Chapter 7: In which Elissa gets her M.A.

It has been brought to my attention that I’ve been remiss in updating my adoring public on important life events. I hereby repent in dust and ashes and officially announce that I have completed my M.A.!

I successfully defended my master’s thesis in December and was most gratified by the positive reception I received from my thesis committee—they approved it with no revisions and even nominated it for a university thesis award! As far as statistics go, the thesis is called Eleanor Gibson and the Visual Cliff Myth: The Biography of a Scientific Object, is 151 pages long, and has 166 separate references. Whew! I don’t think it’s my best writing ever, and so don’t feel the fierce pride that I often do for my writing, however it represents a huge expenditure of time and effort. As you can imagine, I’m quite relieved and happy to have it finally finished.

What’s next for me? Well, as it turns out completing the thesis doesn’t portend huge life changes: I will stay on at York and complete my Ph.D., so about 3-4 years more. I’m happy about this, as I have gotten established in the program, have a church that I love, and feel at home in Toronto now. As for what’s next in terms of academic projects (i.e., for my dissertation.), I’m thinking I will probably leave Eleanor Gibson and her visual cliff behind and write on Milicent Shinn.

_____________

Eleanor J. Gibson _____________________Milicent Shinn

(1910-2002) _______________________ (1858-1940)

Milicent Shinn was a psychologist from California who published The Biography of a Baby in 1900, the first systematic observation of a baby’s early years conducted in America. Like my thesis, this (potential) dissertation project focuses on a woman psychologist who did developmental psychology, but I expect that, also like my thesis, Shinn’s biographical details will provide an interesting point of departure for investigating larger psychological and historical questions.

I am somewhat bemused to be choosing another developmental psychology topic, since I did rather poorly in my undergraduate developmental psychology class, and didn’t particularly like the subject matter (these two tend to go together in my experience). But it seems to have grown on me, and then again, who doesn’t like babies? If you need convincing of the charm of babies, just watch this trailer:

Eleanor Gibson photo credit: Dr. James Maas, Cornell University.

What I did on my summer vacation

the visual cliff experiment,

Sadly, it's only two minutes long and so doesn't show rats and chickens and goats being tested on the visual cliff like the complete version does, but at least you can get an idea what the apparatus looks like. If you really want to know how more about Eleanor Gibson or the visual cliff here's a fairly informative obituary and an online reprint of the original 1960 Scientific American article which first publicized the results of the study. Oh, and you can also look at some funny pictures of pigs and babies and goats on the cliff which were taken for an article in Life Magazine (click on any of the 'Related Images' to see the other pictures).

Congratulations, Gordon!

I love Gordon College. I recently found a blog that keeps track of all the interesting projects the faculty, students and alumni are engaged in, from sculpture to service. Reading these posts always makes me fond of the place. But today I’m particularly proud of my alma matter. Yesterday was the dedication of the Ken Olsen Science Center at Gordon—a facility that has been a long time coming, and was desperately needed. I explored the building when I visited campus this summer and was quite impressed. I’m so pleased that my friend, Dr. Dorothy Boorse, will have such a great place to conduct her biology labs and research, and that all my old professors in the psychology department will have the teaching and experimental facilities they deserve.

But I’m also proud because Francis Collins spoke at the Science Center dedication. Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, has been someone that I’ve admired ever since I read this interview in National Geographic in which Collins is interviewed by an atheist. Collins is just so ridiculously smart and articulate and gracious. Take, for example, the start of his answer to a question referring to the idea of "God the semi-competent." Collins says “That's delightful—and probably blasphemous! An alternative is the notion…” Somehow in this succinct answer he manages to convey his sense of humor combined with unapologetic disagreement, which he then follows by offering of the Christian perspective for the questioner’s inspection. What a great model for apologetics! I also uncovered an interview where he pretty much kicks butt on NPR--no easy feat! Best of all, he’s a great example of a Christian taking science seriously and doing it well—he’s at the top of his field by any measure.

