Narrow and wide

All too many of Natalie's courses seem interdisciplinary in nature (history, literature, art, sociology...) and based upon themes ("Race, Politics, and the Law," "The African Encounter with Colonialism"). A couple of caveats:

1. As an area studies (Russian and East European Studies) major, I participated in this and
2. The students do work awfully hard and read a lot of books by people I've never heard of -- which indicates to me that they're digging deep -- and
3. Natalie is objectively better educated than I was at her age, meaning she and the system are doing a lot of things right

I nonetheless wonder if the relative lack of single-author or more narrowly focused classes (I took classes with titles like Pushkin, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Russian Symbolism, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, Russian History to 1796) etc. means that the pendulum has swung a little too far towards professors presenting their own pre-baked theses, leaving a little too little space for students to do their own thinking. Certainly Natalie has already run into trouble in one course where she disagrees with the professors and they gave her a crappy grade on a paper, she thinks mostly because they don't agree with her.

As an example of something I've seen in my own learning about a topic along these lines. I've complained here on the blog about the slowness of Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng, and how it seems stuck in interminable discussions of how China worked through Mao's legacy and its own ideological direction following Mao's death. I pined for tales of what was actually happening in the street. So I stated listening to Weijian Shan's book about exile to the Gobi in the Cultural Revolution, and there I learned just how intense and real the ideological discussions were all up and down China during this period, and also during the preceding and arguably crazier Great Leap Forward of the late 50s-early 60s. The absolute seeming insanity of what the Chinese would do on the basis of fine points of ideology. Kill all the sparrows. Try to scale up steel production by building millions of tiny forges in backyards and melt down pots, pans, knives, bicycles....

Fast forward to today and look at the conflict between Houston Rockets owner Darryl Morley and his little tweet about the Hong Kong protester, and Alibaba #2 and Brooklyn Nets owner (also Branford College '87, so a guy I knew in college) Joe Tsai's response characterizing what is happening in HK as a "separatist movement", seeming to toe the Beijing party line. But then he explains that in fact it's not just the party line, but that because of the Opium Wars and also the Japanese occupation prior to and during WWII, Chinese are extremely sensitive to perceived intervention. It's complex.

My point is that perhaps the best way to grasp the complexity of being is to dig deep in specific places and do your own spelunking.

Also, who are we to say the Chinese go overboard about fine points of ideology, we a nation of people who allow the proliferation of hundreds of millions of guns and very high rates of gun-related violence because of a romantic view of our "right to bear arms." And other stuff too. Liberals also do crazy shit because of very fine parsing of sacred ideas. But now it's time for work.