History Rounds Off Skeletons to Zero

Interdisciplinary teaching isn't supposed to make you feel better

The online meme holds that all jobs can be sorted into “emails” or “spreadsheets”. The joke is accurate only up to a point (plumbers, firefighters, and nurses might object, after all), but given the meme’s origins in the discourse created by the keyboard class it nevertheless packs a punch among its intended audience: do you use the computer to communicate with people or to communicate with data?

As a teacher, my job is mostly emails. (Lecturing is an afterthought!) As a researcher, my job is mostly spreadsheets. In both guises, my job is mostly about abstractions. Even in my lecture courses, where there’s real, embodied humans in my class, I don’t grade: I set the parameters by which other people (or machines) grade and watch over statistical distributions to ensure the grading is consistent. Moreover, as an instructor in the social sciences, a good deal of what I teach concerns theory. Thus, even when I’m interacting with real people, I’m dealing with abstractions.

Emails or spreadsheets: which way, modern man?

Between emails, I try to convey those concepts to students through a variety of means. I have a private, perhaps quixotic, dedication to the notion that we should be interdisciplinary even when we’re in disciplined courses. That might come from my deep conviction that political science is really itself just a specialized branch of sociology that shares close borders with other sociological sciences, like economics.

To be sure, this dedication may also come from my belief that those of us who don’t fit into the reductive rubric of STEM need to consciously band together against STEMdinistas. There is, as they say, a war on for your mind, and we need to fight the barbarous tendencies that threaten every discipline that isn’t coding. (Marymount University’s move to abolish just about all the interesting ways of thinking about people and society is backed by a college president who is an electrical engineer and a provost who’s a computer scientist—and although far from all people in those disciplines would support such moves, rather a lot of them seem to silently acquiesce in such tendencies depressingly frequently.)

One manifestation of that tendency comes in my Introduction to International Relations course (or “World Politics”, as it appears in the UMass course catalog). I teach a lot of the hits, as one does in an intro course—not the paradigms, of course, but real tools that students can use to think with in my course and beyond. I do, however, try to introduce students to ways of thinking about topics beyond using just social-scientific texts; one of my goals is that they learn to recognize how our subjects can be presented in other genres.

And so it is that in one day we encounter both Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes, El Memorioso” (Funes, the Memorious) and Wisława Szymborska’s “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”. (Note, dear reader, that these are both works of world literature, a subtle underscoring of the breadth of the course’s ambit.)

The Borges tale, a story of a man with a memory so perfect that he cannot understand patterns in the world, is a parable (although one that presaged scientific truths) about the necessity of abstraction and theory. It serves a useful, even overly didactic, purpose for a day about why we use theories in international relations and political science. As a working political scientist, theories are the water in which I swim, but years of experience have reminded me that students need to be introduced to the idea of a productive reduction in specificity—that you can use simple ideas to motivate larger arguments about the world, for instance, or that you can boil down complex realities into simpler representations. Theories form a large part of the class, and we have to prepare the students for thinking with them, and Funes shows a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the naïve observationalist views that I’m trying to combat.

The Syzmborska, on the other hand …

If I recall correctly (for I am not Funes), I first encountered this poem in a poetry workshop in college, one of those distribution courses that changed how I approach my work and my continuing inspiration for how I teach my distribution courses. It is not so much that I became a poet as that I encountered different ways of working with words—both of creating with them and of using them to create in readers different impressions.

I do not recall that it made a stark impression on me at the time. I do remember that it is one of a half-dozen poems or so from the course that have stuck with me—including, among others, some bits of Cavafy and Browning. It is the first section that is most affecting for me:

Write it down.  Write it.  With ordinary ink

on ordinary paper; they weren't given food,

they all died of hunger.  All.  How many?

It's a large meadow.  How much grass

per head?  Write down:  I don't know.

History rounds off skeletons to zero.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand.

That one seems never to have existed:

a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,

a primer opened for no one,

air that laughs, cries, and grows,

stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,

no one's spot in the ranks.

I have read this poem perhaps fifty times. I have thought about it a lot. I am not a sophisticated reader, and I do not always know why what I read affects me as it does. In this case, though, the effect of the poem grows with each reading, not least because Szymborska is indicting me and my ilk. It is not, or not only, History who rounds off skeletons to zero—it is all of us who talk about the past, who think of the Holocaust (for instance) as affecting millions of people—a statistic that conceals the scale of the loss. What, then, of those of us who think about politics, at least some of the time, with not only the proper nouns removed but even the notion of personhood—the notion of individual people at all?

I try to use this to invite students to see themselves in the void, to imagine themselves erased by some future scholar or journalist. (The appendix to The Handmaid’s Tale, which is in many ways the key to the whole novel, serves as my touchstone for what such a scene could look like.) I am not sure it works for them. But I will not ask. I won’t ask, in part, because each time I try to read this passage aloud in class—the only way to ensure that everyone will “do” the reading, even a reading this short—I cannot finish; my heart sticks in my throat; I cannot get to the end without gasping. It is one thing to know that someone has filed a true bill of indictment against you; it is another thing to be called upon to read it at your sentencing. Politics is not, in the end, emails or spreadsheets—it is a set of human efforts that aspire to honor each individual and will always fall short, or worse.

And this is the thing about interdisciplinarity. The concept sometimes gets used—and practiced—as if it were a simple process that reliably generates a whole that’s more than the parts, like adding chocolate to peanut butter. It is not, and should not, be comfortable or easy. It is, and should be, a process of constantly having the foundational assumptions—and, more important, the familiar, forgiven informalities—of one’s field held up from a new perspective. The best work from any other field will always make the workaday product of your own (which is the best we journeymen can do) look shabby, if not negligent. One can cover up those flaws, or one can confront them. And if one is going to confront them, one might as well do so in a teachable moment.