The Case for Western Civ

If there is one course everyone should take in college, my high school civics teacher told us, it's the history of Western civilization. But I didn't. Now, 35 years later, I am.

Was he right? Yes, and better late than never.

Team taught by two faculty members who specialize in different regions and periods, my course in European history surveys four centuries of ideas and movements across the U.K. and east and west Europe. My professors complement each other's differences in  knowledge bases and personality. But they also share a fabulous rapport, a talent for teaching and good humor.

On the first day, Holly Case introduced herself after Robert Travers. In her dead pan manner she commented, "Ok. You met him. He uses words like 'liberating' and 'thrilling.' I -- don't. He's wearing colors. I'm in black. So you met good cop. I'd like you to meet bad cop."

More serious, she observed that ideas can be fascinating (the role of education, religion and economics for example)  but also dangerous (excessive nationalism, imperialism, anti-Semitism to name a few).

Moving through the 15th-19th centuries, there is a particular suspense in approach of the 20th century and legacies that now challenge our world.

My reactions to the huge wealth and complexity of information and ideas presented in this course, has steadily ran from "Hunh!" to "Oh-h-h-h-h...." to "Aha!" These spring forth in my mind -- guttural and spontaneous-- whether from hearing about the Hungarian Comenius, an early believer in open access and universal education; enlightenment ideas used to justify colonization and imperialism; finding out how 16th century exploration brought home new colors of indigo and carmine; Baroque art and music as a communications medium for the Catholic Church; the ingenuity of the Lyonnais silk industry in launching French fashion and marketing with neckties.

But what it does best is to highlight intellectual history and its role in power, politics, and economics, as opposed to, say, one that focuses more on science and technology.

For me what is most valuable, what moves me most deeply, is following the the long pathway of human rights across the European continent through centuries: for the serfs, the poor, Protestants, slaves, factory workers, women, Jews, and others; and from the right to reap rewards from hard labor and worship according to beliefs, to the right to vote, to learn, to hold property and on. It is in this way that I see today's struggle for human rights among gays, lesbians and transgender persons as a continuation of that pathway.

How can we fully appreciate where and what we are without knowing how we got here? It's why I believe my high school teacher spurred us onward.

European history is my start. But there's a vast world out there to explore.




                                                                   

On Eating Well

After hearing both Toni Morrison and Mark Bittman last week, I'm noticing even more how memorable food and meals can be.

Morrison named food among her three top memories of attending Cornell in the 50s. She recalled the campus beauty and a progressive political and religious community. She also remembered savoring affordable food.

She loved Cornell bread -- a fortified loaf with a recipe landed in many cookbooks -- and 25 cent eggs from the Ag school. She said they always seemed to have two yolks.

She mentioned growing up in a time when there was little trash to take out. Food did not come in plastic containers. Fruits and vegetables came from the garden. Waste was composted.

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman was also in town. He is a generation younger than Morrison and said, "My mother saw it as her duty to put meals on the table 7 days a week, about 330 days of the year. No one feels like that today."

By the 1980s and 1990s, he said, home cooking was as bad as it would get and that the level of food in supermarkets was plummeting. His column, "The Minimalist," was born when he noticed two trends that had been ignored by the food press: the decline in home cooking and an increase in junk food.

Bittman stayed on campus for several days chiefly to press people toward becoming political about  food and press our government to put food issues on legislative agendas and make policy changes.  Of course he also encouraged everyone to cook and eat more of what's delicious and nutritious and less of what's bad for us.

In round one he talked mostly to undergraduates about his writing career pathway and how he made it in journalism.

His last talk was in a room filled with Ithacan foodies who are as crunchy and smart as it gets in our town (witness the presence of both a Moosewood restaurant founding member as well as an Ag School researcher who called Bittman to task on issues related to GMOs and countering him with his view of the advantages of biofortification for poor people around the world.) I had the impression that the week in Ithaca was rewarding but also challenging. Maybe it pushed a few of his buttons. Running into him in a hallway at week's end, I could see he was ready to get home to Manhattan.

On Friday I stopped in to see Joyce McAllister, in her 80s,  who went with me to hear Bittman. Her home is filled with several hundred cookbooks, in addition to volumes of poetry, biographies and novels. On her dining room wall is a hobbyist's oil painting of the small dairy farm where she grew up outside of Dryden, NY.  After her family sold the farm, it deteriorated. She no longer wanted to drive by. But now at least a small grant has helped its owners restore the barn.

