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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: June 28, 2004
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Latest Update: June 28, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Janus Standard

I am firm, thou art obstinate, he is pig-headed. Merton, moral alchemy.

The Janus standard, whose name I just made up, so don't go searching madly for it, is two-faced. Hence, the name Janus, after "the Roman god of gates and doors (ianua), beginnings and endings, and hence represented with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions." In Images of Color, Images of Crime, there is one piece that contrasts the use of "the noble savage" and "the wild savage," and our habit of portraying Native Peoples according to our instrumental designs. So if we want to dishonor treaties, the "savage" is wild and barbaric and dangerous to civilized peoples; and if we want to search for gold and ways across the land, the "savage" is noble, simple, generous of heart. Janus.

Jason Blair and President Bush and Us speaks of an Environmental Protection Agency report that withheld information:

EPA Ditches Climate Change in Report

"An internal Environmental Protection Agency memo shows how the White House insisted on altering the global climate change section of a soon to be released EPA report. Instead of making the White House's changes, the EPA decided to delete the climate change section altogether to avoid publishing information that is not scientifically credible. " 'The administration must be held to account for its stewardship of the environment,' said Mark Van Putten, president of the National Wildlife Federation. 'This document provides disturbing evidence of the administration's readiness to reject or spin scientific findings on crucial environmental issues that do not suit the White House's political agenda.' "

From National Widelife Federation's Site. Newsflash. But from June, 2003.

Here we see the Janus standard in operation. The crime is not important when the administration chooses to ignore information and makes up its own version of reality. But when a young black male engages in the same ruse, the whole nation gpes flibbertigibbity. that doesn't mean that the ruse and the misinterpretation of data are OK. It just means that who you are reacts interdependently with what you have done in the judgment of sin and falsity.

When I did my graduate research in the L.A. City Schools, I had a parent from the Hollywood Hills rant at me that his son had never known prejudice of any kind until L.A. City bussed black children from the inner city into his school. The child had had black friends all his life, but now was exposed to black children who allegedly stole expensive gadgets and money, and his son was learning prejudice. His son wasn't sophisticated enough at his young age to understand that what he was seeing was intersectional discrimination, meaning that the children who had in fact engaged in these alleged minor thefts were POOR and black. The son was drawing a spurious conclusion that blacks stole, probably even when some of the items had been misplaced. Even the father was in no mood to hear a reasoned argument about spurious conclusions at that point. And neither was the school principal, who saw nothing wrong with explaining to a poor child that it was wrong to steal because private property had to be protected from such wrongdoing so that we could all be secure in our property and safety. Yeah, right. A kid from the inner city, who is bussed into a school in a wealthy area, is supposed to resist the temptation of the early 70's equivlent to cell phones and $5 bills tossed carelessly about by the indigenous students at the school. No one ever thought that maybe the poor kids were intimidated by the trappings of wealth in the hands of young children like themselves, so no one ever took the time to explain a little of human history to them about the interdependence of agency and social structure. And no one thought that maybe the problem could have been handled more creatively by altering the social structure.

By the way, the results of my research showed that black kids who had been bussed out of poor largely black neighborhoods into largely white neighborhoods were more inclined to show deference to whites than were kids who had not been bussed out of their home neighborhoods. The findings supported irwin Katz' studies with black and white college males. (Jensen, White, and Katz. Social Class, Race and Psychological Development ) This was the book that Jensen wrote with White and Katz and published just before his article came out in the Harvard Educational Review on "Compensatory Education Has Been Tried and Failed."

And in those days we were told that our working class colleges suffered from grade inflation, and colleges tried to prove they were "as good as" Harvard. Turkey Tech received major complaints from its local community for giving too many A's. Now the title at Carnegie Perspectives on Advancement of Teaching is Grade Inflation: It's Not Just an Issue for the Ivy League By John Merrow. I guess that was the epoch change when grade inflation moved from Turkey Tech to the Ivy League. Hal Foster, help. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, The MIT Press, 1996:

"I believe modernism and postmodernism are constituted in an analagous way, in deferred action, as a continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts." (Ibid., at p. 207.)

And I think a similar pattern might apply to issues like grade inflation that in one period are attributed to Others who are being included for the first time without adequate recognition of the structural imperfections already operating on the whole process, only to become in the postmodern epoxh attributed to the Elite who seem to have caught the imperfections from the Others.In the anticipation of the future and reconstruction of the past, there are entire variables we just don't recognize, structural and interpersonal. Where I have been fending off grading as certification for years, now Carnegie calls it "deep learning," and it's suddenly what only some of the elites have accomplished. Posh. Most of the issues we talk to death today are more like Hal Foster's description of modernism and postmodernism, in a continuous process of social construction involving the interdependence of agency and structure.

And most of them are illusionary because a problem that is very clear when you talk about an individual, like Jason Blair, is not at all clear when the White House censors and reinterprets data. The White House is no longer an individual. It's a complex of individuals, all of whom have agency, and all of whom are caught up in various structures with various agendas.

An example that is stuck forever in my mind is the university professor, crying when a student has been discovered to make a false claim on a professional school application" "How could he do this to me?" He didn't do it to you. He tried to cope with the system. Ineffectively, perhaps stupidly, but no more stupidly than kids overdosing on drugs to obliterate the feelings of stress. The system has to stop dishonesty. But the system doesn't permit answerability. It is not human. The kid is human.

The cost of war cannot be understood as we cry over each fallen soldier. Which is one reason we haven't seen much media coverage of coffins coming home. That cost is real. But so are macro costs. Sometimes we have to fight wars because the continuing cost of not fighting them may be greater than the cost of fighting. But those issues are complex. We cannot move freely between interrelational issues into structural issues. Whether the war is seen as just has more to do with issues of nation-states, ethnic groups and differences, religious beliefs, issues of social justice and equality, and long term ecosystem survival than it does with the individual tragedies of lives lost.

This is like the mourning issue of Ray Charles and former President Reagan. Both deaths are tragic. Their respective postions on race relatins doesn't lessen the interpersonal tragedy and mourning. Those are intellectual leaps we should remind ourselves not to make.

I'm very tired right now. Please feel free to comment. jeanne