#JeSuisCharlie

Feeling more aggrieved than usual, your unbending author interrupts regularly scheduled programing to clear his throat in defense of civilization. 

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Yes, I tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. Yes, I put the hashtag on Facebook. Yes, I even put it on the wipe board on my office door, which isn’t really my office door, hence the “even.”  #JeSuisCharlie is a small thing, but not meaningless, a gesture of solidarity with victims of religious fascism. As someone who makes his living in the world of thought and ideas and written expression, I found the murders at Charlie Hebdo particularly poignant even though far worse acts of violence against innocents were committed elsewhere in the world that week.  Boko Haram murdered several hundred people in the town of Baga around the same time as the Paris shootings, and despite what some people seem to think, I am not ignorant of the one if I care about the other. 

The very minute I saw the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, I knew that the backlash against it would begin with a couple of days or so. Sniping of the kind I just described was inevitable. Even before the Ice Bucket Challenge (remember that?) reached its zenith last summer people started saying, “Why all the attention about ALS? Don’t people know that heart disease kills more people?” And so on.  If you’re ever giving a eulogy, try that line of reasoning out. “Well, sure, this guy is dead. But, come on. A lot more people than him died this week. Don’t you people care about them? What kind of monsters are you?”  See how that goes over. 

So the backlash against #JeSuisCharlie has taken on a perfectly predictable form and has come from perfectly predictable people, including a number of journalists who make a living writing Op-Eds that wouldn’t make the cut for emergency backup columns on Measure of Doubt.  To those people, I say: just how stupid do you think I am?  Did I anywhere claim that posting #JeSuisCharlie is an act of bravery? That it constitutes a serious blow against religious fascism? That it mitigates the need for vigilance about freedom of expression in my own country? Does it mean that I am unaware or uncaring about other acts of violence, including some committed by the government of France in the past? Does it mean I am not aware of the complexities and nuances of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts that underpin the attacks? Does it mean any of those things about anyone who posted it?  To listen to and read many cranks you’d think so.

There’s another distressing side to this, too, even though it was equally predictable. You wouldn’t think you’d have to defend the idea that people ought not to be murdered for hurting the feelings of the kinds of people who murder people for hurting their feelings, but you do. There are hordes of people saying right now, “Well you poke the bear…” or “I’m against murder, but…” and so forth. We've been listening to that noise since The Satanic Verses pissed off people who never read it. So, here’s the thing. Am I committed to freedom of expression? Yes. Do I understand the nuances and complexities of the statement I just made? Yup, some of them. You can explain the rest to me if you feel the need. But will I post any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons here? No. Why not? I already told you, and it’s not because I’m afraid of terrorists. 

Commemoration

Today is the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in which three thousand people perished in flame. Judging from the many hostile e-mails I received to my blog post about visiting La Cambe, many people will be spending a portion of the day in quiet commemoration of those nineteen terrorists who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause they believed in. After all, they must say, in order to be consistent, who are we to say that what they did is wrong?

Q.E.D. 

Desecration

I used to teach Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, sad, and important novel Slaughterhouse Five in my American history classes, but gave up after being met by seas of incomprehension and even outright hostility. Why was I teaching a novel in a history class, they wondered, as if novels weren’t written in the past or in historical contexts. In this, the most expansive of disciplines, students too often have been straightjacketed into thinking that history is merely a bill of facts about war and politics to be committed to memory. And there is no shortage of historians who want it that way.

Above all, I was distressed by the inability of history students to think coherently about the very thing that almost invariably is most important to the people we study – morality. Slaughterhouse is about an American POW, Billy Pilgrim, who in 1945 witnesses the firebombing of Dresden only to be abducted by time-travelling extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians, beings whose response to every moral catastrophe in the history of the universe — including the entire universe’s eventual destruction at their own hands — is the same: they intone the phrase, “So it goes.”

Unwittingly, I had handed my students what many of them thought was an ideal philosophy of ethics. “So it goes.” A way to shrug and say, “Oh, well. Can I get back to Facebook now?”  Vonnegut himself later said he was distressed by the ease with which so many readers accepted the legitimacy of what is self-evidently a hideously immoral proposition. “So it goes” – not stoicism in the face of history’s cruelties, but indifference; not acceptance, but apathy; “so it goes” – the proposition that we are not moral agents, that we make no choices, that we bear no responsibility for the consequences of our actions, whether it’s firebombing Dresden or blowing up the universe, or, at the very time Vonnegut was writing, waging war in Vietnam. 

