New Identity Crisis Kicks the Asses of All Prior Identity Crises

We here in the DoD have been on an unscheduled mental sabbatical prompted by the loss of our sense of humor following the U.S. election.  Indeed, we have been in the throes of an identity crisis that shut down all operations for a time.  For while our mission is to know more things, we realize that we didn’t in fact want to know THAT.  By THAT of course we mean ALL THAT, all the things that people are apparently equipped to accept and even embrace. Likewise, while we love a good swerve, that which takes thought and experience in some new and chaotic direction, we really weren't looking for things to plummet off a cliff.

So we here in the DoD have more than lost the thread, we’ve lost whole blankets.  Humor has given way to misanthropy and our ordinary curiosity about people and what they think is in retreat.  To cope with this, we have adopted as our therapeutic mantra something our grandmother used to tell us.  We (mentally) say to other people: "I'm gonna  slap you to sleep and then slap you for sleeping.”  This makes us feel marginally better, just as it used to do Grandma when she too was in high dudgeon.

Deviant Identity Crisis (Redux)

As happens in most faculty meetings, our meeting last Friday generated a distressing identity crisis.  Doubts about ourselves are never far from the surface, so it doesn’t take much to set us off.  On Friday, our rousing discussion of class scheduling was interrupted when a junior colleague noticed that we have a habit of sometimes using Deviant as if it is an honorific and asked, “Why exactly is that?”

Upon hearing this question, one of our more cranky senior faculty glanced at the junior colleague, saying, “Bless your heart.”  Happily, another faculty member quickly rebuked her, pointing out that there was no call for vulgar oaths and hostility.  With that bit of bad manners out of the way, we could proceed with de-railing the agenda in our more usual collegial way. 

Upon consideration and as often also happens, we realized that our junior colleague was right.  We do sometimes use “Deviant” as an honorific. 

Sometimes this rather predictably follows from delighted awe at our Deviant ancestors, as when Dogen inspires us to entirely reconsider the phenomenology of cooking supper.  Or when Mengzi reminds us not to climb trees when we want fish.  Times like that make us want to bestow veritable crowns of Deviance upon some ancestral heads. 

But sometimes we use Deviant in praise of the living.  And however fun it is to pass out imaginary crowns, we’re less sanguine about resting them on living heads.  More to the point, we are suspicious of what heads we may leave bare.  Deviant can be just a descriptive used in reference to us poor benighted souls laboring long to know more things, including those who are paid to do it and those who are training in it.  But therein lies the rub when usage slips into the honorific, for we notice this can lead to some dubious verbal shenanigans.

We have, for example, heard speakers implicitly distinguish between those they deem Deviants and (mere) “professors of Deviance” or (measly) “teachers of Deviance.”  This sort of thing is far worse when people are denying that someone is a Deviant.  Typically this will occur with some softening gesture that attempts to equivocate between Deviant as an honorific and Deviant as descriptive.  The Deviant will be ascribed characteristics that are generally desirable (the honorific) but Deviant status (pseudo-descriptive) is denied as if it is merely remarking reasonable divisions of labor:  “Deviants are fearless…. He works in religion, not Deviance.” We call shenanigans on that.  For it can’t be a good thing if using Deviant to refer to people works as an honorific that can be withheld based on petty methodological differences or status signaling.  Start treating Deviant as a verbal reward for the well-placed, well-behaved, or like-minded or start withholding Deviant to scorn those who lack professional advantage, act up, or disagree and pretty soon we’re going to need a Confucian to come in here to rectify some names.  Maybe even to bless hearts all over the place. 

So, finally, we decided to save the verbal crowns for the dead.  Where the living are concerned, we concluded, we have no trouble with descriptive usage.  At least we think we don’t, but wait around a bit since we’re sure to become queasy about that too.  Still, henceforth we’ll try to use Deviant descriptively when talking to and about each other. Of course even there, our usage will need to be loose and flexible, as we’re never entirely sure what properly belongs in the category Deviant and what does not.  Aw, hell, we thought, we haven’t even finished this paragraph and already we can feel trouble brewing with even that basic conclusion… Aware that we stood at the precipice of a renewed and more vigorous identity crisis, we were saved by the abrupt recognition that we have to call ourselves something.  Otherwise, how will the administration know where to send our funds?  And what will they put on our students’ degrees?  So, Deviant it is.  As Nagasena would say, it is but a way of counting and convenience.  That Nagasena, he was such a Deviant!

