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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Thursday, October 30, 2003
FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE
I had a dream. A dream of a wood, old beyond imagining, rich with life, thick with deep, heavy fertility, laden with the smells of eternity. The trees were tall; the trees were strong. And they beckoned, though they did not need to move. Their proud straightness alone was a magnetic force. And their silence was a pregnant moment waiting for a voice. And I was drawn toward them.
How many other travellers had heard this call? How many had become lost in this wood or found a home here? But the silence pressed in tight, and the wood closed around me. And where I had expected to hear the distant conversing of birds and the careless accompaniment of splashing water, there was only the soughing of a dry wind. The soughing of a dry wind through brambles, thick, black, and wicked, clinging closely to the base of the trees, sinking thorns deep into aged bark. And what had been the rich, sticky-sweet smell of life swelling deep in the earth became the cloying scent of decay, of death bursting through the soil in repellent, fungous growths.
The wood cringed about me, as if each creature in every nest and burrow and cocoon were recoiling from the smell that I had caught. And although the motion subsided quickly, the vision remained with me, like bright flashes in darkness. The wood was steeped with life, saturated with creatures, each cowed, as I was, by the unexpected intimation of doom.
But the trees were tall and proud. The brambles, though twining vine-like through the limbs, were nothing to the ancient strength of the trees.
A soft groan touched my ears, the sound of weight shifting, settling. It came from a tree, like many of the others around me heavy with sigils and signs, carved deep with coats of arms and patents of rectitude. With a dull pop, it sagged against it's neighbor, a younger tree, uncarved and unmarked, but no less tall or broad. The young tree bowed, trying to roll with the weight of its older neighbor, but the groan of its bending ascended to the shriek of living wood splintering. The two trees crashed to the forest floor, leaving the final shriek hanging in the air. But while the young tree crashed and splintered bitterly and violently, leaving a quivering stump and savage echoes, the older tree landed with a dull thud, and disintegrated to reveal an interior seething with insects and pungent with dead ichor. Where it had entered the ground, the trunk had pulled free, leaving a shallow, musty wound, where all its roots had long since dissolved into the grey leprous soil that remained.
And suddenly I saw how many of these dead but still erect trees there were, each sagging against the living ones beside them, hanging like a sword above the healthy trees of the forest. These standing dead were holding the living hostage against their pride, their will to outlast their lives. It was then that the silence found a voice, and it was singing a song of death.
How could no one have seen that the wood had been dying for so long? How many young trees could shrug their way through the dead weight entangling them?
A shadow passed near me, a force shrouded in blackness, which left a bright flickering behind as it fled. A flickering of fire. Before I could move, the fire leaped to the fallen tree, consuming the crumbling, dry wood, and destroying the insects with pops that merged into a steady sizzle.
The wood came alive again, with creatures mindlessly fleeing the blaze, but not quickly enough, for the fire leaped ahead of them, tree to tree, bramble to bush, cutting them off, mercilessly devouring them. Leaves ignited on branches in the searing air, and trunks exploded as the sap inside them flashed to steam. Somehow, above the infernal roar, arose another sound, a shrill keening, the combined cries from the throats of a million million incinerated creatures, and the creaking of a million million falling trees.
After a time, which was forever, or might only have been an instant, the fire was over. Smoke and steam concealed everything, and the sounds were of fading hissing and crackling, and the exhausted groan of great weights shifting one last time to their last resting places. And a wind stirred, but not a dry wind--a fresh wind, which stripped the smoke from the smoldering wreckage and carried away the sounds of ruin.
The trees that remained stood battered and blistered, but untangled in the sunlight. The brambles were seared away, and the standing dead were ashes. The creatures that returned were strong and vigorous, and the song that they took up was the song beyond the song of death: It was a song of defiance, of renewal. The voice had found the song of life.
Some things can only be cleansed with fire.
I had a dream. A dream of fire.