On Measure of Doubt and its briefly extant sister blog, Suspended Judgment, I wrote on several occasions that the biggest problem with our education system is that we’re good at getting students to memorize facts but not good at getting them to think about facts. Despite all our protestations to the contrary, most of our education system consists of telling students stuff and getting them to regurgitate it, what one colleague of mine inelegantly calls the "binge and purge model of education." Even in universities the lecture – a tool for conveying facts – remains at the core of our methodology, although students who steadfastly refuse to read anything are partly to blame for this. 

Over the years, I have attempted on many occasions to initiate conversations in class concerning the great moral questions of the Second World War: the Holocaust, Japanese atrocities in occupied China, Allied area bombing, and so forth.  Year after year, these discussions take on a predictable and depressing sameness. They run the usual gamut from soft moral relativism and all its attendant confusion (“our side was just as bad”, they would say, as if this empirically false claim were somehow relevant even if true) through to the positively fascistic view that military service must automatically be accorded the deepest reverence, regardless of the cause in which one served. But at least those students articulated a coherent worldview. The relativists basically said: “Who am I to judge? Not for me to say what’s right or wrong. Everyone has their own way of looking at things. We shouldn’t be biased.” Blah dee blah blah blah. So it goes. Generation meh. 

All this brings me to the case of the German cemetery at La Cambe, in Normandy, France.  It is the resting place of many young men who were caught up in the lunatic asylum we call the Third Reich, teenagers forced to fight for a totalitarian regime that sought to redraw the racial map of Europe through war. Their graves are important reminders that few countries suffered so much because of Adolf Hitler as Germany itself.  But La Cambe is also the burial place of a large number of straightforwardly wicked men who were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi program. Among them is Sturmbannführer Adolf “Otto” Diekmann, an SS officer who ordered a hideous crime against humanity at Oradour, France. Diekmann’s troops massacred 642 men, women, and children – the men were shot in the legs and then burned alive – for no military purpose whatsoever a few days after D-Day in the summer of 1944.

In early June, I visited La Cambe, not certain if I should. I’m not sure what possessed me, on that cold and damp morning, to venture off, alone, into the far corners of the cemetery in search of Diekmann’s grave. It might have been morbid curiosity. Or perhaps it was a desire to gloat slightly over another exemplar of the absolute failure of the worst system of governance ever devised. Anxious and distinctly unsure of myself, I stumbled about for ten minutes, looking for the marker, half-hoping not to find it, when suddenly it seemed to appear before me, flat and rather disappointingly innocuous against the ground. 

I reflected at once on the words of A.J.P. Taylor: “I come to history not as a judge, but to say what happened and why” – outright hypocrisy from one of the 20th century’s most judgmental historians. What do historians do except judge? The whole enterprise is a process of gathering, evaluating, weighing, assessing, in short, judging evidence for one position or another. Above all, to say “I cannot judge” is itself a moral judgment of the very strongest kind. Not one moral relativist, while themselves being murdered, would calmly accept death with a shrug and say, “Who am I to judge this murderer?” but they will do it when other people are being or were murdered. Appalling. Appalling.

I reflected, too, that historians are wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy, not because they know it to be dangerous, but because they’re lost.  We pass our moral confusion onto our students. The problem isn’t that most historians are abstaining from engaging their moral sensibilities – that would be a considered position. The problem is that their training has left them unprepared to assess moral issues at all, even from the perspective of the period they’re studying. With nearly three thousand years of moral philosophy before them, the best most of them can do is shrug and mouth, “Well, who’s to say?”  So it goes. 

I also found myself thinking about the firmest conviction I have as a teacher: that education, like physical exercise, should hurt a bit. It should destabilize the intellect and force it to adjust to new demands. It’s not a teacher’s job, of course, to tell students what to think – even if the teacher actually knows what to think. But it is a teacher’s job to get students to think. This involves more than just holding up a mirror to youthful vanity and awarding gold stars for sharing. Good teachers make students understand that extracting knowledge from information takes serious effort. 

Here was a teachable moment, but there was no one teach. So I must have stood there for five minutes or so, above Deikmann's little plot, wondering what to do or say. I do not believe that the dead are conscious of the living, so having words with the man seemed rather pointless. It was, moreover, getting on, and there was a schedule to keep. I walked off, briskly, troubled by all this. Then I surprised myself.  Well, hell, I thought. Why am I debating historical theory with myself? I’m an historian for maybe forty hours a week. The rest of the time I’m a human being. And my human obligations come first.