All that to say that I was thrilled to hear that Collins was speaking at the dedication at Gordon. If I were living anywhere close by, you can bet I would have been there like a teen girl at a Jonas Brothers concert (well, maybe not quite so hysterical) to hear him speak on Genomics and the Human Condition in person! As it was, I had to content myself with the podcast of the three talks he gave (search for Gordon College in the iTunes Store, or click here). Now that I’m done with those, I need to get me a copy of his autobiography: Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Good stuff! Way to go, Gordon!

Tree or Rhizome?

In my theory of psychology class this term I read the following:

In philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) applied the metaphor of a root in order to describe various forms of thought. Metaphysics was described as the root of a tree in which everything was derived from a single source or first cause. Modernity was characterized as favoring a fasciculate root, a system of small roots with many sources. (Teo, pg. 138)

Got it so far? I thought not. In other words, metaphysics is like a tree, where there is one main root, with smaller roots branching off, whereas modernity is like grass, which has multiple small roots.

Now, I’m not sure what exactly the justification is for saying that modernity has multiple small roots, and I don’t think that metaphysics and modernity are that distinct. If I were creating a model of thought using a tree it would go something like this: Philosophy is the root is the root of the modernist tree. Philosophy has produced a diverse body of knowledge, including the sciences and the humanities. Each of these fields of study has split into numerous specializations, however it is still possible to trace each branch back to its roots, which is ultimately metaphysics—those ancient conversations about the nature of what is. Nice, right? It’s all very neat and tidy and logical.

Teo continues:

However, postmodernity was described as a rhizome, a stem organ in which branches in the air could grow again into the soil, where old parts died out and where new branches were formed elsewhere. (pg. 138)

My response: Ugh! What a mess!

Even worse, Teo says that modern psychology may be best characterized by the rhizome, given how disunified it is. According to Teo, a postmodern approach to psychology would challenge the “logocentric” notions of cause and effect and “the idea that the person was the center of awareness, an integrated whole, and an entity that opposed other entities” (Teo, pg. 138).

Now, I’m not going to go of on a rant about postmodernism, as much as I’m tempted. I do think that it leads to a deadly epistemological chaos, as the analogy of the rhizome so perfectly illustrates, and that nothing could be worse for psychology than this sort of nonsense.

But let’s consider the tree and the rhizome for a moment, evaluating them simply on their aesthetic merits.

The tree stretches towards the sky for light, and burrows deep into the earth to find water. It has both form and flexibility, trunk and leaves. It is symmetrical. It is strong. Things can be built with its wood. It provides shade. It bears fruit. Children climb it. Birds nest in it.

The rhizome, well… its ability to grow all directions and not be killed by a single cut is pretty useful. There are a few rhizomes, like potatoes and ginger, which I would hate to give up. But in terms of aesthetics, it’s not going to win any beauty prizes. We’re talking about crabgrass here, people! Although the rhizome is certainly an apt analogy for postmodernism, it strikes me as a pretty poor mascot choice. No contest, the tree wins!

Now the only problem with this whole little exercise is that I’m not sure I really want to be chief cheerleader for modernism, or give it a monopoly on the tree. While a neat hierarchical tree is useful for describing science (or church history, for that matter), Biblical trees strike me as wilder and more symbolic. Of course there’s the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis, and the Tree of Life in Revelation whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. And there's that comforting image of the wise man as a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. No, I wouldn’t trade the biblical trees for modernist tree, despite its charming simplicity.

But perhaps a premodern, medieval tree* would do the trick?





Yes, that’s more like it. Much better than a rhizome!

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Teo, T. (2005). The critique of psychology: From Kant to postcolonial theory. New York: Springer Science.

*Tree by Tolkien.

