Only a fifth of UK universities say they are 'decolonising' curriculum

[downer]

Only a fifth of UK universities have committed to reforming their curriculum to confront the harmful legacy of colonialism, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/only-fifth-of-uk-universities-have-said-they-will-decolonise-curriculum

It's a click bait headline since 84 of 128 universities "said they are committed to making their curricula more diverse, international or inclusive." But still, while statues are being toppled, and drastic cuts are being made to higher ed, it does raise the question of what will be supported.

It isn't clear to me what 'decolonising' curriculum means: for example, do we no longer include Plato and Aristotle, who were both for slavery and colonization? Or do we include them but portray them as thoroughly evil? Or do what I do when I discuss them, which is to put them in historical context, highlight the problems with their arguments but also point out their achievements and historical importance?

I've always been pretty critical of the idea of "the canon" and all that stuff, and so I'm very much in favor of revision of the tradition. I am a bit worried about universities making dumbass policy decisions in their attempt to assure social media that they are making a full penance for their former sins.

[Parasaurolophus]

It isn't clear to me what 'decolonising' curriculum means: for example, do we no longer include Plato and Aristotle, who were both for slavery and colonization? Or do we include them but portray them as thoroughly evil? Or do what I do when I discuss them, which is to put them in historical context, highlight the problems with their arguments but also point out their achievements and historical importance?

It means different things in different contexts, but generally, no, it doesn't mean the end of Plato and Aristotle.

What it means where syllabi are concerned is taking time to take stock of the views represented on your syllabus, and asking yourself whether your "greatest hits" model isn't actually leaving out some hits which are just as worth investigating as the canonical ones. So, for instance, you can contrast Aristotelian virtue ethics with Aztec virtue ethics, which emphasizes improving the character of society rather than individual character. Or, indeed, the virtue-theoretical traditions that came out of China and India. Or you could show students how the ethics of care grows out of virtue ethics and tries to do its own, separate thing.

It could mean maybe using the translation of Metaphysics M and N by Julia Annas or of the Nichomachean Ethics by Sarah Broadie, rather than the old standards by W.D. Ross; or thinking about assigning articles on those subjects in addition to the originals, and trying to ensure that women are adequately represented there (since, after all, there are lots of excellent female scholars specializing in ancient philosophy).

It could mean having a think about your bog-standard intro ethics course and working to ensure that its meta-ethical framework goes beyond the standard consequentialism vs. deontology duopoly, and represents a wide range of meta-ethical positions. It might mean taking the time to educate yourself, as well as your students, about Indigenous rights and land claims, and taking the time to cover some of these disputes alongside your more standard readings on justice and sustainability.

And yeah, I do think it means being frank about Aristotle's misogyny, Locke's deep-seated interest in slavery, Kant's abject racism, and that Socrates was a real prick who (1) nobody really liked, and (2) actively participated in genocide (to say nothing of participating in the widespread grooming and sexual abuse of children). We can contextualize these things, and show how these behaviours are products of their time, and caution against rushing to judgement purely from a contemporary lens. But we should be upfront about it all.

The idea is not to include these new voices tokenistically, but rather to rethink the way we deliver our courses and their content, so that we can put these voices into productive conversations with the old voices. A course on the pre-Socratics should be about the pre-Socratics (there are real constraints on what you can do there), but it doesn't only have to be about Xeno and Parmenides, or locked 2500 years in the past. But a general introduction to philosophy, for example, doesn't need to follow the standard free-will-mind-God-maybe-some-ethics model, either. Own the content. It's more fun when you do, anyway.

[downer]

I'd say that most departments already do most of that, or at least have a substantial number of faculty who do that. Why didn't most of the UK universities reply "yes, we are commited to decolonising"?

There is the question of what it means for a university to commit to an anti-racist approach. Does it include telling faculty how to teach their courses? Encourage them to rethink? What form does that encouragement take? Do the retrograde members of the dept who refuse to update or reform their courses have courses taken away from them?

Regarding translations of classic works, it tends to cost students quite a lot of get the new versions, and most prefer to get access to the old free translations you can find at the Internet Classic Archive (including that by WD Ross). So there's a decision to be made: cater to the economic problems of many students, or require them to buy a better translation (Broadie's translation of the Nichomachean Ethics is close to $50 new). Or I could illegally make a PDF of Broadie and put it on the LMS, but that would deprive a scholar of revenue they deserve for students using their work.