As for the class scheduling issue, since time was short, we decided to cut to the chase and voted unanimously that next fall we’ll teach some stuff.

Sacred Stupidity

Here in the DoD, we don’t just work on deviance.  We also farm - because having one job with a vanishingly small success rate just wasn’t enough for us.  We ambitiously need two, and the more luckless the better.  And, since it’s summer, we’re mixing deviance and farming (ok, mostly the latter), so forgive a predilection for agriculture talk. 

We here at the DoD satellite ag campus are ashamed to say that we used to seriously underrate quail.  Quail have a habit of running instead of flying off immediately when you approach their habitat.  Worse yet, they run straight on away, into the open spaces and in the direction you’re heading.  So if you come upon quail, they’ll “flee,” except their version of this looks a lot like trying to lead you on a 5k jog.  So here’s the shameful admission:  We here in the DoD once thought quail exceptionally stupid on account of this.  After all, if you’ve got wings, use ‘em and, if somehow that’s not on, then at least run into some brush and hide.

Quail are in fact quite clever, since this behavior is a form of predator misdirection.  They jog instead of fly so you’ll think you might catch them and so follow.  And they run in the open since that’s going to draw you away from their covey in the brush. 

To figure this out, we at the DoD satellite ag campus had to look into things (ok, we asked our uncle) and were struck that some healthy curiosity had not blocked our low opinion of quail in the first instance.  Nature can be a hot mess, sure, but it tends not to favor deadly behaviors. 

From this sorry episode of confident ignorance, it was a short leap to radical self-doubt since, in truth, we here at DoD are ever poised to make that particular jump.  Why, we asked ourselves, would we have assumed that quail don’t know what they are about when concluding that they are stupid is surely the least interesting possibility?  Too much learning, we ruefully reflected, and you start to think you know things - even, and maybe even especially, when you don’t. 

So we here in the DoD refreshed our resolve regarding fundamentals – to wit, we decided to lead with the thought that we are stupid and leave the smug certitude to other departments.  We would praise and valorize stupidity wherever we find people earnestly owning it.  Indeed, we concluded that the “revelation of our own slowness has seemed to make all stupidity sacred.”*

*Henry James, “The Middle Years.”

Deviant Identity Crisis Averted (for now)

As most of you know, all work abruptly stopped during the faculty meeting last week, when our newest junior colleague interjected to ask: “Who is this ‘we’ we keep referring to?”  This drew all of the tenured old dogs up short as they immediately realized this was an exceptionally diverting question – indeed, it was the bomb and far more interesting than the budget (which, as always, aspires to someday achieve shoestring status).  All department effort was redirected to puzzling this out and the following tentative conclusions were drawn:

a) “We” make ourselves plural partly because we revel most in deviance carried out in company and think Confucius was on to something in noting the joy derived from practicing the things you learn among friends. 

b) “We” aspires to be a linguistic refuge for deviants, those poor huddled masses turned away at the Ellis Island of Normal.  We also hope our “we” could be a nice place to visit for those who live most of the year in Normal.  They could even live here year-round if the spirit moved.  Basically, human solidarity is one of our favorite things.  We like it so much, we think we love it.

c) “We” is also a perilous word easily abused and we resolved to try never to use it in situations of disagreement between individuals – e.g., quarrels over the proper scope of deviance are best handled when people speak for themselves rather than trying to marshal magnifying force for their own views by framing them in the collective “we.”  We should thus be worried about ourselves when we say things like “What you fail to understand is that in deviance, we do ____.”  Say too much stuff like that and we may have to bring out the shame ray.

d) However much we might want our “we” to be total, it surely won’t be and thinking it is would carry us several long strides down the road to perdition. We admire Shakespeare and think Hamlet was astute in saying, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”  Thinking you’re all-the-we has never worked out well in human history and in our endless quest to know more things we think listening to non-we interlocutors is the finest of bad dreams.  They’re what’s saving us from living in a walnut pretending to be king.  We like the ridiculous but are trying real hard not to be it.

e) Talking about “we” while simultaneously using it to refer to oneself is hard.

As with all topics deviant, our metaconclusion was to hold all of our conclusions lightly and resolve to revisit them often.  In lieu of the budget we were meant to plan, we will send the conclusions above to administration and hope they don’t notice the difference.