So I stopped. Turned around. Returned to Deikmann’s marker.

And spat on his grave.

May he not rest in peace.

Rhinoceroses

A funny thing: about three years ago I arrived at work to discover that somebody had put a rhinoceros in my classroom. Nobody told me it was going to be there. I didn’t ask for it, either. I just showed up one day and there it was. It’s an enormously disruptive beast, and I spend a lot of time trying to cajole it into a corner. Believe me, I’ve complained. But whenever I do, I get told, “Well, Broad. Get with the times. We all have rhinoceroses in the classroom now. Adjust your teaching style. Deal with it. Work it into your lectures.”  Some say the problem is me.  “Maybe if you were more interesting, students would pay less attention to the rhinoceros.”  Relax. Deal with it. Adapt. Make the flying leap into Rhinoceros Age.

Actually, none of that happened. Instead, somebody decided it would be a great idea to install wireless Internet instead. Now half of the two-thirds of the students who show up for my lectures have something else to do while I’m trying to talk to them. Is that lecture about the Holocaust getting you down? Never fear – here’s a video of a panda bear sneezing. Update your Facebook status. Multiplayer Call of Duty awaits.

Well, we all used to fade out sometimes, didn’t we? I recall doodling and making to-do lists the odd time, and fighting to remain conscious against the sonorous drone of a handful of sonorous droners. But that’s not really the point. Good lecturers can compete with everyday classroom distractions. I personally can blow the student paper or an idle game of hangman out of the water, any day of the week. What I can’t do is compete with Youtube, Facebook, and Call of Duty. If I could do that, I’d create a website called grahambroad.com, upload my lecturers, and be a multi-billionaire by the end of the year. They’d make a movie about me, with George Clooney in the starring role. We’ll call it The Asocial Network. But I can’t compete with those things, and for a simple reason: I’m not in the entertainment industry.

A few weeks ago, I had a “eureka” moment while a student was giving a presentation. I should haul out my laptop and phone and start surfing the web and texting while this student is talking, I thought. And then, when the student appeals his grade on the grounds that I wasn’t paying attention, I’ll tell the Powers That Be, “Well - that student should have just incorporated my web surfing and texting into his presentation.”  Nonsense, isn’t it? And yet another example of the double standard (or perhaps lack of standards): we profess to be preparing our students for their professional lives, but we permit them to behave in ways that would be considered highly unprofessional if we were to do it.

Oh, puh-leeze, I can heard the digerati saying. This discussion is so 2007. This generation of students “lives on the Internet” and they communicate by texting. You can’t ask them to stop. 

Oh, yes we can.  Can we all say it together, like at an Obama rally? Yes. We. Can. We ask students to do things they don’t want to do all the time, like write essays, take tests, and read books. Or does anyone think that, if it weren’t for university, they’d be quizzing each other on Plato’s Republic and writing papers about it?

Okay, I admit it. I’m getting on. I blinked and suddenly I was middle-aged fogey. “That lecture was sick!” one of my students said after class a few weeks back. Only later did I learn that “sick” means “good.” And I was just getting used to “bad” being “good.” Now it turns out its bad again.

So let me put the question another way. What have we wrought? PowerPoint. WebCT. E-mail that effectively renders our office door open 24/7. Wired classrooms. Digital databases. WikiLearning. Educational podcasts. Flat-panel displays mounted on nearly every square inch of empty wall space. Tweeting to students, sometimes from the front of the lecture hall. Clickers. And for all that, for all those billions of dollars and millions of labour hours expended, do we have so much as a tiny, tattered, threadbare shred of evidence that our students are smarter than they used to be? Are their essays better researched or written? Are their exams more accurate? Are they more literate? More articulate? Better able to critically assess what they read and learn? And if they are not — and I have searched the pedagogical literature in vain for evidence that they are — then why is the rhinoceros in my classroom?

Spartacus

Many readers, no doubt, are familiar with the hit TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, about the famous Roman-era gladiator. This is the greatest show ever made in the history of the world. It has no need for such bourgeois banalities as “plot” or “scripts.” Instead, it has full-frontal nudity, graphic sex, decapitations, and nonstop virtuoso swearing that would make a Marine Corps drill sergeant blush like a home-schooled teenager given her first valentine. And abs.

