4/26: Context and Ethics

While you finish your first complete drafts of P3 in anticipation of peer review on Thursday through next Monday, this seems like a good time to talk about some scenarios you might encounter in research and writing (and real life). Today's lesson is more narrative or story-like than normal, as a break from the very content-heavy lessons we've been having. (Yes, there's still a quiz.)

We're going to talk about the often-overlooked Background Section, why you should "contextualize your normal," and talk about a key resource you can use to get "up to speed" on long-term discussions and issues quickly (since you're a relatively "new" human).

Context Isn't Optional: Cautionary Tales

The Background Section of your P3--the bit between the introduction and the argument where you cover things your audience needs to know--is often the easiest to write, which does not mean it's unimportant. The background section provides a useful service with important rhetorical (i.e. good argument) and ethical (i.e. good person) functions.

Not surprisingly, it's easier to make an argument using correct terminology if your audience understands those terms, which is why background sections often try to teach the audience about important jargon. This move builds up your own authority while providing you a good opportunity to introduce key sources that you'll use later. You can think of it as a sort of "first episode" of your argument, where you set up the situation and introduce any key or recurring characters you're going to use later. That's pretty obvious to most of you. I think.

The second, ethical function of a background section is more complicated: background sections keep your work honest by forcing you to present the ongoing expert conversation to your audience. Without knowledge of past discussion on a topic, your audience would be more vulnerable to asking dumb questions or getting fooled by some rhetorical trickery, either by you or someone else--educating your audience about the context surrounding your topic enables them to challenge you on more equal footing. While, in a paper, your audience can't actually ask you questions live (like they can in a class), writing a good background section is essentially a commitment to treat counterarguments and disagreement seriously (even if you're totally going to dunk on them with Science! later, the dunking-upon will be honest).

Understanding the context of your issue also keeps you from falling prey to unethical arguments or just looking like a dummy. Here's two real P3 horror stories about context:

50 Years and a Whole Continent Isn't a Big Deal...Right?

A student wanted to write a paper about American involvement the Vietnam War. I thought this was a weird topic, since the war is long over, but I was a young teacher and I thought "let's see where this goes." It seemed like this student was having a hard time with the concept of relevance/kairos, but when we conferenced about it, they said they were going to talk about it in the context of the current War on Terror. I figured "ah okay, so they're going to discuss how the two conflicts are playing on similar ideas, might be sketchy but it's their choice."

That was not how their P3 went. It was so much worse.

Having apparently just learned about Vietnam for the first time recently, they fell victim to the worst version of New-To-You Syndrome I've ever encountered. Having been a baby when 9/11 happened (and maybe having gone to a mediocre high school?), the student was, in fact, under the impression that the War on Terror and the Cold War were the same thing, and based on that faulty logic, assumed the following (all of which are absolutely dead wrong):

That Vietnam is/was a Muslim Country
That the Viet Cong were part of Al Qaeda.
That Communism and Al Qaeda are Somehow Connected*
Therefore, the Vietnam War was part of the War on Terror
The Vietnam War was Still Happening

You can imagine what happened: their research didn't make any sense, and they interpreted it very incorrectly, because they were missing a key piece of context that all their research assumed they already knew. Their draft was, predictably, a disaster. Mercifully, we caught this all in peer review, but it meant a lot of wasted work for the student.

In fixing this, the student's politics also changed a little, because they'd based their opinions on a really weird misunderstanding of history.

*Fun History Sidenote: Al Qaeda is actually connected to the Cold War and Communism, but in a weird way: the groups that formed the terror organization have their roots as anti-Communist resistance groups, most famously in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of that country in the 80s.