[hazeus]

Decolonize is one of those buzzword terms that gets thrown around a lot but is not very clearly defined. In my experience the colloquial usage often means something like the inclusion of figures historically marginalized from the canon or including readings on anti-capitalism, indigenous studies, postcolonialism, feminist & queer theory, etc.

The more radical orientation is epistemological: "arguing that reform should involve challenging and remaking the current pedagogy, which was rooted in imperial and colonial ideas about knowledge and learning" (from the article).

This is one of those things that sounds great but again is unclear in meaning. The work of postcolonial theorists that explores the geopolitics of knowledge (like Walter Mignolo and Annibal Quijano) is a great place to start. In my experience in classroom/educational settings however, this line of thinking often manifests instead in really bizarre forms of anti-intellectualism. Aspirations towards objectivity and empirical analysis is seen as rationalist, western, or patriarchal and challenging other's "lived experience" or subjectivity is seen as form of violence. On the one hand I get it because it is a response to the very long history of the hard and social sciences being used in abhorrent political projects, or intellectual darkweb/manosphere types, but shit can still get whacky real quick.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'd say that most departments already do most of that, or at least have a substantial number of faculty who do that. Why didn't most of the UK universities reply "yes, we are commited to decolonising"?

Shrug. Perhaps that marks the difference between "decolonizing the curriculum", which encompasses a broad set of proposals and strategies, and "confronting the harmful legacy of colonialism", which is much, much narrower (and seems to be what 1/5 of universities reported actively trying to do). Or, indeed, maybe it reflects disagreement or uncertainty about the scope of each. Not everyone who understands that dihydrogen monoxide is a colourless, odourless, tasteless compound made of two hydrogen and one oxygen atom realizes that it's more commonly known as 'water'.

There is the question of what it means for a university to commit to an anti-racist approach. Does it include telling faculty how to teach their courses? Encourage them to rethink? What form does that encouragement take? Do the retrograde members of the dept who refuse to update or reform their courses have courses taken away from them?

I would think it involves many very different things. Some of it certainly involves encouraging faculty to revise their curricula; I'd also imagine that it would mean taking serious steps to ensure that the university's investment portfolio does not help to prop up racist institutions like prisons. And presumably the form it takes is mostly carrots and few sticks; and one of the few sticks is that proposals for new courses should demonstrate this kind of commitment and diversity, to the extent possible, if they're to pass the curriculum committee's review/the faculty Senate. (That's how it works here, by the way. There are plenty of people who grumble about having to answer the question "where's the Indigenous content?" for every new course, but I think they're wrong. It's not a very onerous requirement, and the Senate is fully aware that it's a question that's largely inapplicable in many domains; what they want to see is that you've given it some thought, rather than merely excluded it by default. And, incidentally, the 'content' could include guest speakers, field trips, work-integrated learning, etc. So there's a wide range of things you can do.)

Regarding translations of classic works, it tends to cost students quite a lot of get the new versions, and most prefer to get access to the old free translations you can find at the Internet Classic Archive (including that by WD Ross). So there's a decision to be made: cater to the economic problems of many students, or require them to buy a better translation (Broadie's translation of the Nichomachean Ethics is close to $50 new). Or I could illegally make a PDF of Broadie and put it on the LMS, but that would deprive a scholar of revenue they deserve for students using their work.

Yup, that's a tradeoff you have to think about. The Broadie is widely considered a superior translation, so that's a mark in its favour, at least. But it's only one thing you can do, specific to a course in ancient philosophy. There's tons more you can do. My colleagues all use textbooks, which I think is (1) boring, (2) inflexible, (3) a waste of money. I just assign articles, which I post to the LMS. And that allows me to introduce students to a much wider range of people and their views than my colleagues. But they do other things which I don't (yet), like bring in guest speakers.

[Myword]

Make no changes, at all. Nothing wrong with the way it is taught now. I am from the older generation before all this BS political correctness diversity began. Nothing wrong with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Locke, etc. except for their philosophical mistakes in texts. Stop the broad faulty generalizations.