From "When Empires Fall", Challenge magazine #64, p.42
I suppose for some it's a matter of opinion which method is better, Socrates' or Uday's. But we'll get to that in due time. John Allison writes:
When I taught in the Army I taught maintenance of tank turrets, use of test, measurement and diagnostic equipment, basic electrical theory, stuff like that. If I was wrong, or tried to lay an 'interpretation' on my students, their BS-detectors would be going off before that hour's worth of instruction had passed (try teaching basic electrical theory to a National Guardsman that has a BSEE, can you say 'peer instructor'?), I'd be demonstrably wrong. You learn humility doing this and you learn to stay ahead of your students.
A tank turret is a part of a tank, which is a tool that can be put to many uses. It can be used by the British and eventually others to break the stalemate on the Western Front in the Great War. It can be used by the NAZIs to overrun Europe. It can be used by the Soviets to push the NAZIs back and overrun half of Europe and threaten the rest for fifty years. It can be used by the British and Americans to liberate half of Europe and protect the rest from the Soviets. It can be used as a spearhead to liberate Kuwait, and it can be used by Iraqi Ba'athists to crush an uprising, and then it can be used later to finish the job we should have, could have, would have finished if only.
Point is, I guess I would put the maintenance of tank turrets, however difficult and however vital ('cause if you screw up at the wrong time, it can cost your tankers their very lives. So it ain't nothin) in a somewhat less complex category than the uses it is put to, and the uses it is put to with all its variety are what matters most. Of what value is your job? Well, it might depend on the context in which it is done. If a tank is used to defend a worthy nation and its cause, then I would argue the worth of what you're doing is a lot more exalted than that of counterparts on the other end of the barrel of the tanks you're servicing, which also have people maintaining them (hopefully - and usually - badly, and perhaps with reason), who are using them to repress others and defend tyrannical repression. Perhaps the people maintaining the turrets of those tanks are doing a half-ass job in part not just because their culture cultivates laziness but it cultivates laziness because people rightly see little reason to put much effort into a job that is dedicated to their own oppression and the oppression of their family, friends, and countrymen. Meanwhile, you and the people you trained are Motivated and Dedicated because the guys driving that tank, you want the best for them, they're great folks doing an honorable job serving a worthwhile cause and defending not only a great nation, but one that is great because we're a beacon of certain values - and they aren't undermotivated conscripts looking for the first chance to ditch the field and head home because they don't want to die for a worthless despot like Saddam, they volunteer to serve.
What leads us to such conclusions and such judgements? All this fuzzy humanities stuff, which so often doesn't seem to have the bright lines distinguishing the hu-ah from the half-assed, where (at least right now) nattering bloviators can prosper. All the thought and scholarship and hard-won experience, even if sometimes with different interpretations of those experiences, leading us to a state where, darn it, I do assert that we are able to make some fairly bright-line distinctions - or should be - between good and bad and which should also teach us some humility since the consequences of screw-ups are at least as dire here as in turret maintenance; indeed, screw-ups here have cost the lives of more tankers than even the most hapless maintenance battalion ever could. In my observation humanities stuff does meet hard reality and when it does it has the potential to do so in the most ugly ways if it is gotten wrong and this is why it is so vital to get it right. Indeed, it is getting this stuff right upon which whether you and your fellows fight and die for something worth fighting and dying for or not, whether the nation you serve is a nation worth serving or not.
Maybe in some cases it's harder to determine definitively something in these fields as worthy or unworthy because basically everyone born since the end of WWI has been trained, in certain respects, to suspect everything. Why that demarcation? Because that war, so bloody and destructive (only to be followed a generation later by one still more bloody and destructive) caused so many of its participants to believe that they had gone into the war thinking they were fighting for something worthwhile only to come out of it thinking that it hadn't been worth all the death, that the sacrifices made had been for nothing. And yet this is the war that put an end, a definitive end, to the institution of monarchy as a living, credible institution, one that had for millennia dominated political life. The cost, however, had been so appalling that people decided that it couldn't be worth it and caused deep self-doubt and loss of Civilizational confidence in the West (c.f. my "In the Long Run We'll All Be Dead and Other Happy Reminders" post).