Spartacus is set at a time when Western Civilization was in its infancy, and made as if it died there in the cradle. The first six episodes consisted of Spartacus chopping heads off while bellowing, “I must find my wife!” When he found his wife, and she was dead, he spent the next six episodes chopping heads off and bellowing, “I miss my wife!” I realize that readers who have not seen the show may be baffled by the byzantine nature of its storyline, but try to keep up nonetheless.

Longtime friends can confirm that my real talents, such as they are, lie in the realm of fiction rather than non-fiction writing. As proof, I offer my own script for a new episode of Spartacus, which I humbly submit for consideration to the producers of series. As this is a family blog, I have omitted all swearing, though you should feel free to imagine certain four and twelve-letter swearwords sprinkled liberally throughout.

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Exterior, Gladiator training school. Enter SPARTACUS and his six-pack abs. The sun reflects off them, blinding several stage hands.

SPARTACUS

“I need a new wife!”

Enter BATIATUS, his master, having sex with a slave.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring DISHONOR on the House of Batiatus!”

Enter CRIXUS, another gladiator, preceded by his abs.

CRIXUS

“I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA!”

SPARTACUS

“No, I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA! Still, you think maybe a Gaul like you and a guy like me..."

CRIXUS attacks. They fight, making a point to hit each others’ swords. A tidal wave of blood knocks everyone off their feet. They are about to resume fighting when DOCTORE, the gladiator trainer, appears and cracks his whip.

DOCTORE

“You can’t fight in here! This is the gladiator school! Ah...Ah...get it? Get it? Plus it’s a Kubrick reference, from Dr. Strangelove. But he also directed the movie version of Spartacus. You see, what I’m doing is subverting your expectations by inserting a metafictional reference, and...er...ah...come on, people. Work with me. You can win independent film awards for this sort of thing.”

Enter XENA, naked, with an entourage of NAKED SLAVES in tow.

XENA

“My husband, could you have Crixus brought naked to my room? Make sure he’s spritzed with a thin but glistening sheen of oil.”

BATIATUS

“Certainly, my dear wife. My goodness, how you two seem to be getting on well these days. No doubt you’ll have an enjoyable conversation or something. Anyhoo, I’m off to the market for precisely the amount of time it would take for you to have sex with a gladiator, if you were doing that behind my back, which you’re not, of course. Ciao.”

SPARTACUS (from below)

“While you’re at the market, can you find me a wife? I really need one. Seriously.You have no idea.”

Commercial.

Interior of BATIATUS’S digs. BATIATUS sits at his desk, writing a love poem for his wife, XENA. XENA and CRIXUS can be heard GRUNTING and MOANING and SIGHING and POUNDING THE WALLS in the next room. This goes on for twenty minutes. Enter SPARTACUS, with little frowney faces drawn on each of his abs. When he flexes, they become smiley faces.

BATIATUS (shouting over the noise coming from the bedroom)

“Ah, Spartacus. Your presence brings GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Now pack your things. You’re fighting a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS in the arena this afternoon. I must warn you. No ONE has EVER defeated the TEN FOOT NINJA with FOUR ARMS. There’s nothing I can do. I owe the man a dollar fifty.”

SPARTACUS

“Is he looking for a good husband?”

Commercial.

Exterior of arena. By which I mean interior of arena. The part of the arena that’s interior to the physical structure but actually is open to the air. You know what I mean. Thousands of HALF NAKED ROMANS await the arrival of SPARTACUS. They pass the time by the doing the wave. BATIATUS watches from his private booth. An IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN is there. XENA and CRIXUS are making out in the back row.

IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN

“Oooo how I totally hate that Spartacus. And why do all Romans have British accents?”

BATIATUS

“Spartacus may yet bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Or GREAT DISHONOUR. Or, his effect might be more-or-less neutral in terms of its impact on the relative honour standing of the House of Batiatus. There’s no way of knowing without an objective consideration of his win-loss record over the course of the gladiatorial season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, entering the arena. He is BUCK NAKED except that he is carrying a sword in each hand and is also holding a shield. Don’t ask how. The CROWD begins to chant his name.

SPARTACUS

“I am SPARTACUS! Are any of you ladies single?”’