I don't think we should ever, never judge historical figures from centuries ago by today's liberal new standards. Would you want to be judged by the morality in the year 2500? It's ridiculous. Colonialism accomplished a great deal of good, including America.( and it had some evil.) It is all new propaganda against white men (because they are not nice to women, so what?).  Many well known names were anti-Semitic, but  Jews are not arguing and whining about them. 
You are then replacing the bias of the canon with a new bias that is more prejudiced.

[downer]

Make no changes, at all. Nothing wrong with the way it is taught now. I am from the older generation before all this BS political correctness diversity began. Nothing wrong with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Locke, etc. except for their philosophical mistakes in texts. Stop the broad faulty generalizations.

I don't think we should ever, never judge historical figures from centuries ago by today's liberal new standards. Would you want to be judged by the morality in the year 2500? It's ridiculous. Colonialism accomplished a great deal of good, including America.( and it had some evil.) It is all new propaganda against white men (because they are not nice to women, so what?).  Many well known names were anti-Semitic, but  Jews are not arguing and whining about them. 
You are then replacing the bias of the canon with a new bias that is more prejudiced.

Maybe you haven't heard about the debates about Heidegger and Paul de Man. Or Nietzsche.

We can definitely admit that these figures were historically important and we go on teaching them. But the common way of teaching them was very often "these are the great thinkers of our civilization and they need to be taken seriously and respected."

I think we should often take their philosophical ideas as seriously as we take their science. We don't promote claims that the earth is the center of the universe anymore or insist that students need to learn this tradition. It is worth including though if we want to understand the ancient worldview and their efforts at theorizing.

Have any schools actually made institutiional decisions to decononize their courses?

[marshwiggle]

First of all, I'm astronomically glad to be in STEM, where it doesn't matter who came up with something, just whether what they came up with fits reality. (And if somebody else comes up with something that fits reality better, it will replace the earlier thing.)

Has anyone interested in "decoloinising" curriculum taken the approach of just talking about ideas without reference to where they came from? In other words, if ideas are discussed which have come from different countries and time periods, why not present them without specifying the geographical or ethnic context? (If some ideas are built specifically on earlier ones, then some chronological order may need to be preserved.)  But that would avoid getting into an entire slagging match of who-said-what, and rather would allow ideas to be considered on their merits. There would be no implicit advantage given to some specific culture, which is presumably what "decolonisation" is about.

[bento]

I think different disciplines have different jobs to do here.  Some of the disciplines (philosophy is one example) are so shaped by early acts of 'colonization' that it's hard to imagine them differently. 

Plato's Socrates had such a gigantic influence on philosophy's development as a discipline: a conversation among elite males, which can go on forever (Republic) because no one has chores or domestic responsibilities, which should "follow the argument wherever it leads", which enjoys refuting people and shaming them, adores fine verbal distinctions, and is disconnected from the marketplace and its grubby politics.   Plunk this down in Oxford or Cambridge today.  Or Berkeley or Stanford.

British universities have the shadow of the British Empire to reckon with, as a special challenge.  Whole colleges endowed by Cecil Rhodes and his ilk.  Museums full of colonial booty.  The imposition of stale discipline paradigms shaped by white male supremacy is something we share in the U.S.

I interpret the 'de-colonize' recommendation as rethinking the disciplines to be more culturally aware, inclusive, topical, applied, public, self-reflective and self-critical, and just plain more interesting.  I think it's an invigorating time to be an academic person.

[marshwiggle]

I think different disciplines have different jobs to do here.  Some of the disciplines (philosophy is one example) are so shaped by early acts of 'colonization' that it's hard to imagine them differently. 

Plato's Socrates had such a gigantic influence on philosophy's development as a discipline: a conversation among elite males, which can go on forever (Republic) because no one has chores or domestic responsibilities, which should "follow the argument wherever it leads", which enjoys refuting people and shaming them, adores fine verbal distinctions, and is disconnected from the marketplace and its grubby politics.   

But how does this have any bearing on the quality of the ideas themselves? Whether they are internally consistent, and whether the ideas about human society and behaviour play out in practice doesn't depend on that.

Similarly, there may be good ideas from people outside the historical western canon, but again, by looking at the ideas themselves, and how they fit reality, they don't have to compete according to where they come from.