That served as a dividing line between an era of almost boundless confidence that we were definitively discovering and learning not only in sciences but in the stuff of humanities as well. It affected American confidence less than European in no small part because while all the other major participants felt they lost, even when they were on the winner's side of the negotiating table, our losses were not as severe and we could feel we won it (just as we were the real winners of the Napoleonic Wars, gaining half a Continent out of it for a pittance as a result of the Louisiana Purchase). This was the fertilizer within the seeds postmodernist thought flowered (and also Cultural Marxism). And we were affected, too, somewhat delayed compared to the Europeans.
But if one really thinks about it in ways that I'm surprised the scientific minded haven't, we really do have some fairly clear demarcations established by "Humanities" stuff. Wanna be a slave, or a free man? Wanna fight for a representative government, or a despotic tyranny? Want the law to be the arbitrary whim of some monarch, or made by a representative legislature (with all its own flaws and imperfections)? Do you want to be a human sacrifice, or not? And do we want science to be conducted in an atmosphere of open inquiry and empiricism, or bound by the need to provide results pleasing to an ideology, religion, or ruler? How do you want your daughters to be treated? Like they would treat them in Saudi Arabia? Or not? Is Orwell right in suggesting that freedom of thought is of more worth than obeisance to the doctrines of a ruling elite? Or is that open to interpretation where we would have to concede that O'Brien may have a point and our opinion has no empirical support to demonstrate that his position is flawed and would serve humanity ill?
Are you glad we're conducting this discussion in the form of a modified Socratic dialogue, or are any of you out there (Hagemaier) of the opinion that Uday's methods would be just as good? If so, let me know - I'm sure I could use the net to scavenge up a few sadists and we could come right over and torture you and sodomize your wives and daughters before your eyes until you'd be willing to agree with whatever I said. Of course, you'd have to sign a binding waiver beforehand, because we have laws against treating people that way in this country (some may wonder why, I suppose, given that opinions may vary and why impose our morality by forbidding this kind of thing?) Actually, I'm really not sincere in the offer anyhow, because I have certain principles about how people should be treated and how they shouldn't be treated, as well as on the best methods of persuading people (rational discussion seems better than torture and intimidation, no?). But I mention one of the alternatives to illustrate the point, because I guess I have to do that to illuminate some of the things that we have learned and discovered and just take for granted in how we expect each other to conduct ourselves and how we expect to be treated. That, for example, you're not going to be executed for disagreeing with me, and we simply assume that and understand it's better than the alternative. I mean, I guess it's better. Don't eat the chile, though ("Do you like it, Mitch? Do you? I call it 'Mr. and Mrs. Hagemaier Chile'").
IMO, theories originating in the Humanities have met "hard reality", regardless of the obvious fact that their are people who want to close their eyes to it (the very people we are driven to oppose): there have been, in effect, what amounts to uncontrolled experiments run on what works best and what is best in life. America prospered, the Soviet Union was a horror to take one example. The Great Leap Forward sucked as a means of promoting economic prosperity, and the Cultural Revolution left something to desire as a means of cultivating progress (as did Year Zero).
Yes, in turret maintenance or in engineering or physics, the answers may sometimes come quicker and clearer, and its impossible to run "controlled experiments" scientifically in fields like human history, politics, &tc. But what I am saying is that I disagree with both the post-modernists and with the people who perceive a vast chasm between hard science on one hand and the humanities on the other that we don't discover or learn anything in the later, only in the former can we say we reach conclusions. Even in science, btw, conclusions on things now are contingent on later discoveries which might provoke a(nother) rethinking of the paradigms upon which their findings rest.
By the way, is economics a "hard science" as you people view it, or something in the despised humanities (the field where nothing is learned or discovered)? Anyhow, over the centuries we seem to have learned something there, and economics flowered out of philosophy and theology (Adam Smith was a theologian, one of those religious fellows that are the subject of so much scorn. Of course, so were many, many scientists at the dawn of what we call Western science).