ENTER a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS. He is carrying a sword, an axe, a spear, and an atom bomb. He and SPARTACUS fight. They make sounds such as “ARAAGH” and “OOOGHA” and “BLAGH” and say such things as “Hey! Careful there!” SPARTACUS is slashed across the chest, arms, legs, and nearly gets his shield-holder taken off. His hair is ripped out. His teeth are smashed in. He loses both eyes and has to put them back in to see, but he puts them in BACKWARDS and sees everything upside down. One of his six abs gets removed with a cake-lifter. He is finished off with a horrendous noogie. Spartacus collapses all dirty and sweaty. Four men throw buckets of blood on the camera. The NINJA pauses for a few hours to GLOAT.

Cut to: SPARTACUS, having a vision of his WIFE, who is named MILDRED.

MILDRED

“Is that the best you can do? Typical. You never could keep it up. What will the neighbours think? And you never help around the house. I should have listened to my mother and married a doctor.”

SPARTACUS

“I want my wife!”

MILDRED

“Not now. I have a headache. And If you think I’m washing your loin-cloths later, you’ve got another thing coming, mister. Anyway, get up and kill this Ninja. Get that promotion you’re always bragging about.”

SPARTACUS

“But why?”

MILDRED

“Because everyone wants to see you have sex with Xena next season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, raising both his swords and his shield. The NINJA goes to finish him off but stubs his toe. While he’s hopping around on one leg, saying “Ow! Ow! Ow!”, SPARTACUS cuts it off. Then his other leg, his ears, and each one of his fingers in turn. Then his arms, which SPARTACUS uses to wail on the NINJA for about half an hour. A thousand-gallon drum of blood is thrown at the camera. Finally, SPARTACUS chops off the NINJA’S head and punts it for twenty-five yard field goal. The CROWD goes WILD.

SPARTACUS

“That one’s for the ladies!”

Cut to BATIATUS, who is being jostled by XENA and CRIXUS who are rolling about the booth naked in a sweaty embrace.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus!”

SPARTACUS

“So you’re saying you find me attractive?”

Fin.

Next week on Spartacus: SPARTACUS searches a mail-order tablet for a wife. BATIATUS accuses him of dishonouring the House of Batiatus, and condemns him to fight a BRONTOSAURUS. The IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN tries to frame SPARTACUS for tax evasion. Everyone has sex while DOCTORE throws buckets of blood around. XENA and CRIXUS continue their secret affair.

Armageddon

Bad news. The world is ending December 21st, 2012. Or at least a lot of people seem to think so, on the grounds that that’s the day when (they claim) the Mayan calendar “runs out”. I’m not quite sure why the pre-Columbian Mayans should be taken as authorities on anything at all, let alone prognostication, especially since things didn’t work out all that well for them. By contrast, the 2012 crowd don’t seem much cheered by the fact that, for instance, China’s calendar doesn’t run out in 2012.

There’s been so much public concern about 2012 that some folks at NASA decided to take time out from unimportant work such as exploring the universe and unlocking its secrets to create a number of public-relations web-pages assuring people that they can go ahead with their advance planning for New Year’s Eve, 2012.

This is probably futile, since people who believe in this sort thing usually are immune to rational argument. Still, it’s good to know that somebody’s trying. Take these people, for instance, who are waging a radio and pamphlet-based campaign against this poppycock that the world is ending in December 2012. According to them, it’s ending May 21st, 2011. Get with the program, people.

I know this because some supporter of theirs handed me a pamphlet outside of Shopper’s Drug Mart yesterday. “The End of the World Is Almost Here! Holy God Will Bring Judgment Day on May 21, 2011!” I did some quick mental math and then headed straight to the LCBO to stock up, because if the world’s coming to an end, I’m getting wasted.

At home, I perused the pamphlet and their website over a cheeky little Beaujolais. Family Radio, I discovered, was founded in 1959 and now has several dozen FM radio licenses in the United States. (According to Wikipedia, these licenses would be worth several hundred million dollars today.) Day after day, these stations broadcast this end-of-the-world business to whoever happens to be listening. Their arrival at the precise date of Judgment is based on a complex numerology explained on their website. Incidentally, they also reject the usual Creationist nonsense about the world being 6,000 years old. Turns out it’s 13,000 years old. Again: Program. With the. Get.

At any rate, their website insisted that “well-known denominations such as Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, etc.” are “still in deep trouble with God”. At this, my heart rose slightly— perhaps I might be okay after all. I read on. Alas, it was not be so.

