Harry Potter and Children's Orphanages

There's a new Harry Potter book. Yesterday, in celebration of Harry's birthday, it was announced that The Tales of Beedle the Bard, complete with commentary by Aldus Dumbledore, will be sold to the general public, with proceeds benefiting J. K. Rowling's charity, Children's High Level Group.

This is a noteworthy event, not because of the publication of the book, but because it sheds light on the problem of institutionalized children in areas of Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, Moldova, the Czech Republic, Armenia, and Georgia. In those countries, child development services are lacking, and as those countries struggle economically, startling numbers of parents are finding it impossible to care for their children, particularly those with special needs.

The Children's High Level Group reports that 250,000 children, often from ethnic minorities, are abandoned every year by their parents across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Only 4 percent are actually "orphaned" in technical sense. Most are the victims of ethnic prejudice, economic hardship, or some significant disability that makes them impossible to care for, but they are victimized again once they enter the system.

"Many of these children have disabilities and handicaps, but often remain without any health or educational interventions," Children's High Level Group reports. "In some cases they do not receive basic services such as adequate food. Almost always they are without human or emotional contact and stimulation." They continue:

A recent study found that adults who had grown up in institutions were:

• 10 times more likely than the general population to be trafficked abroad for
  the purposes of sexual exploitation;
• 30 times more likely to become an alcoholic;
• 45 times more likely to be unemployed or in insecure employment;
• more than 100 times more likely to have a criminal record; and
• 500 times more likely to kill themselves

In many ways, the challenges that Rowling's charity are trying to address are the same types of concerns that the United States dealt with during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the problems of massive urbanization and industrialization left many children endangered. At first, civic institutions, particularly churches, were essential in providing the social safety net for children. In time, governmental agencies and non-profits began to take over those responsibilities.

Of course, the American system is far from perfect. But at least at the beginning, it had a moral and ethical framework that recognized the dignity of children and the importance of caring for their needs. The problem that Rowling's organization is attempting to address seems much more complex. Not only is it attempting to reform a system of child care that is horrific in its deprivations, but it is also trying to establish a basic sense of social obligation and acknowledgement of the needs of children in societies that have lost their moorings.

Newsflash: Music doesn't pay well

"The economy can be a cruel mistress, particularly, it seems, to performing artists," an unfortunate academic with a doctorate in musical arts lamented today in the Chronicle of Higher Education website's Career Forum. "I'm tired of fighting with academe and performing at poorly run auditions, but I'm also tired of running around in circles."

Really? I wondered. I never knew!

The real world, of course, can indeed be a cruel teacher, but our intrepid writer perseveres. First taking a job—gasp!—as a temp and then—double gasp!—as, of all things—Wait for it! Wait for it!—a public school music teacher.

I had always thought of music education at the K-12 level as dull and unchallenging, work fit for music majors who couldn't cut it in performance, theory, or musicology. However, faced with a tanking economy and three empty years on the academic-job circuit, I'm learning to swallow my pride and re-evaluate being a schoolteacher. It's still not my idea of a great job, but again, it pays.

The horror. But then again, if you're too good for the idiots in "academe"—the elitist sobriquet for what most people call "college"—and all those orchestras that can't put together an audition process that meets your exacting standards, then teaching music to young people (which, incidentally, is what you should have been interested in doing as an academic) would seem like the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno.

(In the interest of full disclosure: My grandmother is a former music teacher, some of my best friends are music teachers, and I once considered becoming a music teacher myself, so I find the author's sense of disgust and frustration to be more than a little galling.)

One of the greatest problems with academics lies in an exaggerated sense of their own importance, the philosopher king-like sense of entitlement that takes the sorts of career travails most people have to deal with—being under-employed, working with people who aren't as smart as you, doing stupid office work, and so on—and blows them into galactic crises.

Difficulty in finding meaningful work is par for the course for gifted people with interests that don't match the norm. The challenge is finding ways to make the journey to that destination meaningful as well, particularly because you may never get there.

My vote is for Schopenhauer

Beginning today and ending on August 5, the world's philosophers are converging on Seoul, South Korea, for the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophers, a gathering held every five years. Now, I'm used to hearing about philosophy conferences and symposia, where professional philosophers gather to share their latest work and learn from each other, but this is something different altogether, because a "congress" has governmental and legislative connotations.

And this, according to the World Congress of Philosophers website, is precisely what the event is about:

The first World Congress to be held in Asia, the Seoul Congress presents a clear invitation to rethink the nature, roles, and responsibilities of philosophy and of philosophers in the age of globalization. It is committed to paying heed to the problems, conflicts, inequalities, and injustices connected with the development of a planetary civilization that is at once multicultural and techno-scientific.

The topics are serious, and so is the intent. As Julian Baggini writes in the Guardian:

The official line seems to be that the world somehow needs philosophy if it is to deal with its great problems. In the first of four "congratulatory addresses," Han, the prime minister, said he thought it could help both environmental problems and the fight against terror. Lee Jang-moo, the president of Seoul National University, claimed it could teach us "the direction in which to steer the human destiny." Such hopes for philosophy are shared in high places: Koïchiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, told the congress, via video, about how Unesco was committed to fostering the teaching of philosophy around the world. He wasn't just being polite: Unesco even has a "philosophy strategy."