My point in all this is that the Humanities matter a lot more than people seem to be thinking. They are in the end what gives purpose and worth to whatever scientific knowledge and technological developments we make. Will those things be used to worthy ends or bad ends? The answer to that may be a matter of religion. Or it may be a matter of philosophy. It may be informed by what we've learned from historical experience. It may rest on our understanding of human interactions. It will certainly be a political question. It will be explored in literature - be it science fiction or otherwise. It may be raised in art and music. Stories, movies, television shows might examine both the potential pitfalls and potential gains of scientific discoveries and the technology that results from them. We learn to understand that a tool can be put to good and bad uses. We understand that tank can embody the defense of liberty or a tool to keep people obedient to a despot. We explore these things in the humanities; which, again, are not limited to University Departments of Humanities, but the fields of humanities as people explore them in both formal and informal settings. Answers here can certainly be harder than in other endeavors where things are more clear cut, or at least clearer cut faster for impatient people. But they are the more important questions, because otherwise all the technical innovations we come up with may very well be put to uses that are deplorable. Getting this "humanities" stuff right simply is crucial, especially since our science comes up with more and more effective and efficient ways of doing ourselves in or abusing each other or oppressing each other if we get this humanities stuff wrong, and let (for example) the sort of people who are blase about our freedom of speech (as mentioned by another letter writer quoted below) carry the day. Stopping them means winning an argument that is couched not in the language of hard science, but the rhetoric of the humanities: what we value and why we value it and the historical examples of what can happen when we lapse, in literary warnings of the Nineteen Eighty-Four sort and its like.
I frequently read stuff where the Science-oriented bemoan the fact that humanities types simply don't have good solid science backgrounds and mathematical skills and thus aren't able to work their way through pressing matters and distinguish from good science and garbage because they lack enough foundational knowledge. Well, in my not so humble opinion, a more significant problem is that the scientific minded aren't able to form arguments and use words to persuade people in debates that are conducted, invariably, on terms set by the humanities (because all such debates really take place in the sphere of the humanities), they are dismissive and scornful of aptitudes that are vital to them if they are going to carry the day over people who they (rather rightly in many cases) see as misinformed or even spreading disinformation (these very same people we're railing against). People best able to speak to human values are going to win those debates every time, even when you think that "on the merits" they shouldn't, because human values are the merits. These things are the province of humanities subjects that are considered such a waste for you all to be forced to study.
The fact that they are mistaught by ideologues that are the point of my posts in the first place, who I see as threatening something valuable, does not mean one should confuse the jewel with the worthless custodian who is debasing it. Quite the contrary. If these subjects are, as many seem to believe, pointless, then it won't be worth anyone's efforts to try and counteract the influence of these ideologues that we're deploring, and restoring vitality to the institutions they currently control would be a wasted effort. I don't think that's true, and you folks wouldn't be reading to this point in the post if you really thought the Humanities were as worthless as some of your mails seem to indicate.
There is a lot more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in your science.
We hold these truths [replace w/"opinions"] to be self-evident [replace w/"well, open to dispute, I mean, whatever floats your boat, man. Who are we to judge?"], that. . .[Oh, wait, strike the rest, too, which goes on in a similar vein. But I mean, like really, well, who knows. So on second thought, forget the whole thing. Nevermind. We have no conclusions and who can say what is "best"? It's all just a matter of opinion. Six of one, half a dozen of another and all that. Long Live the King!]
What folks like Charles Mitchell Hagemaier are forgetting is that the application of reasoning and rationality to scientific questions did not originate with science, but had its roots elsewhere, in subjects that he thinks they don't apply in.
Well, the analogies aren't perfect, to be true. But neither is the rather stark contrast that he and others are trying to set up. The point that keeps being missed is that the scientific method that these people are so proudly contrasting against the despicable Humanities did not spring ex nihlo out of, say, Copernicus' head, fully formed, as Athena out of Zeus. It has as its foundation inquiry into the sort of topics that form the Humanities, at least in how that inquiry has been conducted in the Mediterranean tradition that became a Western tradition of "intellectual life".