It’s often said that religions are automatically to be accorded respect, and that people are not to be criticized on the basis of their religion. The cultural relativists who dominate the academy are particularly insistent about this, going so far as to argue that criticism of religion – and of certain religions in particular – is tantamount to racism. But this is not a position that they themselves believe, since they are perfectly willing to cast aspersions in the direction of, say, the Catholic Church, over such things as the ordination of women and other issues that shouldn’t concern non-Catholics. By contrast, I remember well how they fell all over themselves to defend those who sought the death of Salman Rushdie, arguing that he really did hurt the feelings of millions of people who never read The Satantic Verses.

Respectful behavior can be mandated but actual respect cannot be. Whatever else they may be, the world’s religions are social institutions into which people have vested enormous and all-too human effort. Some of those people are morons, and it’s hard to treat them respectfully. Some of those efforts have been violent, and preach violence, and we have a right to defend ourselves against them. This goes, too, for crude and crass theological arguments mounted by the likes of Family Radio. If you tell me that I’m going to hell, I get to tell you to precede me there.

The suggestion that religions are beyond the scope of criticism can hardly be taken seriously. Certainly no one who is a devout follower of any given denomination takes such an argument seriously, since his own beliefs almost invariably constitute an implicit or even explicit criticism of other beliefs. Either reincarnation exists or it doesn’t. Either a certain messiah is divine or he isn’t. Either the world will end May 21st, 2010, or it won’t.

I am currently taking bets – of any size – that it won’t.

Posting

Do you want to be really, really frightened? Deeply and truly terrified about the state of the world? Do you want to experience the long, dark, night of the soul, paralyzed with fear for the future of humanity? Forget global warming. Put nuclear terrorism out of your mind. Worry thee not about declining potable water supplies. If you want to be truly afraid, spend an hour trolling through posts on Internet message boards, the ones that follow virtually every news-story or video clip. Then consider: these people have the right to vote. Here is the electronic community’s infinite equivalent of obscene scrawls on the inside of a public bathroom stall: people at their most nasty and cowardly and illiterate and crass. In a recent column, the outgoing editor of the local newspaper gushed that reader input of this kind could “democratize the news”, as if what’s factually true and worth presenting was a matter of majority opinion. Can you imagine? “Next on News Now, the stars of Twilight discuss why they think Bush planned 9/11.” It would happen.

But the most subliterate, irrational, and mean-spirited message boards anywhere are to be found on Youtube. People there find ways to start vitriolic (but illiterate and uninformed) fights about Obama on clips of otters holding hands. Just to see, I selected a video at random from Youtube’s main-page. It turned out to be a clip of a UFC fighter, “talking trash”, as they say, about his opponents. You can imagine the kinds of messages that followed. Even the profanity is spelled wrong. So it’s not necessarily to click the following link. But, if you do, be aware that there’s swearing and racist epithets being thrown around:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmfquIjKmJo&feature=topvideos

Now, admittedly, there was some selection bias here. Click on your typical link of, say (I sense the sports fans starting to rise from their seats already), a UFC video or an NHL game or a even Tiger Woods these days, and you’ll get decidedly less literate commentary than if you clicked on a link of, for instance, a performance of Mozart’s Great Mass in C or a replay of a famous chess match.

Anyway, it’s of no particular consequence what the average person thinks of last night’s game or who is a better fighter in the UFC (or what they think of the Great Mass, for that matter.) It is of importance what the average voter thinks about politics, and the posts in response to events of actual importance on most Internet message boards actually leave me rather thankful that most people don’t vote.

Issues such a climate change, the threat of fundamentalist religion, the global economic downturn, etc., are extraordinarily complex problems. Understanding them requires study and careful consideration. Solving them will require serious people who have a clear mandate to act on behalf of a properly informed citizenry. Reading message boards on CNN.com, Youtube, Slate, and, well, almost anywhere, one gets the sinking feeling that tens of thousands of people are totally ill-informed but, what’s worse, nonetheless think that they’re right. They are exemplars of Russell’s famous adage that the whole problem with the world is that smart people are full doubt while the stupid ones are sure of themselves.

So what is going on here? I mean, apart from the fact that the most educated generation in the history of the world has apparently resolved itself to do nothing with that gift? I have a theory, and it has to do with human nature.

After World War Two and until the 1980s at the earliest, many cultural anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, feminists, and others, argued that the World Wars had demonstrated that the problem with humankind was not a lack of civilization, but civilization itself, or at least the racist, sexist, militaristic, environmentally destructive civilization we’d built over the last 10,000 years.

