Rilke: Coming to Terms with a Death that Doesn't Fit and other notebook entries...

Lou Andreas-Salomé with (from left) her husband Friedrich Karl Andreas, the architect August Endell and Rainer Maria Rilke in a summer house near Munich, 1897. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is often regarded as the first 'modernist' novel. I find it hard to place. As far as genre is concerned, it is not quite Finnegan's Wake, that Rilke was a poet does not make this like a Bukowski novel, nor is it a work of non-fiction in the vein of Rabindranath Tagore. I enjoyed the work, but usually I write about my reading as soon as I am finished. I finished this work late last night and I am still trying to work out what happened! The Notebooks read just like notebooks. But in the first half or so, one reads about a child born into privilege at a time when the privileged classes are losing their grip. One reads about infatuation, love, wonder, ghosts. Then in the second half, it becomes something of an historical rant. Not as one might find in a novel where historical persons and events have been used as raw material for fiction, but where you are reading a fiction that is discussing historical events. This version includes end notes to the historical figures and events and highlights parts of the work that originated from Rilke's personal experiences. For example, Rilke witnessed a man with St Vitus' dance (Sydenham's chorea) who is captured in the notebooks; and his own experiences as a child are recreated in the person of young Brigge. Such historical renderings were wonderful. I must admit to not having known anything of Rilke. But like all new things, now I see him everywhere - he influenced James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many others. Rilke seems obsessed with death, but he does it so well (pp. 5-6):

[The death of a poor person] is of course a banal one, with neither pomp nor circumstance. They are happy to find one that more or less fits. They don't mind if it's a little too large, because they can always grow into it. But it's bothersome if the front won't do up or it's tight at the throat.

I enjoyed reading this work without an introduction. If I could compare the work to anyone, it would be closest to Kafka, but without the sense of plot or chronology. And without an overblown introduction, it leaves the reader to "come to terms" with the author, as Mortimer Adler would say. But I doubt that many would find it easy to come to terms with Rilke. This might best be done with his poetry.

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On the Standardisation Aesthetic in Education: All the Same "Just Because"

US Military parade at the Imperial Palace Plaza, 1948. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Standardisation is an important means to an end - typically efficiency. Shipping containers and pallets are interesting examples. A world without these would be a very different world. Standard electrical fittings, too, are convenient - you notice this most when you travel overseas and you do not have a country-specific adaptor. 

But what about when standardisation is not a means to an end, but an end in itself? This I call the standardisation aesthetic.

I noticed this first in the military. The regimental sergeant major walked into a classroom and ordered the desks to be lined up precisely, and make it "all regimental-like". Later, I found myself being annoyed at the way the cheese was cut. In its extreme, it becomes obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be unhealthy.

So when I find education managers wanting to make everything "nice and regimental-like", I question: What are they trying to achieve? Efficiency? Hardly. While management is busy checking up on everyone else, some important system is typically offline. Often, it is simply this: the standardisation aesthetic. I find this permeates so many things in higher education.

In a nation that routinely claims universal ideas as part of its "culture" or "way of life", the standardisation aesthetic is surely a cultural artefact that manifests itself regularly, but is rarely observed. And I don't mean "artefact" in the sense of a human-made tool or object, but in the scientific sense of "something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure".

Having worked for a few years in my youth in hydraulic spare parts and industrial bearing sales, I heard the term "standard" frequently. A typical customer engagement would go like this:

Customer: "I need an o-ring/oil seal/tapered roller bearing for a thing".
Me: "What size/type/brand/thing is it?"
Customer: "Oh, it's standard".
Me: "Yeah, right. There's no such thing".

Anyone who has worked in spare parts will know this story. It happens every day, and I have even stopped myself from saying it (it is possible, for example, to have Ford bearings in a Holden trailer hub - and it's "standard").

So we have two issues here. First, standardisation can achieve efficiency. Granted. But second, standardisation becomes an expectation to make things more convenient. But what if "it" isn't standard, and therefore it isn't convenient?

I ask this question because when designing a customer experience, the more convenient, the better. Consumers can mind-numbingly buy the same thing without thinking while retailers pocket the profit. Except in grocery stores. The trick in grocery stores is to routinely rearrange the store. This disrupts habits and forces shoppers to "look" for their preferred or habitual purchases. 

Of course, it typically leads to shoppers buying things they didn't need or want. There is a reason that every convenience store has the bread and the milk at the back of the store, you know.

But what about the people who are meant to be future leaders? Should we provide a consistent customer experience for students? I say no.

The world is not standard. Sure, parts of it are or can be, but this works best when there is an end in sight - an objective. Standardise shipping containers and pallets, and we have efficient physical distribution systems. Standardise the customer experience, and we have an efficient market or distribution system for goods and services. 

But standardise nature, and one day the species is wiped out because we removed the opportunities for critical variations in the evolutionary gene pool to occur. Natural selection ceases to function. Do the same with our markets, and organisations will cease to innovate and eventually die. Just like the Soviet Union. Or Kodak.