[downer]

That's an interesting thought, Bento. You don't quite say it but you seem to imply that decolonization of the academy is less of an issue in North America. I'm not sure. Presumably the content of courses in both the US and the UK is pretty similar. So if those different approaches  to teaching and curriculum are important in the UK, aren't they just as important in the US?

[mamselle]

And it's not just the humanities.

Innoculation in Boston and the UK was first tried because African and Turkish communities had developed protocols which became the basis for Cotton Mather's and Lady Worthly Montague's trials in the early 1700s.

In both cases, more study ought to be done on how and where those efforts began; the Western (UK/US/Euro) studies since there are fairly complete but (in gravestone research done a few years ago) I found it hard to locate much on the developmental issues in African and Eastern Mediterranean areas. (I will say I haven't recently read in this area, so it's possible something has been done in the past decade, but this is still an example of what I mean).

So history of science/history of medicine studies, which directly affect how and what academic science classes teach, are also an area where re-balancing the narrative and digging deeper for non-Western contributions would shift who is credited with certain discoveries and how their findings might be incorporated into the more dimensional knowledge of a topic.

Likewise, today, in the citation wars. How much bias occurs in just getting things to print, having the resources to do in-depth research (do the HBC's have the same level of funding/laboratory equipment/instructional depth, for example?) and publicizing ones results through invited talks, etc.?

Science may think of itself as a thought-thread of ideas, but it's not devoid of bias and colonial views of the findings from other civilizations, either.

It's gotten better, but that's not saying it is where it needs to be.

M.

[marshwiggle]

So history of science/history of medicine studies, which directly affect how and what academic science classes teach, are also an area where re-balancing the narrative and digging deeper for non-Western contributions would shift who is credited with certain discoveries and how their findings might be incorporated into the more dimensional knowledge of a topic.

As far as students are concerned, most of this is basically irrelevant. As an example, many calculus students may attribute the development to Newton. A smaller, number may also be familiar with Leibniz. (Perhaps in German speaking countries those are reversed.) But only fairly mathematically-inclined people are likely to remember that each of them developed their own notation, and each type of notation gets used in certain situations.  And that's about one of the most well-known "origin stories" in physics and mathematics.

I'd welcome anyone to disagree with me, but in my experience, the "history" part of most science courses is barely significant, and rarely shows up on any test. (The main vestige of history is a person's name on a theory, method, or equation. Most people completing a course would be hard pressed to tell you anything about Gauss, except that there's a law named after him. So his national origin, ethnicity, politics or personal habits are completely off the radar, beyond what can be inferred from the name.)

[Parasaurolophus]

Make no changes, at all. Nothing wrong with the way it is taught now. I am from the older generation before all this BS political correctness diversity began. Nothing wrong with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Locke, etc. except for their philosophical mistakes in texts. Stop the broad faulty generalizations.

There's plenty wrong with them, as with anyone. And to pretend they were really nice nerds who wished no harm to anyone is to whitewash history and sanitize their ideas in exactly the kind of "politically correct" way you decry.

More importantly, however: to teach some classes along the "greatest hits" model is simply irresponsible. Take aesthetics: one long-standing way of teaching it is as a Plato-Hume-Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger class. And that is grossly incompetent (especially since the most important work in philosophical aesthetics took place from 1968 onwards). Similarly, you could teach an Aristotle-Aquinas-Mill-Kant-Moore course in ethical theory, but it would be lazy and incompetent (though perhaps not quite as incompetent as the aesthetics class above). You could have a BA organized entirely around the history of philosophy, if you wanted to; but that, too, would be incompetent and thoroughly inadequate.

Yet, in many quarters, this is exactly how things were done for a long time, and continue to be done (although it's true that this has changed a lot in the last ten or fifteen years).

And, FWIW, sometimes a thinker's political and personal failings are relevant to their ideas. I think it makes a great deal of difference to the ancients that their talk of freedom and rationality only applied to (male) citizens. I think it makes a big difference to understanding Locke and his account of liberalism to understand the role he played in administering the slave-owning colonies, and how his thinking on the issue changed over time. And it sure as fuck makes a big difference to understanding Heidegger to understand that he was a Nazi, and that his ideas were inextricably tied to that party, its ideology, and his own anti-semitism. Heidegger in particular has been sanitized for middle-class consumption for far too long, and his actual role in the Nazi party and the extent of the importance of anti-semitism to his work has been systematically minimzed (indeed, suppressed, as we saw with a recent controversy over his black books). If anything is "political correctness", that is--although, to be clear, I think the term is basically devoid of content, unless its content is something like "liberal ideas" (which is clearly bullshit).