I'm reacting really badly to the assertion so many people are making that has no real basis in fact if one looks at things historically (oops! History! A arm of the Humanities!) that dumb stuff just never got passed off in science. For so much of history, there was a lot of scientific quackery passed off in much the same way as the charlatans of the Humanities pass things off on a gullible public. It happens still today - their's a lot of B.S. being passed off on people as "science", especially when it comes to issues that are fore square in front of us now as part of debates on what paths to take. The effort to then re-define all such things as "oh, well that's not really science, then" and then move it into the other box is rather unscientific in that it creates an unfalsifiable premise (science is hard reality, no one could pass off garbage as substantive in science, that only goes on in the humanities, therefore anyone who looks like they are doing stuff like that under the umbrella of science is by definition not-science, constructing an unfalsifiable theory/premise. Q.E.D.) People like Hagemaier are being as selective in their accounts of things as the folks in the despised humanities can be, omitting things in order to produce a "Just So" picture of reality that gilds the lily of science a bit (and btw, some folks with despicable Humanities backgrounds came to the right conclusion about Soviet practice well before it got "rough handling" by later scientific discovery, oh, and btw, you'll find Marxists with Science degrees too, but if the Just So Story that folks like Hagemaier are telling is true, with the stark contrast he portrays, then they would know better, wouldn't they? There wouldn't be any Marxists or Socialists among the Scientific community if they were so vastly elevated above their lesser peers in the Humanities.
And, yah, there are "hard stops" in Humanities, once one takes the correct perspective which is that things that form Humanities Departments in Universities are related to things that hit the pavement in real life; theories intellectuals come up with in, say, 1848 get "field tested". If you are, say, a Ukrainian Kulak or Chinese or, say, an educated Cambodian, or even any random Eastern European, you experienced the "Hard Stop" of some of that. A very definitive Hard Stop in many cases. The fact that the people who populate the universities are insulated from that and thus the lesson hasn't percolated to them isn't really unique to the Humanities (though the degree is likely different); implied in what one of the readers quoted below writes regarding how ready the students of Science Departments are for the "real world" is the fact that the professoriate there is somewhat detached from certain hard realities, too.
As for how we break this cycle and repair the Humanities, that's what we're workin on and pondering. Hopefully the discussion will turn more towards that and away from a "The Humanities are Bunk" conclusion. The goal is to come up with a solution or solutions, something that hopefully all you engineer/science types, with experience in thinking through problems aiming at practical solutions that will work in the real world will be very helpful in that. Which is why I'm frustrated by how things are going so far.
Given the responses I'm getting from some of the folks who are presumably "on my side" in the Culture Wars, I have to wonder why they're bothering to read my blog. After all, the things I write about aint rocket science. The stuff here is, I hate to break it to you, humanities oriented.
Likewise I have to wonder why some of you waste time reading works of science fiction, even. I don't know if Heinlein convinced himself, when he was writing The Notebooks of Lazarus Long that what he was engaging in was science, or convinced his readers that what they were reading was science, but it wasn't. These stories aint rocket science, either. They're literature - which is a part of the humanities.
A lot of people are, to my mind, confusing the problem that I am complaining about and pushing to see fixed with the humanities in general. One reader writes:
Heinlein also made the distinction (in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long and other writings) between fields that required merely scholarship and those that actually required you to learn and discover new stuff, not just a reshuffling or redefinition of existing stuff.
He was as wrong about such a distinction as those critics of mine are in making it, claiming that only science learns things and the humanities merely reshuffle and redefine existing stuff. In that he, and you all, are inadvertently falling into exactly the outlook that those post-modernist forces that I am fighting want
you to fall in, that nothing related to the humanities is really knowable and any point of view is equally valid (or, for the flip-side of the coin critics, worthless) in these fields, so you either accept their metaparadigm or tune the whole thing out as garbage, six of one half a dozen of another but their premise is adopted.
