Cindy --

I have no poly-sci theory under my belt, and I took Philosophy 101 in the Fall of '85 (and mostly paid attention to cute!boy), so most of me is pretty convinced I'm over my head already, Strega.

Oh, gosh, I'm not speaking from any great font of knowledge. Especially about poli-sci. It's entirely possible I'm talking nonsense that sounded convincing to me at 2 AM. Wouldn't be the first time.

Doesn't pluralism presuppose relativism? Also, I am unconvinced that pluralism is the opposite of absolutism.

I think they're on different levels. Pluralism and absolutism are both about how we should receive and evaluate new ideas. Absolutism says that everything should be judged against the One True Idea, and if there's a contradiction, the new idea is heresy. We do still evaluate ideas in a pluralistic society -- new ideas are incorporated into old ones, or thrown out, or the old idea is replaced. Pluralism doesn't mean "all ideas are equally good," it means "all ideas deserve an equal hearing."

Relativism isn't really opposed to either of those things; it's questioning the basis of evaluation, and says that we can't judge because it's all subjective. We're in a pluralistic society where relativism has been a fairly successful idea. And in some academic circles, it has reached authoritarian status -- saying "I think Shakespeare is inherently better than Toni Morrison" can cause a pretty huge backlash.

How would you have categorized those two statements by Solomon? To you, do they seem odd, proposed side by side?

They made sense to me, though I agree he was being a little too pithy to make his point very well. I think the argument was that books are pluralistic; they allow people to share new ideas and points of view very easily. Relativism isn't all bad, but taken to extremes, it demeans any statement about why one thing is better than another. So that has a bad effect on pluralism, if we can't judge ideas (or books) and say some are better than others. And that in turn makes it hard to counter authoritarian arguments; if all points of view are equally valid, who are we to say theirs is wrong?

Thank you.

So relativism doesn't mean "you can't judge things without a common standard", it means "there is no standard, and can't be one"? Didn't know that.

I always figured it meant "Well, it depends on where you're standing," but that's mostly from physics.

Me, too, ita.

I think that a lot of the problems that arise from the use of post-structuralism and relativism come from the fact that while both are very useful intellectual tools, the vast majority of the people who use them in public really aren't qualified to do so, and are in fact using the mental equivalents of a very complex surgical machine (read: post-structuralism) and a set of finely machined calipers (relativism) as essentially a pair of hammers to beat their daft ideas into students' heads.

And, to leap back a bit more in the conversation, I think one of the major reasons why reading is on such a steep decline in Amurikah is because of the way it's presented in school. Outside of the tireless efforts of a few heroic individuals, most of the teachers I had presented reading as a chore, something to be done because they were required to assign books to us, rather than as something to be done for the joy of it. My best teachers approached reading assignments as an opportunity to introduce us to neat things that would also teach us what we needed to know, but they were few and far between. Fortunately, I was raised in a bookish household, and came to reading outside the scholastic environment. That's where I caught the bug, not in class.

most of the teachers I had presented reading as a chore, something to be done because they were required to assign books to us, rather than as something to be done for the joy of it.

Oh, God, YES. I can't tell you how many reading contests my kids' schools have had, where you read so many books and get a prize, so many more books and get a bigger prize....

Reading IS the prize. Paying somebody to read tells them it's something that they wouldn't want to do otherwise.

So relativism doesn't mean "you can't judge things without a common standard", it means "there is no standard, and can't be one"?

Again, taken to extremes. It's useful to question what the standards are and examine them for bias. It just gets taken to an absurd level at times.

Reading IS the prize. Paying somebody to read tells them it's something that they wouldn't want to do otherwise.

While I get this (and regarded reading competitions as easy loot), isn't it key to get them reading? I mean, how can you convince a kid reading's fun if they don't read?

Kids get rewarded for a bunch of stuff. I probably would have gotten scorned or punished for not reading, so that was my external motivation. Just turns our I didn't much need it.

The library where I grew up had a reading fundraiser every summer. All the kids would get people to pledge a certain amount per book read, and then we'd keep track of what we read all summer. There were prizes at the end of the summer for the kid in each age range who read the most books, and the kid who raised the most money, which went into the fund for building an addition onto the library. For really little kids, books that were read to them counted. (My parents usually warned people not to pledge more than about 25 cents per book for me, because I could easily read close to 100 books in a summer.)

I never really thought of it as rewards for reading before. It was always framed as raising money for the library. There would be a theme each year, like it was dinosaurs one year, and each kid would put his or her name on something related, like a picture of a dinosaur pawprint, and they they'd move along the wall toward the "dinosaur cave" set up in one corner of the children's section as you read more books. Then they'd have a special section set up with all the kid-level books about dinosaurs.

The thing that I did see as "rewards for reading" and didn't really like the tone of was the Book-It program, which we had around fifth grade. That was "read a certain number of books in a month, and get a sticker on your Book-It button." Then with those stickers, you could go to Pizza Hut and get a free personal pan pizza. Since nobody in my family liked Pizza Hut, I never got the pizza, but it just seemed silly to have that set number of books to read to get stuff, especially when that stuff was stuff that your parents would have to drive you and buy other stuff for you to get. (And the number was something like 5.)

I very much remember where I got my reading love from. First, my parents were huge with acknowledging the slightest smat thing I did. As soon as I learned to add 2+2 my parents were showing me that it wasn't much harder to add 2222+2222 and so on. As soon as I could read cat, I was taught any word that began or had cat in it. And every time I figured the stuff out on my own my parents would show me off. It was generally the only attention I got, so I learned as much as I could as quickly as I could to have more stuff to show off.

Mom also read to me constantly. My first book I remember was Charlotte's Web, in bed every night with mom. I still read like that. At least a chapter when I read. I'm sure there were books like Goodnight moon and Little Bear, but those were read on my own. I also used to take my mother's books and tell my parents to sit down so I could read to them. I couldn't actually read her books, or at least I couldn't follow them, but my parents sat there while I read a Harlequin romance and pretended it was a story about dinosaurs and kings.