On that farm,  she and her mother canned thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetable. When she first tasted pasteurized milk as a college student she could not believe how bad it was. She still buys organic eggs from free-range chickens and suffers no others.
She points to Julia Child and Craig Claiborne for starting to turn things around in this country. And, she said "We didn't go to the table just to eat, but to talk."

Then she sent me home with about 15 pounds in cookbooks, including Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Bits from Bittman:

• You changed your light bulbs. You bought a Prius, How about eating a freakin' salad?
• We need more farmers.
• If I could get people to cook rice and beans once a week I would have had an amazing career.
• No one gives sweet potatoes enough credit.
• Consumerism is not inevitable.
• We have too many "unidenitifable food-like objects" in grocery stores.
• We should all try to be more vegan-ish.

Extra Minute: Bittman explains the 'cut and paste" function in the old newspaper paste-up days, before digital design.

Toni Morrison on Goodness

In fiction evil too often makes for blockbusters. Goodness is equated with weakness and lurks backstage.

So says Toni Morrison. She counts a some characters created by Faulkner, Melville, and Coetzee among her exceptions. But most contemporary literature, she believes, is not interested in goodness. The author's language can be beautiful, but it explores the corrupt.

Morrison said she does not find that interesting.

"Goodness is really and truly hard. You can't seduce it," the Nobel Prize winning writer told a reverent, excited audience of hundreds on March 7 at Cornell. "Writing about it and trying to find language for it is all I've ever done."

Morrison is a regal presence. She commands, speaking truth with grace. With a light touch, she takes your hand and leads you deeper into the sea of your heart than you thought anyone could help you go.

"You are a person, and deep down is this free person. That is the person you should use for good."

Watch President David Skorton's introduction

Hear Toni Morrison read from her new novel Home

Also view Morrison's lecture on Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination delivered at the Harvard Divinity School in 2012.

My Mind in Training

Left to its own devices, my mind is like a puppy -- eager, unfocused, prone to distraction.

That first leash promises a certain freedom to take to the trails, but it also brings out excitability and rebelliousness. Our puppy strains, pulls, and bounds off to follow first one scent, and then another, losing all interest in whatever quest was so captivating before. Puppy wanders off until reminded of what we were doing.

That's my mind as I start to develop a focused practice of meditation.

In January, I took a four-week course from Diane Hecht through Cornell's Wellness Program. She's upbeat and encouraging. She's able to laugh at our community's earnestness and the natural propensity for people to be offended, especially herself. I like her evidence-based approach, her background in integrative medicine, and the authority she brings as a longtime practitioner.

Now, two months into establishing my regular practice, my most noticeable benefit is in the battle against distractibility.

You know how it is. I sit down to pay a bill or answer an email and then start wondering what's new right now at the New York Times. Reading the headlines leads to an article on where boomers like to travel in winter, which leads to idle speculation about available rental houses in the Outer Banks next summer, or maybe a trip to Costa Rica.

Ten minutes are gone before I return to the project of recalling my password so I can pay my bill.

But now I find that I'm getting better at sticking to the task at hand. I'm learning to do one thing at a time, and -- high five! -- to remember what it was I was intent on doing!

There is renewed interest in mindfulness meditation, in part because research shows its benefits for stress reduction, anxiety management, and overall well-being -- all benefits I hope to experience as well. Jon Kabat-Zinn first studied and applied ancient meditation techniques in hospital settings with positive results. Today mindfulness meditation is endorsed by the psychological and medical communities and incorporated into many treatment modes.

In my beginner stage of meditation, I am also looking at compassionate awareness meditation traditions out of Buddhist and yogic traditions. Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, BKS Iyengar, and Tara Brach all have wisdom to share. But more on that another time.

Check out this recent synthesis of research looking on mindfulness meditation's effects from the American Psychological Association.

The Welcome Center at Cornell Plantations was 

a peaceful location for winter meditation classes.

The Tyranny of Root Vegetables -- and More

One of Ithaca's leading ladies among local writing circles, Joyce McAllister writes poems that send audiences into gales of laughter with delight and self-recognition.

On Sunday she read to an overflow crowd at the Ulysses Philomathic Library in Trumansburg with Mary Beth O'Connor, another wonderful poet and Ithaca College professor.