I completely reject the notion that we haven't learned or discovered anything of value in these spheres. We'd still be living under monarchy as serfs or slave-holding massas if we hadn't. We'd still accept being treated like dirt (as was common even in Greek "democracy" and the Roman "Republic", for all that I admire both within the context of what they knew at the time, but the simple fact is we've come a long way, baby). Women would still be household chattel (as they remain in much of the world to this day) if we hadn't learned a damn thing, but simply re-shuffled and re-defined existing stuff. I'll note that I haven't received a single letter of this sort from a woman. Maybe because they understand more than guys do that we have come a long way, baby, in some of these things, even if we have a ways to go yet. ""knowing that I would I would never arrive, but knowing that I would grow ever closer, and that was every bit as good". (Didn't I tell you to read this post?)
And, lest one forget (though there are certainly those on the "Science Supra Omnes" side of this humanities vs. science debates who want people to forget), if we hadn't learned a damn thing in the spheres I've been talking about, there would have been little or no scientific discovery either, as had been the case throughout human history and remains the case in much of the world today. The reasons for a "take off" in these spheres, concentrated in the west and spread to areas most influenced by the west, are these ideas which have produced an atmosphere that too many are simply taking for granted and failing to recognize.
What's frustrating me now is that the fact is that all the "Only Science Matters" people are as intransigently close-minded as the people I (and they) have contempt for who currently infest the humanities departments and which IMO threaten the very cultural/intellectual structure within which the scientific progress you all (and I, too) all value so much is fostered.
I recommend people read, if you haven't already (and re-read if you have but obviously missed the point) VDH's "Carnage and Culture" and in particular his various points about why the West is so devastatingly efficient and effective; almost all these points have to do with how people in the West interact, means and methods that are certainly useful in fostering scientific discovery and learning, but which had their wellspring in the historical experience, ideas and philosophical insights, general political structure (political science, history, philosophy, sociology, &tc), and the like: fields that, setting manipulative re-definitions aside, that are in the sphere of the humanities.
I really, really wish that the people who supposedly have my back in a fight against the forces that threaten the things we all find valuable weren't so deeply if unconsciously influenced by the premises of the very intellectual forces, that we supposedly agree are wrong and guiding us down a dangerous path.
Another reader writes a point that Steven Den Beste has also made from time to time:
So I am not being cruel its just the gods honest truth, Universities do not prepare Engineers CS Biology Chemistry majors in my experience for the real world of work.
and the reader goes on to say:
I do not see this in the humanities, particularly with professors teachers councilors, (I would say Lawyers but with the exception of maybe a dozen that I personally know and I have met and worked with a couple hundred in the last thee years these people are extremely mercenary) even a few physiologists I know from outside their jobs, they all have and keep the ideologies of the university because it is perpetuated by the job because there is no hard stop.
Seeming to confusing the baby with the dirty bath water that I myself have been railing against and asserting needs to be changed, confusing the subjects with the academics that are undermining what is vital about those subjects and what we have learned and gained in those areas. He goes on:
She was all for damn it I can not remember the treaty name but it was one where the U.S. would have to abide by other countries definition of Free speech instead of the one that is our own. When I sat down and explained how this was truly not free speech how at any time a country could say we do not want you talking about this, or to say this in such a way is racist, and citizens of the US would now not be able to have a discussion about it. Imagine how many topics of conversation would be lost, for that matter she would lose the freedom of speech if a country that practiced Fundamental Islam wished to enforce its laws on speech here in the US.
Herein is my point: because of what we've learned through philosophical inquiry, historical experience, political analysis, and the like that freedom of speech is valuable. Freedom of speech is not an idea from the wellspring of the humanities. Which brings me to where he writes:
Anyway this is the problems I see at the universities these days, I can only give anecdotal examples and I am not a elegantly spoken person, but I sincerely hope I got my point across. Due to current ideologies here in the US mostly these ideologies come from the Far Left of the spectrum college educations are not so much about education but about indoctrination in their ideology.
