Bite-Sized Subversions - challenging thoughts about everyday things

Air Bands and Power Point

I still remember the feeling I had when I saw my first air band performance. It was a sick kind of feeling.

I hadn’t known what an air band was. The announcement came over the p.a. at my school-for-the-day, and I dutifully shepherded the class to the gym. Then I watched, incredulous, as group after group of high school students came on stage and pretended to play their favourite songs. I mumbled a query to the teacher standing next to me. Apparently this air band stuff was quite big. Students spent weeks practising. They really wanted to get it right. ‘It’ being the appearance, the pretence.

In my day, the guys actually did play, guitars and drums mostly. Each school had a couple bands. From time to time they even played at our dances.

But I tried not to go there. That was then, this was now. There is some skill required for this, I thought. It does take practice to get it right. But still. It bothered me. As everyone applauded – faking it.

I was reminded of that sick kind of feeling just the other day. I heard a new technopop piece on the radio; it was based on a sample from a Gene Krupa drum solo. That’s how technopop is ‘composed’: someone uses bits and pieces (‘samples’) of other people’s music and puts them together – often at random, mostly in repetition. That is to say, there’s no coherent development, no substance.

It’s sad to see that the ability to play, let alone compose for, a musical instrument is on the wane. But it’s frightening to think about the why and the therefore.

I read somewhere that playing a musical instrument is the most mentally challenging task humans perform. Certainly the daily practice requires a level of both concentration and discipline that I just don’t see in young people today. Is it that our kids don’t have the mental stamina needed to learn how to play a musical instrument? Or is it that because they don’t learn how to play a musical instrument, they don’t develop such mental stamina. Either way, it’s cause for concern. And my guess is it’s both.

That is to say, attention to pretence/form instead of to substance/content is both the cause and the effect of a paucity of higher cognitive skills. True, content without form can be incomprehensible. But form without content isn’t anything at all. One must attend to content before one attends to form. At best, content determines form. Further, inattention to content entails inattention to quality of content. And that makes things so much worse.

Consider the addiction many have to the internet. Surfing the net is like watching the news (and browsing the encyclopedia). It’s kibbles and bits of information. That’s all. It’s pure content. Sure, it’s knowledge. But is it valuable knowledge? Is it relevant, is it sufficient? Is it usable? One has to have some of those higher level cognitive skills to go beyond acquisition and comprehension into analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and application.

And, well, I’ve read about the increase in kids’ television viewing time. I’ve heard about their inability to play games at recess: they just stand around, or maybe they play with a ready-made single-purpose toy for a bit and then they’re bored. I’m told that kids, young people, don’t go to the library anymore; they don’t go to the used bookstores either, to trade in one handful of paperbacks for another. I know about the increase in learning disabilities. And I found out about grades inflation: Cs are now Bs, Bs are now As – ‘So what do I give to students who really do get an A?’ ‘Trust me – you won’t have that problem.’ An exaggeration?

For a while, I taught courses at a university. Basically I taught applied philosophy – Informal Logic, Contemporary Moral Issues, Business Ethics. I discovered right away that essays on controversial issues were way over most of the students’ heads. I soon started giving an open book reading comprehension quiz for each essay I assigned – it doubled as a guide to the main points of the essay. I couldn’t teach them to assess what they didn’t even understand.

And in three out of three courses, students told me that the kind of thinking I was demanding, essentially critical thinking, was a new way of thinking: they hadn’t had to do it before. Arts majors, Science majors, and Business majors, even third and fourth year students – they all said the same thing.

And then – I happened to be in an Accounting class, watching students present case studies. The second group was very impressive. They sure had their act together. Respectfully in their suits and ties, standing at business attention, their voices projecting confidence, they introduced themselves as Wannick, Smith, and Pratsk: ‘We thank you for choosing us as your Accounting consultants, and we are happy to present to you today our analysis…’ They had rehearsed, that much was clear. And the power point presentation sure was slick: titles variously fonted with fade-ins and fade-outs, points neatly aligned and bulletted, graphics full of colour and icons – it looked just like the real thing. The class applauded.

I mumbled a query to the prof sitting next to me. ‘Suitcoats and power point aside, which group had the better analysis?’ ‘The first group – these guys missed some important discrepancies in the accounts.’ Hm. And if they didn’t get an A, there was hope, I thought.

Then again, no there wasn’t. The week after, the Student Union held an air band competition.

There are four reasons why teaching ethics to business students is an exercise in futility.

1. The profit motive trumps everything. As long as this is the case, there’s no point in teaching students the intricacies of determining right and wrong. Whether something is morally acceptable or not is simply irrelevant to them. It might come into play when two options yield the same profit, but how often does that happen? And even so, other concerns are likely to be tie-breakers. Read the rest of this entry »

Science is the pursuit of knowledge according to the scientific method: hypotheses must be testable, and results must be verifiable by replication.  Obviously, the more quantifiable something is, the more accurate and precise its measurement can be, and the more accurate and precise something is, the more testable and verifiable it is – it’s hard to test and then verify an uncertain or vague something-or-other.  So the definition of science really comes down to quantification.  Well, that and matter – only material things can be quantified.

