TITLE: A Few Thoughts on How Criticism Affects People
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 21, 2024 8:28 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
The same idea popped up in three settings this week: a conversation
with a colleague about student assessments, a book I am reading
about women writers, and a blog post I read on the exercise bike
one morning.
The blog post
is by Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings from a few months ago,
about an occasional topic of this blog: being less wrong each day
[ for example,
1
and
2
]. This sentence hit close enough to home that I saved it for
later.
We struggle to tolerate censure, even the censure of idiots. Our
social instrument is strung so tight, the least disturbance leaves
us resonating for days.
Perhaps this struck a chord because I'm currently reading A
Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf. In one early chapter,
Woolf considers the many reasons that few women wrote poetry,
fiction, or even non-fiction before the 19th century. One is that
they had so little time and energy free to do so. Another is that
they didn't have space to work alone, a room of one's own.
But even women who had those things had to face a third obstacle:
criticism from men and women alike that women couldn't, or shouldn't,
write.
Why not shrug off the criticism and soldier on? Woolf discusses
just how hard that is for anyone to do. Even many of our greatest
writers, including Tennyson and Keats, obsessed over every unkind
word said about them or their work. Woolf concludes:
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond
reason the opinions of others.
Orlin's post, titled Err, and err, and err again; but less, and
less, and less, makes an analogy between the advance of
scientific knowledge and an infinite series in mathematics. Any
finite sum in the series is "wrong", but if we add one more term,
it is less wrong than the previous sum. Every new term takes us
closer to the perfect answer.
Source:
Wikipedia,
public domain
He then goes on to wonder whether the same is, or could be, true
of our moral development. His inspiration is American psychologist
and philosopher William James. I have mentioned James as an
inspiration myself a few times in this blog, most explicitly in
Pragmatism and the Scientific Spirit,
where I quote him as saying that consciousness is "not a thing or
a place, but a process".
Orlin connects his passage on how humans receive criticism to
James's personal practice of trying to listen only to the judgment
of ever more noble critics, even if we have to imagine them into
being:
"All progress in the social Self," James says, "is the substitution
of higher tribunals for lower."
If we hold ourselves to a higher, more noble standard, we can grow.
When we reach the next plateau, we look for the next higher standard
to shoot for. This is an optimistic strategy for living life: we
are always imperfect, but we aspire to grow in knowledge and moral
development by becoming a little less wrong each step of the way.
To do so, we try to focus our attention on the opinions of those
whose standard draws us higher.
Reading James almost always leaves my spirit lighter. After Orlin's
post, I feel a need to read The Principles of Psychology
in full.
These two threads on how people respond to criticism came together
when I chatted with a colleague this week about criticism from
students. Each semester, we receive student assessments of our
courses, which include multiple-choice ratings as well as written
comments. The numbers can be a jolt, but their effect is nothing
like that of the written comments. Invariably, at least one student
writes a negative response, often an unkind or ungenerous one.
I told my colleague that this is recurring theme for almost every
faculty member I have known: Twenty-nine students can say "this
was a good course, and I really like the professor", but when one
student writes something negative... that is the only comment we
can think about.
The one bitter student in your assessments is probably not the ever
more noble critic that James encourages you to focus on. But, yeah.
Professors, like all people, are strung pretty tight when it comes
to censure.
Fortunately, talking to others about the experience seems to help.
And it may also remind us to be aware of how students respond to
the things we say and do.
Anyway, I recommend both the Orlin blog post and Woolf's A Room
of One's Own. The former is a quick read. The latter is a
bit longer but a smooth read. Woolf writes well, and once my mind
got on the book's wavelength, I found myself engaged deeply in her
argument.
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