See, the problem clearly isn't with what we have learned and discovered in fields of the humanities over the century, it is with the current intellectual custodians of that legacy. Which is what I have been talking about: combatting their influence, not because we have accomplished nothing in those areas, but because these ideologues threaten what we have discovered and learned, and because, furthermore and even more appallingly, they have convinced so many otherwise intelligent people that not only are those ideologues who infest the university like so many germs that the very subjects are bunk.
Now, to return to one part of what he said and its relevance to why I am so exercised about the need to reform and restore these institutions rather than give up on them:
So I am not being cruel its just the gods honest truth, Universities do not prepare Engineers CS Biology Chemistry majors in my experience for the real world of work. People in the departments who have learned otherwise and have the patience to help them through this teething process generally, here in the US anyway correct this.
One thing is the God's honest truth, and that is no one experience, including a university experience, will give someone every tool they need for life. But their is a reason why, despite the fact that you have to go through the teething process and help these university grads acquire the skills needed for the real world of work, there is a very good reason why you're hiring graduates anyway and not just picking some smart fellow off the street or straight out of high school. Because, when the universities function, people do acquire knowledge efficiently that is useful. It's not everything one needs to know but having such an expectation is making the perfect the enemy of the good: they get some of the knowledge that is absolutely crucial, vital, to what they need to know to do the job (otherwise you wouldn't bother selecting the best from among the graduates of Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, &tc schools that you can get). Not everything they need to know to do the job, but knowledge that, without which, they couldn't even begin the "teething process".
So we're all grousing about the condition of Universities and in particular the current sorry state of so many of the Humanities Deparments. I propose that we push to reform them, push so as to provide the "hard stop" that is currently lacking, while others are basically coming to conclusions that end up accepting the premises of the very post-modernist ideologues that I thought we agreed were wrongheaded. In any case, if their is nothing of value in those fields, nothing that can be learned or discovered, then the whole thing is unimportant. In that case, it isn't only that you may as well stop reading this stuff I write, but I may as well stop writing it: Pushing the boulder up the hill again is then pointless for you to watch and pointless for me to do.
My british friend sends me this link (via ICQ), commenting: "The latest [EU] kleptocracy story, but I'm becoming jaded. More resignation than righteous anger now". Boyo, that's how they want you to react. He goes on, though, saying:
"'This summer Mr Solbes angered many MEPs by pleading ignorance. "I can't be blamed or asked to take responsibility for something I don't know about," he said.'
Ha! incompetent technocrat at large. Fire him!
Oh, we cant.
'Democracy' in action."
He also sends this story and comments (likewise via ICQ):
"I dont believe this. He's lost the confidence of just about everybody in the entire country, and yet he's 'fighting on'. An honourable man would just resign gracefully. This is going to be ugly and utterly counterproductive thanks to his 'defiance'. He just doesnt have the ability or the gravitas. Its not something to be ashamed of, he's done some good stuff, but its time to step aside and let someone prime ministerial have a bash. Instead he's clinging to the mast of the sinking ship as it goes down, battling to the very last fag end. I notice all the plotters lean to the Left of the Tory party too, that irks me That tells me that if a perfectly acceptable person on the Right ends up being the leader (like Michael Howard) they'll probably keep bitching. Seems anybody of leftwards persuasion, even those ostensibly on the right, can only do damage, no matter what guise they have Its like the wets in the 1980s all over again.
I really like LTB, but I wish he'd just come out and tell me what he really thinks about things. 8-)~~~
I know what he means, though. I do hope IDS goes down. He's been a disaster. Anyhow, in response I sent him a link to this John Sullivan piece.
Herein some responses to the "Sisyphus Shrugs" posts and my replies. I'm going to start with a kudo because - well, because I want to. George Atkisson wrote:
Right on the money again. To be fully human is to know of humanity, therefore the study of "the humanities" is and must be required of anyone with a claim to education.
A trained, competent scientist/mathematician/technician is quite capable of making and supporting morally devastating decisions and actions, precisely because these decisions are in fact outside his area of expertise. The proper goal of education should equip him to fulfill his training in full understanding of the larger society in which he operates and with some knowledge of the potential consequences of his decisions and actions within that larger society.
