel to this concern:

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

Read the entire article . . .

Writing in today’s New York Times, Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author whose works my English 1 students have read in previous semesters, says that the title “Holiday on ICE” for the congressional hearing dealing with the treatment of migrants by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is flippant.

She reminds us that the more than 110 migrants who have died in immigration custody since 2003, her uncle among them, were hardly on holiday:

The flippant title of the hearing shows a blatant disregard for the more than 110 people who have died in immigration custody since 2003. One of them was my uncle Joseph, an 81-year-old throat cancer survivor who spoke with an artificial voice box. He arrived in Miami in October 2004 after fleeing an uprising in Haiti. He had a valid passport and visa, but when he requested political asylum, he was arrested and taken to the Krome detention center in Miami. His medications for high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate were taken away, and when he fell ill during a hearing, a Krome nurse accused him of faking his illness. When he was finally transported, in leg chains, to the prison ward of a nearby hospital, it was already too late. He died the next day

“My uncle’s brief and deadly stay in the United States immigration system was no holiday. Detention was no holiday for Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, who was 35 years old and pregnant when she died in immigration custody in Texas in 2007. She had a history of blood clots, and said her complaints regarding leg pains were ignored. It was no holiday for Mayra Soto, a California woman who was raped by an immigration officer. It was no holiday for Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese immigrant with a fractured spine who was dragged on the floor and refused the use of a wheelchair in an ICE detention center in Rhode Island.

Such treatment brings many words to my mind that are much harsher than flippant.

Any of my Spring 2012 students who would like extra credit should consider the following assignment: Write a personal Listen-Speak-Learn response to Benjamin Zander’s TED talk.

Those of you who read and play music might be interested in the score for  Frèdèric Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, Opus 28, Number 4, which conductor Zander plays on the piano during his presentation. Since this particular piece has a simple, haunting melody backed by chords not that different from what you might encounter in a blues or rock ballad, you might want to try playing it on your instrument of choice.

Guitar note: I began reacquainting myself with piano a little more than two years ago — years ago I was terrible; now I’m a bit better — so when I wrote the above, I was thinking piano chords, which are rather easily played in this piece. However, I also started to teach myself guitar a little more than a year ago, so you’d think I’d always remember that it can be quite difficult to go from piano to guitar inasmuch as one’s fingers are only so long. It does appear that there’s a transcription for Guitar in A minor with drop-D tuning, with the baseline inverted relative to the melody. There’s also an A minor performance uploaded to YouTube.com by FretboardMechanics that you can compare to a wonderful performance by Jozsef Eotvos.

In Klamath, California the Yurok are struggling to rebuild their culture:

In Tucson, Arizona some Mexican-American books are banned:

And in Miama, Florida a 17-year-old is shot in “self-defense”:

There’s an interview in today’s New York Times with Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist who has produced with Charlie Rose a series of fascinating programs on the science of the brain that you can view online.

Something I didn’t realize, which I learned from the interview, is that Kandel escaped Austria in 1938. He was 8 when he sailed with his brother across the Atlantic. His parents would come later, so he and his family were among the few lucky Jews who managed to escape Nazi control at such a late date.

When he won the Nobel Prize in 2000, Austria tried to claim he was an Austrian Laureate. Kandel instead said that this was an American prize:

After you won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, did the Austrians reach out to you?

Yes. Their newspaper people said, “Oh, wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize!” I said: “You’ve got this wrong. This is an American, an American Jewish Nobel Prize.” The president of Austria wrote me a note: “What can we do to recognize you?” I said, “I do not need any more recognition, but it would it be nice to have a symposium at the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism.” He said, “That’s fine.” I’m very close to Fritz Stern, the historian, and he helped me put the symposium together. Ultimately, a book came out of it. It had a modest impact.

Today, Tuesday, 2/7/2012, is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken’s birth in Portsmouth, England, so it’s fitting to remember Thomas Gradgrind, teacher of facts, in Hard Times.

Also, listen to the TED talk by Tim Hartford, who presents the antithesis to the Every-Complex-Problem-Has-A-Simple-Solution-But-It’s-Wrong assertion that he calls the God Complex: There’s a simple solution to every complex problem, and it’s right.

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy merchant who only believes in facts, is an ardent believer in the God Complex, but then he learns that a wise man knows he’s a fool and begins helping the poor.

NOVA image from "What Darwin Never Knew"

It was the early 1950s when I was about seven or eight when I saw a public TV program on the dance honey bees do to communicate the location of  food sources.  (Such information is now readily available on the internet.) At the end of that program there was a question that viewers had to answer to demonstrate an understanding of the science that had been presented, and if we answered correctly, we would win a subscription to a science magazine. While I no longer remember the name of that magazine, I wrote my answer on the back of a postcard, sent it in, and won a subscription.

Though up until this point I had been collecting anything I found interesting, which included bugs and butterflies and feathers and rocks and shells, that TV program triggered an interest in me that  eventually led to my becoming a physicist.

This, of course, was in the middle of the 20th century when at about the same time, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick were discovering DNA. It’s amazing the progress science has made in the last 60 years understanding DNA structures and their role in life forms, disease, and biological evolution. If you’d like to be amazed, too, by this progress, spend just two hours watching NOVA’s “What Darwin Never Knew.”

To say that it will blow your mind is probably an understatement. Indeed, if you’re young and curious and would like to play a role in what Richard Dawkins calls The Greatest Show on Earth, consider science in any of its forms as a career.

When we get together during the holidays with family and friends, one thing naturally leads to another — generational catching up, drink, food, song, games, photos, long walks — until we arrive at discussions that involve the state of affairs, which can be challenging, for we try to focus on things we want to explore while navigating around stressful deep pits that wreak havoc.

No matter how these discussions worked for you — my hope is that they were pleasant and thoughtful — you, like I, were probably exposed to a range of intelligences that made the holidays more memorable.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Model

And when thinking of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner is our go-to psychologist who has long been recognized as the person who can help us understand the complexity of intelligence, which, by his definition, consists of the ability to create, solve and discover:

• the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture;
• a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life;
• the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge.

With this as his foundation, Gardner, who started with seven intelligences in his 1993 Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, believes now that there were nine different intelligences on display during our Thanksgiving holiday:

HOWARD GARDNER’S NINE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES:

1. Linguistic Intelligence: the capacity to use language to express what’s on your mind and to understand other people. Any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or other person for whom language is an important stock in trade has great linguistic intelligence.

2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does; or to manipulate numbers, quantities, and operations, the way a mathematician does.

3. Musical Rhythmic Intelligence: the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them. People who have strong musical intelligence don’t just remember music easily, they can’t get it out of their minds, it’s so omnipresent.

4. Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence: the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body (your hands, your fingers, your arms) to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dancing or acting.

5. Spatial Intelligence: the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind — the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences.

6. Naturalist Intelligence: the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence: having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward. We are drawn to people who have a good understanding of themselves. They tend to know what they can and can’t do, and to know where to go if they need help.

8. Interpersonal Intelligence: the ability to understand other people. It’s an ability we all need, but is especially important for teachers, clinicians, salespersons, or politicians — anybody who deals with other people.

9. Existential Intelligence: the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

Seeing Benicia Old Town Theatre Group’s preformance of The Voice of the Prairie and writing a response to the play is one thing you can do for extra credit. My review of John Olive’s play can be found at Benicia.Patch.com.

Lexi Hart as Frankie Reed and Dan Clark as The Watermelon Man