What, then, of our students? Elementary knowledge like times tables? Find the best approach and standardise it. Leadership? Find the best approach and standardise it. Oh, wait. That won't work. Why? Because we are all unique individuals and what works for one won't necessarily work for another. 

We have entered the realm of the social sciences and therefore we cannot reduce everything to standardised units. Even if we could, those sneaky humans might change their behaviour, just to annoy our cunning plan.

There are two problems with standardised education. First, the world isn't standard, so creating a falsely standardised learning environment is counter-productive. It may produce efficient consumers, but it won't produce effective leaders. 

Second, creating a standardised learning environment removes opportunities for students to grapple with diverse and nuanced situations. I always tell my students that an undergraduate degree is proof that they can navigate their way through bureaucracy. Watch your grandmother try to grapple with a Centrelink form and you will see what I mean. 

So standardisation as an aesthetic is a cultural artefact - we only notice it when we strip away the rhetoric of good governance. As educators, we need to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of standardisation? Will it improve our efficiency? Making course information or learning materials readily available is a good example. Standardise away.

But when standardisation becomes an end in itself, we need to question the wisdom of such an approach and ask, why?

Management won't like it, but we risk doing our students a disservice if we let the aesthetic run its course. We need to see it for what it is, and, funnily enough, only someone with a bit of social science training could see standardisation as an artefact. The variations are important opportunities for developing new skills, new knowledge, and improving living standards.

If we standardise everything, we will have a beautiful education system, all regimental-like. Why? Well, just because. And that doesn't sound very educated to me.

Schopenhauer on Religion: Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet

Krishna teaching Arjuna, from Bhagavata Gita.
House decoration in Bishnupur, West Bengal, India. By Arnab Dutta (2011) CC BY-SA 3.0

The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion by Arthur Schopenhauer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have second-hand knowledge of Schopenhauer's "the will to live is consecrated in the act of procreation" thesis, and while it makes a brief appearance, much of this collection is focused on religion. The "On Various Subjects" section reads a little like La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, and makes some interesting assertions about genius (it is OK to make mistakes, just your masterpiece ought to be inimitable); on the farcical nature of higher education (perception must precede concept, not the other way around); an early statement concerning animal rights (p. 77); and that great works have to wait until enough idiots agree that it is great - such insight is possessed by the majority in the same way that a "castrate possesses of the power to beget children". Now to religion. Some of my favourites:

All religion is antagonistic towards culture; 

The absurdities of dogma... arise from the need to link together two heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and the New Testaments; 

Hatred and contempt are decidedly antagonistic to one another and mutually exclusive (p. 52);

The more prudent rulers enter into an alliance with [priests]; and

Faith and knowledge are totally different.

The latter explains the dialogue On Religion, which, although I understand Schopenhauer was atheistic, appeared on the surface to be bombastic, but might otherwise resonate with court judges who have been confronted with decisions concerning the existence of God, and have deferred on the grounds that, in effect, "faith and knowledge" are different. Nevertheless, there is in this work the attitude (of The Enlightenment) that rational individuals cannot possibly believe in God. I have heard this sentiment expressed by senior academics, in addition to the buffoons who drool over the Facebook echo-chamber "I F***ing Love Science" which confirms empirically that God does not exist because it has 25 million "likes" (see quote above about "castrates"). That said, there is little to surprise the modern reader, but Schopenhauer was one of the few Western students of India, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and his insights demonstrate that the glory days Conservatives dream about did not really exist in the nineteenth century, the counterfactuals were simply hidden from majority view. But to disclose the real gem in this work, I found another piece to the riddle of Benjamin Franklin. One of his "virtues" is "moderation". This is not a riddle in itself, but when "temperance" is also one of the virtues, what is so special about moderation that it should stand alone? Schopenhauer explains in the essay On Ethics by setting out some of the differences between Eastern and Western virtues and vices. For Schopenhauer, "virtues are qualities of will", which means that cowardice cannot be a vice if we have the "will to live"! The Platonic virtues closely align with Franklin's,one of which Cicero translated as temperantia, which is"in English moderation". Schopenhauer states:

[Moderation] is a very vague and ambiguous expression under which many different things can be subsumed, such as prudence, sobriety, keeping one's head.

Prudence. Cautious. To Franklin, "avoiding extremes". "Sobriety", therefore, belongs with "temperance". But "prudence" and "keeping one's head", then, belong to moderation. Whether "keeping one's head" is the same thing as to "forbear resenting injuries so much as one is able" remains to be seen, but I daresay Schopenhauer and Franklin were conversant in the literature on virtues, and eventually I will solve the riddle. But what of Schopenhauer? Religion is something we believe because we are indoctrinated as children, but as humanity "grows up", religion must inevitably die because it doesn't make sense (irrational). Yet the final paragraph tells the story of adolescents throwing out the baby with the bathwater - Aesop's fables are too childish because everybody knows foxes, wolves, and ravens can't talk! Thus, Schopenhauer ends with a real noodle-baker (about the boy who was too grown up to read Aesop):

Who cannot see in this hopeful lad the future enlightened Rationalist?

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