I don't think we should ever, never judge historical figures from centuries ago by today's liberal new standards. Would you want to be judged by the morality in the year 2500? It's ridiculous. Colonialism accomplished a great deal of good, including America.( and it had some evil.) It is all new propaganda against white men (because they are not nice to women, so what?).  Many well known names were anti-Semitic, but  Jews are not arguing and whining about them. 

You are then replacing the bias of the canon with a new bias that is more prejudiced.

You know that most ethicists and meta-ethicists are moral realists, right? (Actually, the same looks to be true of most Americans.) If you're a moral realist, then it absolutely makes sense to judge historical people and peoples for their moral failings, in exactly the same way that it makes total sense to make fun of Herodotus for thinking there were ants in Asia that were cat-sized and which dug up gold, or to recognize that Ptolemaic astronomy was wrong, or to judge people negatively for believing, just thirty years ago, that non-human animals had no inner lives or were incapable of thought. That's not to say we should make such judgements without first properly contextualizing them. But it's perfectly legitimate to judge.

Even on most anti-realist meta-ethical views, it makes sense to judge in this way. I'll also note that note that moral relativism has been widely discredited since at least the time of Mary Midgley, and most articulations of it are clearly incoherent.

It's not about replacing the canon. It's about understanding how the canon was built, and striving to build a better canon.

First of all, I'm astronomically glad to be in STEM, where it doesn't matter who came up with something, just whether what they came up with fits reality. (And if somebody else comes up with something that fits reality better, it will replace the earlier thing.)

Well, STEM isn't immune to these sorts of problems, even in disciplines that don't grant much truck to their own histories. (Although that, too, seems like a problem, since this kind of ignorance of their history and sociology leads scientists to make all sorts of stupid claims about things like the aim of science, or its objectivity, or the value of various disciplines. To my mind, a good scientific education would include some coursework on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. But that's a separate issue.)

It seems useful and important for engineers, for instance, to know about Aboriginal Title and the Crown's history (including its recent history!) of violating its legal and treaty obligations. If you want to be involved in the construction of mega-projects, then Indigenous-Crown relations are directly relevant, and understanding why Indigenous peoples are often opposed to these projects can go a long way towards helping you and your team to obtain their consent for your project. Just look at the controversy over the TMT's construction in Hawai'i.

It also seems useful and important to understand the impacts such projects have on such communities. When Manitoba Hydro constructed the Moose River dams, for example, it completely destroyed local subsistence economies, thereby worsening the plight of local populations which could no longer supplement their meagre incomes in the usual ways. That happened in part because subsistence-level activities don't get counted as gainful employment, and so are largely invisible to project planners, developers, etc. And concerns pertaining to these activities get dismissed as tree-hugging, or simply wanting to take part in some historical ritual, rather than actually supplementing other local economic activities.

I'm not in STEM, so I don't have a good perspective on what decolonizing can look like. But I do know that the call is broader than you seem to credit it with being, and involves more than just looking at syllabi and counting names. It also pertains to things like hiring, to revising instructional methods to accommodate the needs of non-traditional students, to delivering meaningful land acknowledgements, etc.

Has anyone interested in "decoloinising" curriculum taken the approach of just talking about ideas without reference to where they came from? In other words, if ideas are discussed which have come from different countries and time periods, why not present them without specifying the geographical or ethnic context? (If some ideas are built specifically on earlier ones, then some chronological order may need to be preserved.)  But that would avoid getting into an entire slagging match of who-said-what, and rather would allow ideas to be considered on their merits. There would be no implicit advantage given to some specific culture, which is presumably what "decolonisation" is about.

I don't think what you're saying makes much sense for the disciplines you're targeting. I mean: I can talk about consequentialism without talking about Bentham and Mill, if you want. But it doesn't make a lot of sense to do so, because they have particular takes on it--and, more particularly, on its utilitarian articulation--that are distinct from other articulations of the concept. It's useful to do so as a general introduction, but if you want to understand how utilitarianism works, you really do need to get into the specifics of different articulations, and what they prioritize at the expense of what, and why. Otherwise, not only will our conversation be very short, it will also be entirely insubstantial. Likewise, the Aztec conception of virtue ethics is a really useful foil to the Greek conception, because it takes it in a totally different direction; and it matters that almost everything written on the subject is in thrall to the Greek conception. Forgetting about these contexts would be... well, stupid.