Oops, You Didn't Read

This one is actually a story about P4, the last paper for this class, where you examine a visual rhetorical piece, like an ad or a painting or a poster. In this story, the student chose to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by the vintage tobacco ad below:

The student (thankfully) correctly identified the ad as being from the 1910s, but seems to have been thrown off the "where is this ad from?" trail by the name of the company: the British-American Tobacco Co. of Petersburg, VA. The student assumed, therefore, that this was an American ad, for American audiences and tobacco consumers. Apparently missing the context of the ad (and the sentence at the bottom of it), the student analyzed the ad from the following faulty assumptions:

That guy with the gun is American.
Those guys with the spears are Native American.
This ad plays on a real-life conflict between Americans and Native Americans that took place in the 1910s.

And this not-wrong assumption:

This ad, rather grossly, is using a racial/colonial conflict to sell Cancer Leaf.

Some of you have already figured out the problem: America doesn't have a Queen, nor does it contain a place called Insandlwhana. Rather tragically, the student did notice the Queen thing, but sort of assumed "all the past is the same" and that 1910 was somehow before 1776. The ad is actually set in South Africa, and plays upon South African historical events and British racist attitudes, but the student incorrectly identified the dark-skinned people in the ad as Native American. Big oof.

Another "rescued in peer review" story, but the student had to rewrite the whole paper in less than a day.

Fixing Context: Resources

As these examples show, working with something unfamiliar and missing bits of context can lead to terrible (and sometimes hilarious) results. A surprising amount of humiliation as an adult can be avoided by consulting Wikipedia.

No, that's not a joke. Doing research on things you like and talk about a lot on Wikipedia can really help you understand the following:

Does this thing have deeper roots/a longer history than I think?
Did I miss something when I jumped into this issue?
What do other people say about this issue, even if they're wrong?
Where does discussion of this topic happen?

It's sort of like googling yourself--checking the Wikipedia entry for things you like or care about can help situate your own experience in the collective experience of many others. The slightly more challenging way to do this is to do your own extensive research, reading several accounts of the long-term discussion around a topic. Wikipedia is faster, but has the drawback of not being your own work.

Social media platforms have begun doing something similar for hot-button issues, posting reminders to check "where this is coming from." Jumping into an issue to react, without proper knowledge of context, can create a situation where you're now committed to an opinion that, if you'd just checked beforehand, you probably wouldn't have. The fact that people are reluctant to change their opinions once they've publicly expressed them only makes this worse.

The two examples from the previous section also illustrate a special problem: both students assumed that their location or historical context is "normal" and that everything they find is from that same location/culture/moment, even when it's obviously not.

This is famously expressed as "everything that happened before I was born happened at the same time" or the more-obviously-dumb "America is the best country in America" (i.e. when somebody forgets the rest of the world also exists.)

Anyway, Wikipedia has another advantage as a self-education tool: because it's collectively edited, it tends to encapsulate a more diverse or representative experience than other kinds of free sources (though it's not perfect). Wikipedia's summary major 20th century events, for example, is actually less likely to forget a whole continent than your high school history textbook (which was written by a team of a few people and approved by a panel of non-expert parents).

Do you want to rely on Wikipedia 100% of the time? No. Can it save you from being dumb sometimes? Yes.

Exercise: Contextualize Your Normal

Activity: what do all these numbers have in common?

12021, 1442, 5781, 2021, +71

Think about it. Scroll down when you think you have it. Some of you might have seen a few of these numbers before. Scroll past the dog for the answers.

Done? All those numbers are the current year.

2021 you've probably guessed, is the Common Era year. While 2020 was clearly cursed, we probably can't blame the numbers: the Common Era is based on the older Christian calendar updated to reflect better timekeeping techniques. The CE year 0, weirdly enough, isn't actually special: it was supposed to be the year Jesus was born, but the math was messed up and it's probably between 4 and 12 years off-target. By the time anyone noticed, it was too late.

1442 is the current year in the Islamic Calendar, which (fairly accurately) counts the years since a specific historical event.

5781 is the current year in the Hebrew calendar.