Political science is the study of government organization and political systems.  These things are not quantifiable.  It would seem, then, that political science should have been named political art. 

So?  Well, one, Read the rest of this entry »

I used to think that the problem with rape was that women weren’t being explicit – they weren’t actually saying no, partly because men weren’t actually asking.  Perhaps because there’s (still?) something shameful about sex that makes people reluctant to come right out and talk about it.  Or maybe that would destroy the romance.  Whatever.

I still think Read the rest of this entry »

Could someone without a business degree become a marketing consultant?  Then how is it that people without philosophy degrees are becoming ethics consultants? [1]  Is it that people don’t know that Ethics is a branch of Philosophy just as Marketing is a branch of Business?  Doubtful.  Is it just the typical male overstatement of one’s expertise? [2]  Perhaps.  Is it that people think they already know right from wrong, they learned it as children, there’s really no need for any formal training in ethics?  Possible.  I have certainly met that attitude in business ethics classes and ethics committees. [3]  Or is it that ethics consultants (advisors, officers, practitioners, and so on) don’t really act as consultants about ethics?  They act as consultants about managing ethical behavior.  No, not even that.  Ethical consultants, practitioners, officers, focus on how to increase the likelihood that employees will follow some specific professional code of ethics or, more likely, the ethical rules the company’s elite want them to follow. [4] [5]

As far as I can see, business ethics taught by business faculty, ethics programs run by managers, and so on  –  any applied ethics taught by non-philosophers  –  is superficial at best.  [6] First, following a code if just an appeal to custom, an appeal to tradition, which philosophers consider a weak basis, even an actual error in reasoning: just because it’s common to do it that way, doesn’t mean it’s right; just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s right. 

Second, legal moralism is prevalent: if it’s legal, it’s right, and if it’s not illegal, it’s not wrong.  Few philosophers (and I daresay few intelligent people) accept this equivalence of moral rightness and legality.  After all, slavery was once legal, and even at that time many considered it wrong and had excellent arguments to support their position (which is, to some extent, why the law changed  –  ethics should determine law, not the other way around).

Third, the so-called ‘media test’ and ‘gut test’ are essentially nothing but appeals to intuition, which is nothing more than childhood conditioning that makes us say X ‘feels’ wrong.  I think it far better to approach ethical issues with thought, to consider the many rational approaches to making decisions about right and wrong, such as an appraisal of values, principles, consequences, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to genetic research, we may soon see people with the money to do so making sure their kids are born-to-succeed – parents paying to guarantee their kids have the right stuff.  I’m not talking about a straightened spine or a functional optic nerve.  I’m talking about designer kids: those made with healthy bodies, intelligent minds, and perhaps a certain specific ability to boot. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been rather proud of not having any ‘people skills’.  Of not being able to ‘talk to people’, smooth things over, talk them out of their way of seeing things, talk them over to my way, persuade, influence, manipulate, control.  No wonder supervisors, salespeople, and customer relations people need good people skills.  And no wonder I resent them: I’ve always been the subordinate, the consumer, the customer – I’m the one the people skills are used on.

Of course, subordinates are expected to have good people skills too, but what’s meant then is the ability to get along, follow, fold, obey.  And, well, as I said, I’m not very good at that.

But no, no, I’m told, you’ve got it all wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Marriage, by its very (traditional) definition, is a sexist affair: it involves one of each sex, one male and one female.  And I suppose this is because, traditionally, the purpose of marriage was family: to start a family, to have and raise children.

This view is fraught with questionable assumptions, glaring inconsistencies, and blatant errors.  I’ll give one of each: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not saying it didn’t happen.

I’m not saying that, in any way, it was okay.

But I’d like to point out that a devout Jew would’ve done, would do, the same thing to the Germans – if God told him to.

‘Oh but God would never command such a thing.’

Take a better look at your Bible: Read the rest of this entry »

Have you watched the House of Commons proceedings lately? It’s unbelievable. I haven’t seen such petty bickering, name-calling, and tongue-sticking-outting since Dicky called Peter a wuss at recess back in grade two. Then Johnny, who was on Dicky’s side, started throwing clumps of dirt at Dougie, who was on Peter’s side, and a bunch of other boys started yelling and kicking and when the teacher came out, they all accused each other, pointing fingers, ‘He started it!’ ‘No I didn’t, he did!’ ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘Yeah!’ and it started all over again.

But they weren’t grown ups, wearing suits-and-ties and saying “Mr. Speaker, I humbly submit…” And they weren’t being paid to run the fucking country.

It’s hard to believe they can be so immature. So instead I believe it’s all a charade. To further convince us that there’s simply no point in voting, let alone calling our MP or lobbying for this or that, no hope in hell of any participation in the process making any difference at all. That way the corporate agenda can proceed, with nothing whatsoever in its way.