If you don't think you like poetry, just try Joyce. She writes on many topics and most hilariously about food -- from eating cauliflower in the dead of winter and cooking oversized zucchini in summer's heat to dining in and dining out. Joyce takes on mature romance with wry wit. She pokes fun at our human fashions. Our pretensions. Our presumptions. The preciousness of things. And caught unguarded and unsuspecting, we laugh from the belly.

But here's the thing. Deliberately and with a cat's cunning, Joyce writes in forms that are quite out of fashion. Many of her poems rhyme. They have meter. We come face to face again with sonnets, rhythm, and poetic forms from childhood that may have delighted us or chained us furiously to our desks. Joyce repacks those structures -- poking fun at the seriousness of poetry itself -- and returns them to us fresh, funny, and with attitude.

Garrison Keillor would be enchanted. And Joyce? She would arch her brow and go toe-to-toe in a smackdown.

Listen to a one-minute clip of Joyce reading "Lament" (with permission from the author)

Read "Lament"

Read more of Joyce's poems at gratefulness.org and The Healing Muse. In addition to writing poetry for the past seven decades, Joyce McAllister served as registrar at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology for thirty years.

Singapore Diplomat Issues Wake-up Call

With the gentlest possible manner, soothing his audience with data showing that we live in a less impoverished, less violent world than ever, Kishore Mahbubani nonetheless strived to provide a wake-up call to the Western world. His message: Asia is rising and becoming ever more optimistic through huge economic and social gains; the West is becoming pessimistic and declining in power. 

If you don't already feel it and see it for yourselves he seemed to suggest, then realize now, without a doubt, "the completely different era we are living in." 

Then he twisted the knife just a bit

He was calm, he was kind, and he achieved a conversational atmosphere. The former president of the U.N. Security Council and former ambassador of Singapore, proved his point with key vital statistics. Then twisted the knife just a bit, with good intentions, by honing in with policy critiques but also by countering possibly outdated perceptions that we may have of the U.S. and Asia in a changing world order. By 2030 more than half the world will enjoy middle class life and experience a "rare uplift of the human condition," and that's occurring now in India, China, and other non-Western nations. 

His new book, The Great Convergence, offers evidence and policy arguments. His title refers to this phenomenon: after several hundred years of global economic divergence between the East and West, we are living in a time of economic convergence.

Among his key points: America will yield its top spot in world power to China, an event that should be stable given the interdependent relationship between US debt and Chinese manufacturing. Islam and the West "worry him" but he remains optimistic because the majority of Muslim countries are also rising economically (he cited Indonesia as an example). He suggested that a two-state solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict would go far in changing the chemical balance with Islam. To act on environmental change, he suggested we must "sacrifice equitably across the world," indicating that not much would happen unless the U.S. stopped driving SUVs.

Advocating an open system of trade and government so that all boats rise, Mahbubani may be something of a citizen of the world; he is certainly a distinctively Asian observer.

The larger question is what are we? 

If we are citizens of the world, as conceived by Voltaire in 1752, then we will not despair at the gains of other nations or turn protectionist as Mahbubani cautions.

Voltaire: "To be a good patriot is to wish that one's city may be enriched by trade, and be powerful by arms. It is clear that one country cannot gain without another loses, and that it cannot conquer without making misery. Such then is the human state that to wish for one's country's greatness is to wish harm to one's neighbors. He who should wish his fatherland might never be greater, smaller, richer, poorer, would be the citizen of the world."

Low-hanging fruit we should grab now

Seizing what he called "low-hanging fruit" Mahbubani wants to strengthen multilateral institutions like the the U.N., the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the World Health Organization but called out the U.S. "for keeping global councils weak."  Some of these institutional budgets, he noted, are smaller than that of the NYC fire department.

An Asian rags to riches narrative

Mahbubani mirrors the rapid rise of some Asian societies over his generation. He grew up in Singapore to Indian parents. They were poor, a government-sponsored food program kept him nourished, and they did not have toilets. He learned by reading at a free library. In his later teens he was admitted to a university. Today, Mahubani is a writer and university dean and professor in Singapore. He has been hailed as one of the top public intellectuals in the world. 

Mahbubani delivered the 2013 Bartels lecture at Cornell University on February 13, 2013.

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A Novel Course in the History of Exploration

Tuition benefits are one of the perks of working for many universities, but few staffers have time to take advantage of them. When they do so, they often choose job-related courses. That’s what I did years back when I took courses in life sciences communication and web design.