Nor is this about conferring advantages to some specific culture. It's about noticing the ways in which our conventions and status quo bias prioritize some ideas, and some thinkers, over others, for no good reason beyond convention and status quo bias themselves.

This is what I love about Linda Nochlin's seminal essay, "Why have there been no great women artists?" What she demonstrates so persuasively is that the art historical canon is not a construct which reliably tracks skillful artistic depiction or vision (which you might have expected it to be); instead, it tracks all kinds of much more contingent factors, such as which kinds of images are popular at particular times, who has the right patrons, who has access to the right conditions to develop their skills and interests, etc.

[marshwiggle]

First of all, I'm astronomically glad to be in STEM, where it doesn't matter who came up with something, just whether what they came up with fits reality. (And if somebody else comes up with something that fits reality better, it will replace the earlier thing.)

It seems useful and important for engineers, for instance, to know about Aboriginal Title and the Crown's history (including its recent history!) of violating its legal and treaty obligations. If you want to be involved in the construction of mega-projects, then Indigenous-Crown relations are directly relevant, and understanding why Indigenous peoples are often opposed to these projects can go a long way towards helping you and your team to obtain their consent for your project. Just look at the controversy over the TMT's construction in Hawai'i.

This is all important, and would be relevant in a "professional practice" course or something like that. Along with all kinds of other situations where governments, corporations, or individuals have not fulfilled their legal obligations. 

Discussing the minutiae of the ethnicity, politics, and lifestyles of all of the individuals involved, on the other hand, is immaterial.

It also seems useful and important to understand the impacts such projects have on such communities. When Manitoba Hydro constructed the Moose River dams, for example, it completely destroyed local subsistence economies, thereby worsening the plight of local populations which could no longer supplement their meagre incomes in the usual ways. That happened in part because subsistence-level activities don't get counted as gainful employment, and so are largely invisible to project planners, developers, etc. And concerns pertaining to these activities get dismissed as tree-hugging, or simply wanting to take part in some historical ritual, rather than actually supplementing other local economic activities.

You'd probably find the same kind of things happen in other countries where the small, isolated communities aren't "indigenous"; it's much more about poverty and invisibility than simply ethnicity.

I'm not in STEM, so I don't have a good perspective on what decolonizing can look like. But I do know that the call is broader than you seem to credit it with being, and involves more than just looking at syllabi and counting names. It also pertains to things like hiring, to revising instructional methods to accommodate the needs of non-traditional students, to delivering meaningful land acknowledgements, etc.

STEM subjects don't typically include "names" in syllabi; it's not about "Newton, and what he thought" or anything like that. A person is only mentioned as long as their theory has value. (Can anyone in STEM name a medieval alchemist???? There were probably some who were widely known then but they were WRONG so who cares?????)

As for "land acknowledgements", there are lots of places where archeological evidence indicates that different groups occupied the same areas at different time periods during the centuries before Europeans arrived. Should all of those groups be acknowledged?

Has anyone interested in "decoloinising" curriculum taken the approach of just talking about ideas without reference to where they came from? In other words, if ideas are discussed which have come from different countries and time periods, why not present them without specifying the geographical or ethnic context? (If some ideas are built specifically on earlier ones, then some chronological order may need to be preserved.)  But that would avoid getting into an entire slagging match of who-said-what, and rather would allow ideas to be considered on their merits. There would be no implicit advantage given to some specific culture, which is presumably what "decolonisation" is about.

Likewise, the Aztec conception of virtue ethics is a really useful foil to the Greek conception, because it takes it in a totally different direction; and it matters that almost everything written on the subject is in thrall to the Greek conception. Forgetting about these contexts would be... well, stupid.

The fact that "almost everything written on the subject is in thrall to the Greek conception" is not nearly as interesting as comparing the two concepts. If there are societies which exhibit characterisitics of one or the other which can be compared then that would be great, without having to get bogged down in who got more publicity.