Ghosts and Grad school

I rarely buy new CDs, generally sticking to my dear old favorites, which more often then not are classical, which limits somewhat the selection of new CDs that are relevant (how many interpretations of Bach do you actually need?). However, I have a new favorite CD! It’s is Ghosts and Spirits, by Phil Woodward, available for purchase here, or to see the lyrics or hear the music, see the CD site, here. It’s inspired by C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, and so each song corresponds to a different scene, sentiment or character in the book. For example:

• The man who refuses “bleeding charity” because he wants his good works to count for something.
• The woman who is consumed with love for her dead son, and is thus unable to accept divine love.
• The man constantly fighting the lizard on his back, who, finally surrendering the battle to another, finds the monster transformed.
• The artist who has forgotten his first love—why he began painting—and wants to paint heaven.
• The saint who, unrecognized for her simple acts on earth, is enthroned as a glorious queen in heaven.

But summarizing these more direct correspondences to book doesn’t do justice to the originality
of the lyrics. These characters, whether ghosts or spirits, merely provide the inspiration for the songs, but then are developed further and differently than in the book. Woodward ties in other Lewis references or ideas, such as one character who says about the grey town “I know it’s not good but it’s safe”, turning Lewis’s description of Aslan on its head (“Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”).

The song that most causes me to exclaim “How true, how like life!” (to quote E. Nesbit) is one that that is only loosely inspired by the book. I don’t have any evidence for this, but I suspect this song was influenced more by The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ comment on the state of education. It’s a recitative in positively Screwtapesque tones called Thirst for Water, Inquiry for Truth. You really have to hear the intonation to really appreciate it, but here are the lyrics:

Thank God (in an abstract sense) that we’ve
Mustered up the courage to leave
The battered ranks of the naïve.
Remember that angst, that earnestness,
That intellectual distress,
That accompanied our youthfulness?
My friends, ’tis clearly a priori
That cultures espouse a meta-story
A veritable intellectual quarry
From which they draw their sense of shame,
Their paradigmatic value claims,
And their institutes of praise and blame.
But we, the academic heroes, rise
Above their existential cries
For we need no answers to be wise:
For wisdom lies neither in value nor fact,
But in modesty, honesty, courage, and tact
And in confessing what our academies have lacked,
Their myopic, close-minded approach to thought,
All the unnecessary battles they’ve fought,
And their delightfully one-sided concept of God.
So, tirelessly toil we, on their behalf
And rejoice in the day when they give even half
Of the heart we so nobly put into our craft.
And together we’ll stand, amidst a whole host
Of trivial drivel, and raise high a toast
To the death of the things that matter the most.

I reproduce the text here because it is scarily close to the attitude that I've found to be prevalent in grad school. I don’t mean to single out any of my colleagues, but I think it’s a hazard that we in history of psychology are particularly prone to. Not only can we cast ourselves as “the academic heroes” in terms of the misguided Whig history of yesteryear, but we can also do so by comparing ourselves to modern empirical psychology, which we see as still in thrall to the positivist myth.

But while presentism (dismissing the past as ignorant and regarding modern views as the correct standard for judging the past) has been at least been recognized as a hazard in history, what most worries me about this view is its relativism. For all their faults, at least historians of the past were searching for an objective truth, valued fact and had a purpose for their inquiry. I think most of my professors would argue that truth, value and morality are all constructed, products of our meta-story, the metanarrative of our culture, or perhaps our particular sub-culture (Christianity, for me, of course). What we are to do as historians is uncover the metanarratives of the past, the meaning which people constructed for their lives; we cannot judge the past by modern standards, we are not looking for any sort of objective, universal truth. I could not disagree with this view more. While I acknowledge some of the insights of postmodernism and I agree that what sense people in the past made of their lives is essential for understanding their history, I am convinced that we must be able to make judgments about the truth and falsity of their views. Just because they believed something (that the four humors controlled health, for example) does not make it “true for them”, a category above criticism. Obviously this calls for a post in its own right, and perhaps I’ll do that sometime in the future. But meanwhile check out Ghosts and Spirits and enjoy some great music!





P.S. The first image in the post is the CD cover, but the others are Great Divorce-themed images that I found on the web. The second image is from this blog where someone posted photos they took of an art show and there are several other Great Divorce-themed works there. The third is from Flicker, and is the work of an artist who has many other really nice pieces, some of them of Narnia. Both are really worth a look!