But when I retired early I decided to take a course—and this time the sky was the limit. Where to begin? At Cornell, a university founded on a mission to open its doors to all kinds of students and offer courses in every field of study, deciding on a single course was a project. Should I learn a new skill, update my master’s degree, or soak in new knowledge? Did I want to learn to write computer programs, design native plant gardens, study classics, learn Spanish, read Russian literature, learn to grow apples or grapes — all were now possible.

My "Eureka!" moment

My “Eureka!” moment came when I spotted “HIST 1700, The History of Exploration: Land, Sea, and Space, with M B Norton and S Squyres. DESC: From ancient Stone Age peoples to the Mars rovers, from Christopher Columbus to the Apollo astronauts, humans have for centuries explored the far reaches of our planet, and now we are venturing into the solar system and beyond. This course will examine the history of such human activity.”

I’m a traveler, a used-to-be backpacker and a lover of outdoor adventure stories. The chance to learn firsthand about space exploration with Professor Steven Squyres of the Mars rovers fame and be guided in college-level historical approaches by Professor Mary Beth Norton, a well-known historian, sealed the deal. I boarded ship by climbing four flights of steep stairs in a 19th-century heritage building and asking the history office to sign my course registration form. Skipping over the ‘A’ for audit, I became fully committed.

Over the next three months, I filed into a lecture hall and pulled up a foldaway desktop twice a week to listen to topics ranging from Norse expeditions and the spice trade to the search for the Northwest passage and the Spanish and African explorations. I encountered not only personalities like Marco Polo, Columbus, and Cortes, but also less widely recognized explorers like Burton, Speke, and Jeanne Baret. Through readings, lecture, and a weekly session with my TA, my mind starting to hum. I strived to absorb truckloads of knowledge and started to develop a scaffold of a timeline, and new ways of thinking that, to be honest, I did not think still possible after working so many years in a single-mission office environment.

Midway through the course, this new taste of learning 

after age 50 felt both like a genuine gift and a radical process.

I had never studied history beyond high school and we covered lots of new territory for me. Listening to authorities recount what happened long ago, how, and why seemed like storytelling at its best. Learning firsthand from Norton, Squyres, and several guest faculty was like being served daily meals by world-class chefs. Layers and layers of complexity and deep knowledge are boiled down and assembled with some kind of alchemy.

Later I learned that The History of Exploration is a so-called university course, open to students across Cornell’s colleges and interdisciplinary by design. It showcased Cornell’s commitment to good teaching and it provided access to top professors accessible for undergraduates on the lower rungs of the academic hierarchy. Further, Norton and Squyres believe there is no other course like it across the U.S. or Canada.

The first thing about going back to college when you are 55 is that you stand out, at least at Cornell. At Hood College where I earned my undergraduate degree in the 70s it was common to find older women in my classes because continuing education programs came on the heels of the feminist movement as women who had chosen family over education headed back to school. There were so many women returning to school, in fact, they scored their own lounge where they could meet, network, and study.

In this history class, I was an anomaly. On the first day, a TA passed around a sign-up sheet and the student sitting next to me slid the paper right past me to the next student, evidently assuming that I was too old to be a student. While I saw three other older learners in the lecture hall, they were nowhere in sight for the prelim exam. I out-aged everyone taking the exam by more than 25 years. But with the exception of the time I found a wad of gum stuck to the chair, after traditional-aged students got used to my presence, they were unfailingly courteous and accepting, even when they clearly disagreed with my opinions. Plus, to be fair, I’m pretty sure that I was the only one with a hangover for one discussion, the morning after a rather lively neighborhood dinner. I soon accepted the strangeness of sitting in a classroom after thirty years, and others did as well.

Sqyures shared the inside stories and 

frank opinions we had come in part to hear

Most classes began with Squyres providing an update on the current activities of the Mars rovers, either in person or by Skype. Over the semester he lectured not only on the history of the space age, but also on the voyages of Captain James Cook and polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century, zeroing in on the dilemmas, challenges, and choices faced by some of the world’s renowned expedition leaders. A true baby boomer, his casual demeanor matched his jeans, which he always wore with t-shirts emblazoned with NASA mission logos. He’s average height, wiry and quick in his movements. Only the grey hair and rounded shoulders betray his long hours, heavy commuting scheduled to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and his many years of providing scientific leadership to hundreds of team members, who together enjoyed remarkable triumphs as well as a few defeats. Funny and down-to-earth, he indulged our class with the insider stories and frank opinions we had in part come to hear. But he pressed us forward to consider the leadership qualities that could make or break a mission, and the critical decision points that led an explorer to find personal glory or reach his demise. Just as he walked us through the engineering and technical challenges of Apollo spacecraft, the shuttle system, and Mars rovers, he was our pilot through the unsettling history of space age exploration in which progress was achieved not only in pursuit of scientific goals but military goals as well.