By contrast, prehistoric humans, they contended, including various indigenous peoples prior to European contact, lived noble lives in harmony with nature and one another. The biological anthropologists tended to argue that this was the natural outcome of our evolutionary heritage. Just look at our nearest biological cousin, the chimpanzees, after all: they’re fun-loving creatures who spend their days cuddling and grooming one another and learning sign language.

Well, it’s not that simple, of course. Today many anthropologists and archeologists tell us that the death rate from violence in hunter-gatherer and early agriculturalist societies (including those of most pre-contact indigenous peoples) was probably about 25 or 30 percent. Just by way of comparison, about 4 or 5 percent of Germans died from violence in the first half of the 20th century, and that was after losing two worlds wars and suffering through one genocidal dictator. For Canadians, the figure is probably something like a quarter of a percent.

An important Israeli political scientist, Azar Gat, says that the reason for all this is simple. Contrary to what was once believed, our natural, evolutionary predispositions are exceedingly violent. Consider those cousins of ours. In the early 1970s, Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees do, in fact, wage war, commit murder and rape, and that nearly every female chimp who survives to adulthood loses at least one offspring to infanticide. That’s what evolution conditioned us for, Gat argues. We’re a grisly species that likes to fight. Fortunately, we don’t just obey the dictates of our genes. Civilization, is, well, civilizing. It encourages us to build hospitals and give Mother’s Days cards and write symphonies and get to work in rush hour without killing anybody. Our weapons are more lethal, true, and there’s more of us to kill these days, but in proportional terms the average European — even accounting for Hitler and Stalin — or North American living in modern times, is far less likely to die in war or by violence than the average person in medieval Europe, antiquity, or prehistoric times, when wars were smaller but far more frequent and death by murder was an everyday event. Life back then was, as Hobbes famously put it, nasty, brutal, and short. By historical standards, modern liberal democracies are practically Heaven. Today, the average Canadian can expect to be murdered about once every 54,000 years, and more Canadians die from accidental falls every year than have died in war in all the years since 1945.

And what on Earth has this to do with Internet message boards? Well, it’s simple, really. Civilization – and liberal democratic civilization in particular – encourages us to restrain ourselves. But the Internet is an uncivilized place. It is not liberal and it’s not a democracy – it’s anarchy. The restraints of human solidarity that keep you and me from pelting each other with bananas (or arrows or spears or stones) are not in place when people log anonymously onto Youtube or CNN.com. And night after night, on the message boards, the chimps return to stake out territory and fight. You can read their grunting for yourself.

In fact, I admit that some primal part of me desperately wants to go to that Youtube clip of Mozart’s Great Mass and leave a message saying “Mozart sux. Beethoven rulez” just to see what would happen.

Didacticism

What do we want from our students? Like parents, teachers should want something better for their students - to want their students to exceed their own achievements, by whatever corresponding measure of success is applied along the path they choose. And we hope that, in choosing their path, we have helped to teach them how to think, to reflect, to find answers on their own, and to make moral and ethical decisions. That, above all, is important: we want our students to be decent people.

But education can sometimes result in conceit and arrogance. As a teacher, one’s heart sinks to find a student, possessed of a little learning, who thinks that he’s smarter than everyone else, or even that his superior education has endowed him with moral superiority. This quality isn’t confined to the educated, of course — there are droves of know-it-all drop outs — but, lest we forget, it was educated men who invented Auschwitz and the atomic bomb.

In the postmodern university, where a soft relativism is the order of the day, it is unfashionable to speak of teaching moral or ethical lessons to students, even though questions of how we ought to behave are central to whole fields such as literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. After all, the relativists insist, who is to say what is right or wrong? But allow me to say, once again, that to claim that there are no absolute moral standards is to make an absolute moral claim of the strongest kind. And, moreover, by their own standards the relativists must acknowledge that the opposing claim, that certain moral truths are timeless and unchanging, must be as valid as their own.

The suggestion is sometimes made that historians have no business asking moral questions about the past. But in what school of moral philosophy is the boundary between past and present also a barrier against moral judgment? If I committed murder yesterday, I can hardly defend myself today on the grounds that the murder is exempt from moral scrutiny because it happened in the past. A spurious argument, you say? Very well, then. At what point, then, does the past become such a barrier? After a week? A year? A decade? A century? Give me a number, fellow historians. At what point in the future will historians shrug and say, “Not for us, students, to judge the Holocaust, only to understand it.” One hopes that the answer is, “never.” Alas, in many classes it is already happening.