+71 is the year in the radiocarbon dating calendar--all times for carbon dating (a method of dating old things) is expressed as a year "Before Present", but "Present" is defined as January 1, 1950--which is around the time after which carbon dating stops working because, basically, we tested too many nukes and messed up a bunch of carbon. Future archeologists won't be able to carbon date your bones because they're too radioactive*. Womp womp.

*Yet another way in which decisions from the 20th century are keeping you from getting a date. Heyoooo...I'll see myself out.

12021 is the Human Era or Holocene Epoch calendar. It measures the approximate amount of time since human beings first grew their own food on purpose (a.k.a. agriculture). It's a rough estimate based on archeological findings, and you'll notice it's just CE + 10,000 years. Scientists sometimes like to use this one since it's religiously neutral and just sounds epic. It's also long enough that we never have to use any negative or BC years for human events, since that's confusing.

But why are we talking about this? Simple: it's an easy example of a thought exercise that you should do constantly: Contextualizing Your Normal.

Contextualizing your normal is the practice of deliberately thinking about how your life, experience, and things you think of as "ordinary" are not the same for everybody. We talked about this during the ideology class a little, but it is imperative that you practice this exercise as adults who will have power, influence, and decisions to make.

The way things are for you, in your place, right now is not the way things always have been.
There is no such thing as neutrality: you always have a feeling, an opinion, a bias, or background knowledge (or lack thereof) that affects how you see things.
There is a reason you like or dislike the things you do, and those reasons are tied to your experience of life. Not everybody has the same life.
In communicating, a thought or idea obvious to you is not automatically obvious to your audience.

Why is 2021 a more "normal" way for us to write the year than 12021? No reason at all--it's just that you're used to saying 2021. That's fine, but it's better to know you're biased or making choices than to believe you're "normal" and "this is obvious."

The most dangerous choices, after all, are the ones you don't realize you make.

This is also a key reason why college professors are allowed to tell you their personal opinions but earlier-level teachers aren't supposed to. When teaching little kids, especially, we assume that children will internalize and imitate the teacher, and so expressing controversial opinions to children might mess them up for a long time. However, since both you and your professors are adults, a different caution is more important: presenting yourself as neutral and unbiased at all times is lying (and also a good way to accidentally assume you're 100% normal). This lying would rob students of the data they may need to identify different perspectives and critically evaluate if they want to accept them.

Think about it: if you asked someone what their favorite food was, and they said "I like all food equally," you'd know they were lying. Why would you believe anything they said (especially about food) after that?

Thus, you should always try to contextualize your ideas of "normal," and be honest about how your perspective about what's normal might be affecting your other opinions.

Wrap-Up: The Ethics of Context

What does this mean for ENGL110? Basically, it means research is important and also that situating yourself as a person in a society is important to good communication and good research. Providing adequate context is the sign of good research, since it says "hey audience, I want you to know the background so I can't lie to you about it in an argument."

People lie about context all the time--I bet you can think of a few examples. It's one of the most dangerous places to lie, since it changes what everything means "downhill" from that context.

Contextualizing your normal is a good habit in arguments, because even if your notion of "normal" is backed by objective reality (people are just wrong sometimes), contextualizing how you got that "normal" can help you understand where other people got confused or misled. This makes it easier to bring them back to reality.

Contextualizing your normal also keeps you from having too many cultural "blind spots" that can be awkward or uncomfortable when dealing with people from around the world. (Think about all the potentially-racist baggage packed up when someone says a person is "normal looking" or "eating normal food" for example. Yikes!)

That's why I like the Human Era calendar myself--it's a good reminder that humans have been doing stuff for a long time, in lots of different places and situations, and that what seems normal or obvious to me is probably weird in the big picture.

It's also a good reminder that even small events and decisions can have crazy long-term consequences. After all, approximately 12,021 years ago, some human put some seeds in the ground and told her friends "I bet that'll make food in a few months."

Her friends probably thought she was being weird.