The week we covered von Braun and the V-2 rocket, he commented with an unusual rueful quality, “We wait until college to tell you about the Nazi involvement in rocket science.”

While only a handful of us in the room were old enough to witness the Apollo and shuttle missions, Squyres was eager for students to grasp the joy and wonder of lunar landings and the defeat and devastation of the violent ends to the Challenger and Columbia shuttle missions. Today’s multimedia make that easier than in the days of filmstrips, allowing me, too, to relive those milestones with audio and video footage, but with a crucial difference. What I witnessed as a child and teen was now detailed and explained so that I could consider the space program’s aspirations, goals, costs, challenges and significance on their own merits and in the context of the human story of exploration and migration. I noticed that I thought I knew about space exploration because I had grown up watching Apollo missions or gazing at photos of smiling astronauts. I thought I had that era covered through direct experience,but in fact, I was missing its context.

Norton asked, "Why have there been so few explorers?"

Mary Beth Norton, as a prominent research historian, grounded the class with her deep knowledge of 17th and 18th century British and American history, a crucial time in the Age of Sail that produced not only Cook but Henry Hudson and other explorers of North America. She earned the right long ago to start a sentence with “I join many other scholars thinking…” Norton is a Pulitzer-Prize finalist, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a leading authority on the 1692 Salem witchcraft crisis. She is cheerful, comfortably sized, and wears a no-nonsense attitude. With decades of teaching experience, she also runs a class of close to 100 undergraduates and a crew of TAs with ease and authority. Norton’s lectures on Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conquistadors and many others were small miracles of scholarly editing given the vast scope of the class. Under her guidance we focused on core questions: How did celebrated explorers interact with indigenous peoples? What constitutes discovery and exploration? Who funded expeditions and what was their political and personal agenda?

Norton came of age in the 60s and the arc of her scholarly career rose during the feminist movement. Interested in the role of gender in history, her final lecture of the course centered on the question of why there have been so few women explorers? Answer: family obligations, illiteracy, lack of education, limited financial means. Despite these facts, our humankind produced a number of explorers who were women, among them Lady Montagu, Maria Sibylla Merian, Valentina Tereshkova, and Sally Ride. Hearing about them, however, briefly, was enough to send me to the library to find out more. Throughout the class, guest lecturers, experts in their own fields, served up topics from the spice trade to undersea exploration until truly I felt like a member of the royal court who sat back as one academic after another filed into court and presented their report. My stack of books to read were a treat, lectures kept me rapt, and TA-led discussions were well organized and pointed.

Why after so many years I was swept off my feet

The question I began to ask myself was, “Why? Why after so many years was I being swept off my feet by a wide-lens history class? Yes the subject matter, at first blush anyway, was exotic and steeped in swashbuckling adventure. Yes, the professors were acclaimed in their fields and expert teachers. But there was more to it.

Here’s the thing: I had never before considered that even generalists like me, and me at the age I am now, can take in new knowledge and information and incorporate it deep into some long dormant part of my brain and reshape what I knew and how I was thinking, absorbing not only more detailed information but also seeing the possibility for building a new structure. What is more, as I watched the pathway of my own mind, I enjoyed it My brain was lighting up and the course also became an inward journey of exploration.

Neurologists have yet to nail down exactly what happens when the older brain reaches the shores of new knowledge. But with baby boomers as subjects, I’m sure they will figure it out. I didn’t need a CAT scan for proof. Entering the classroom equipped with both experience and curiosity relieved of the pressure of grades, the problem of hormones, or the challenge of discerning a career pathway made learning a joy. How wonderful to go to understand something of our collective human history, where we have traveled, why, and with what kinds of ingenuity. How worthwhile to try and see things as they really were, apart from assumptions or romantic notions, and consider the consequences of explorations for those around them and those they encountered.

Learning for its own sake is an old-fashioned concept in the liberal arts. For me, it felt like both a luxury and an earned privilege.

Personal field trip: National Maritime Museum in
Greenwich, England, December 2012