Misunderstood?

If this blog is one thing, it is objective. While the guffawing quiets, let me say that religion, race, and objectivity are obvious to me as slippery topics. Inertia is less obvious, but as one who stayed at the Collegium Excellens for 32 years, I am an excellent example of inertia in action. Oxymoron? Active inertia? If this is (fair & balanced) stupidity, so be it.

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THE SHORT LIST: Misunderstood Concepts

We asked four scholars to discuss the most misunderstood concepts in their fields.

Religion

Kent Greenawalt, a professor of law at Columbia University School of Law and author of Does God Belong in Public Schools? (Princeton University Press, 2005):

The most misunderstood, and manipulated, concepts in discussion of the free-exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment are religion itself and teaching religion. One problem is that saying just what makes something religious is very hard. The best one can do is look for features that characterize major religions -- such as belief in a spiritual domain, a comprehensive view of the world and human purposes, ritual acts of worship, the use of sacred texts, and corporate aspects of religious practice -- and ask how closely debated instances resemble the undisputed religions.

Another problem with the legal concept of religion is how it should relate to nonlegal understanding. What counts as religious for constitutional purposes need not be exactly the same as what a philosopher, a theologian, or an anthropologist would consider religious. But a legal approach to religion should connect fairly closely to its ordinary meanings.

These genuine perplexities cannot explain, or excuse, blatant misuses of the concept of religion. Evolution is not religion, teaching it is not religion. The theory of evolution does conflict with some religious views, but it is based on scientific data. Science is an independent field of inquiry that does not even address most major questions that concern religions.

When other subjects, such as history and government, are treated without reference to religion, teachers are not propounding "the religion of secular humanism." Few American public-school teachers tell students that God does not exist, and that human beings are the measure of all things. (And, in any event, the ideas of secular humanism are not themselves a religion.) Religion is not everything about which people care deeply. One may contrast these various expansive notions of religion with ideas that are much too narrow -- for example, that religion in law should be limited to belief in a supreme being.

Developing a constitutional approach to the concept of religion is difficult, but we could think more clearly about that problem if people restrained themselves from putting forward whatever labels will serve the immediate practical consequences they seek.

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Inertia

John S. Rigden, an adjunct professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness (Harvard University Press, 2005):

Anumber of physics concepts are misunderstood by both students and the general public. The spooky "field" concept is an example: A field exists where there appears to be nothing. However, the concept of inertia is so contrary to our experiences and common sense that I would put it right up there at the top.

The concept of inertia equates what seem to be opposites: motionlessness and motion. Standing still and moving uniformly (with no acceleration) are physically equivalent. Since moving and standing still are equivalent, once an object is moving, it would, according to the dictates of inertia, have no reason to stop and would continue moving forever. However, our environment is replete with a variety of forces that conspire to bring moving objects to rest. Thus endless motion is foreign to our experience.

A ride on a roller coaster thrills our senses as the rider is subjected to a variety of stomach-wrenching accelerations. By contrast, our much faster ride on planet Earth, as it simultaneously orbits the Sun and spins on its axis, provides no thrill at all because this motion is almost acceleration-free, and thus we think we are at rest. Inertia underlies an understanding of motion and, since it violates common sense, is often the source of confusion.

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Race

Mica Pollock, an assistant professor of education in human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School (Princeton University Press, 2004):

I think that in education (a field made up of many intersecting disciplines -- mine is anthropology), race is the most misunderstood concept. More precisely, it's the fuzziest concept, the vaguest, the most broadly used, and the least openly wrestled with, though it is a concept that we in education must (and do) use daily.

The number of researchers who believe in biological differences between races is thankfully dwindling. We understand increasingly that race categories are social realities built upon biological fictions -- that race categories have been constructed and thus organize our daily experiences and life trajectories. But too few of us study how race categories are rebuilt daily in American life.

Particularly in education, we tend to treat racial identities as if they are fixed rather than in flux. We also often treat the racially inequitable opportunity system surrounding students as static, rather than as a living structure of opportunity-denial that Americans reproduce and allow on a daily basis. We also tend too often to treat race as a topic that we can simply go ask research subjects about and so get easy answers to our questions, when Americans actually struggle quite actively with both talking and not talking about race.

Many educational researchers are particularly concerned with racial patterns of achievement, but often oversimplify the concept of race. First, they often use race in research comparisons as a kind of simple difference, as if different "kinds" of kids have fundamentally different ways of talking and acting and thinking about school, and that if we can just compare each group's behaviors, we'll understand the "achievement gap."

Relatedly, too few of us examine racial achievement patterns as orders produced jointly by intertwined adult and young players both inside and outside of schools. Finally, in examining racial inequality, some of us treat race as if it can be neatly delinked from other variables, like class, when class itself is racially organized in the United States, and race involves class dynamics.

I think that openly struggling over such complexities of race analysis is essential for producing good research and helping children.

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Objectivity

Robert J. Norrell, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and author of The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (Oxford University Press, 2005):

The most misunderstood concept in history is objectivity. I entered the academic world in the aftermath of 1960s idealism with the faith that the truth would set me, and society, free. I thought, "Let's study the past, identify the wrongs done, and correct them" -- an idea that presumed confidence in both human authority in the world and our ability to objectively establish what was wrong in society.

Objectivity as an ideal for historians, however, soon lost favor. In the 1970s, historians began a quest to include those who had been left out of our typical narratives: blacks, women, the working class. Influenced by the countercultural influences of the 60s, those practicing this "new history" often dismissed old history as biased in favor of white, male elites in the West, and tended to celebrate those forgotten people without subjecting them to the same tough-minded criticism that they were applying to the old elites.

Postmodernist thought in the 80s continued to undermine historians' notions of objectivity, and for many younger historians, the pursuit of truth held about the same importance as looking for the Loch Ness monster. They presumed instead that all reality is constructed according to internal or group perspective, mainly by class, race, or gender. With reality so fractured by our limited perspectives, they felt, it is therefore impossible to determine an objective truth -- and is, in fact, misguided to even try.

The problem was that the academy's dismissal of objectivity set us against the larger public that likes to read history and think historically. The average nonacademic person believes that historical truth can be established, or at least approximated, and that the value of history is its ability to teach us actually what our experience has been. This divide between academic history and what the public understands about the past has resulted from the intellectuals' too-casual dismissal of the human capacity to seek truth, which has undermined our ability to shape understandings of the past outside the academy.

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education