While we need, as Hannah Arendt aptly put it, "to think what we are doing" now more than ever, there is a sense of elitism here, a sense that philosophers, by their professional training, are entitled to speak and perhaps—as the name "congress" implies—even to rule. The philosopher king may be Plato's ideal, but it also suggests that ideas are somehow separate from the practice of daily life and from those not suitably "trained" to engage in complex thought.

But as anyone who studies rhetoric knows, ideas always have consequences, and people of all ages, educational levels, and IQs trade in ideas on a daily basis. To abstract intellectual life into the realm of the intelligensia both neglects this fact and, perhaps more important, keeps philosophers from learning about the fullness of the human experience—which, in the end, is ultimately what philosophy is about. Julian Baggini again:

If philosophy is indeed important, it is because it is not the preserve of philosophers. The professionalisation of the subject has disguised this once obvious fact. In the UK, for example, it is often thought philosophy is not an important part of the culture, but it's actually all over the place: in serious journalism, the work of thinktanks, and in ethics committees. It's just not usually called "philosophy." Indeed, if you want to be taken seriously, you'd be advised not to use the p-word at all. Oliver Letwin, for example, has a PhD in philosophy and has published a book on the subject, but he once told me in an interview that it would hinder, not help him, if more people knew this. (Sorry, Olly.)

So if we are to rethink philosophy, we should rethink first and foremost what it is and how it does and should inform wider debate. Those who have earned the title "philosopher" need to both accept that those who have not are equal participants in such a discussion, which also means being more willing to engage as equals in it.

Ode to Scrabulous

Apparently, the law has caught up to Scrabulous, the free, on-line version of Scrabble currently played by as many as 594,000 people every day on the social networking site Facebook and ranked number 15 on PC World's 100 Best Products of 2008.

Hasbro, who owns the copyright to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, filed a lawsuit against the creators of the game, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, on July 24. This morning, American and Canadian visitors to Facebook expecting to play (yours truly included) found that their access had been blocked.

The story began in January of this year, when Hasbro approached Facebook and asked them to remove the application from the site. That strategy failed, since Scrabulous was neither developed nor owned by Facebook but merely placed there by the Agarwalla brothers like thousands of other applications posted to the site.

Scrabulous, like the millions of other applications floating around on the web, as something of an experiment. The only difference was its massive popularity. Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, remarked in January that the Agarwallas were making something like $25,000 a month off of advertising revenues, and this success, while a pittance in comparison to the value of Facebook itself, was enough to spark the attention and the ire of Hasbro. "The early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing," wrote Cellan-Jones.

But the Scrabulous-Scrabble fight is more than a David-vs. Goliath story. It's about old media and new media technologies, and the ability of companies with popular traditional brands to maintain or even extend those brands in new media. In a way, the Hasbro lawsuit misses an opportunity to find new fans, create new markets, and sell more products. Hasbro shouldn't be suing Scrabulous. It should be buying it.

Reading in the age of the Internet

Yesterday, the New York Times published a feature article on the changing reading patterns of the younger generation.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

The issue isn't that young people aren't reading, but that they're reading in different ways.

Reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Whatever side one takes on the relationship between literacy and the Internet—and there is significant debate as to whether these young people are even "literate" at all—the changes that the Internet has brought to reading habits are here to stay, and they reflect more fundamental changes in what constitutes a "text."

In a world defined—some would say "disciplined"—by the technology of the printing press, the eye is taught to follow a line of printed words, one after the other, from beginning to end. But the Internet creates a new type of textuality defined by what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the rhizome. In botany, a "rhizome" is a root plant that creates dense networks of shoots and nodes. Unlike a tree, whose root structure is much more centralized and hierarchical, rhizomes are dynamic and decentralized. Instead of fulfilling a prearranged "plan," they "happen."

Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1980 collaboration A Thousand Plateaus applied the rhizome to reading. Breaking with "arborescent" reading patterns, they used the metaphor to view texts not as linear arguments that need to be grounded and followed methodically from beginning to end but as dynamic entities that can be entered, understood, broken apart, and repackaged in a multitude of ways. In what would have been a radical move for the time, they remarked that their book wasn't intended to be read straight-through, and they invited readers to pick and choose what they wanted to read and discard the parts they didn't find useful.

Though they may not have known it at the time, Deleuze and Guattari were describing the cultural and intellectual condition of the Internet age, in which knowledge isn't created by a single author and centrally disseminated but is a common project built by many hands.

Of course, this transition is both a blessing and a curse. While the new intellectual culture of reading and textual engagement is dynamic and playful, it also runs the risk of losing track of its grounding. Part of the joy of traditional reading lies in the ways in which it forces readers to go through parts that are at first glance "unnecessary" or "boring" but contribute to the understanding of the whole. Deleuze and Guattari, grounded in the tradition of Western philosophy and metaphysics, may have found the rhizome a welcome release, but for a younger generation who may never sit down and read the ideas that they bounce back and forth on-line, the freedom of the rhizome may be experienced as a sort of intellectual chaos.