P.S. As a side note, I read Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War on my own in the 7th grade just because it seemed "neat" and have been an avid reader of both military history and military science fiction for as long as I an remember.
Going on, several people wrote responses indicative of their outrage that I was arguing against the dismissal of the value of humanities/"soft sciences", to the effect that I was disparaging science. Rather than take one of the worst of these and rip it, I'm going to take a better letter that encapsules the core substantive argument behind this (though without denigrating the value of the Humanities). Several folks supplied the following sort of argument but David Ford wrote the best (least negative, most concise, and well-phrased) argument along these lines:
Unfortunately, when someone gives you bad 'hard science' instruction, and you try to apply it, you have little choice but to see that they were wrong. Invalid data can be proven as invalid. In the 'soft sciences' of history, philosophy, etc, much more is open to interpretation, or at least, not provably invalid; only a well-developed bovine fecal matter detector can do it, and that is usually developed -completely-outside of formal classes.
Perhaps it will be possible at some point to add a required course in common sense, logic, and BS-detection? That seems to me the most simple, though not necessarily easy, fix.
This blog isn't going to become a pissing contest over how folks maintained dogged attachment to flawed theories long beyond when they should have and resisted accepting hard facts, but I will note that this is hardly absent from the behavior of scientists (as a through study will show). Indeed, even some of the episodes that are usually, in conventional wisdom, written off as (for example) "the religious establishment" resisting "scientific progress" are not too infrequently, when one looks at the grubby little details, examples of a scientific establishment that had wedded itself to some conception of things resisting and reacting badly to someone who had proven that their paradigm was bunk and accepting that meant throwing out several lifetimes worth of work (something people were loathe to do). Eventually such problems do get fixed, but lets not be too panglossian about it.
Even as a layman I know enough (since I was "forced" to take some science classes - more on that in a bit) to know that many false theories produce reliable data in some circumstances to the point that they are still used in certain (limited) applications today because they are simpler (quicker) to use than the "right" one (I'm thinking mainly of astrophysical theories atm). I'm not going to press this point further, though, nor the degree to which hidebound scientists have repeatedly resisted theories that overthrew the flawed but comfortable (because they had invested so much into them and had a degree of familiarity with them and even scientists resist changing their mindset and outlook) theories in sphere after sphere, time after time.
Instead I'm going to use this to illustrate my point regarding the whole thing. Now, in fairly easy (that is, less complex or "advanced" problems) situations, the amount of data one needs to see something as valid or invalid, prove or disprove it, is certainly less than what one would want for more complex problems, ones where the scientific community is, at any given time, finding it difficult to reach a consensus about how to interpret the data and what it means. Take something like the earth's climate and medium-term forecasts (the next century or so). There is a fair bit of argument over the modeling and how to do it properly, and then the interpretation of results, and then whether to ascribe any changes the models used predicts to human causation or other possible causes (it being an empirical fact that the earth's climate has fluctuated over time for a variety of reasons).
Now, before people start writing mails saying "well, actually, all the real scientists know thus and such", that's not my point. This is not a post about Global Warming. The point is, the more complex the scientific problem, the more data needs to be collected, the more variables need to be taken into consideration, and the harder it becomes to reach definitive conclusions (did you take every meaningful variable into consideration? How did you decide which ones weren't going to make much of a difference and thus could be abstracted out? Was judgement involved in such a difference? Are their things you don't know? Damn straight, actually, because any scientist worth his salt would say that we haven't uncovered answers to every scientific question and that, indeed, it often seems that every time we find an answer to one it raises two - or more - questions that need to be pursued). Scientific consensus isn't as easy as my correspondents are implying, and scientific consensus has been scientifically proven incorrect (with flawed paradigms clinged to over long periods) far more frequently than their easy contrasts implies.
So lets go back to attitudes about the Humanities and how this applies. Some seem to have the mindset that because of the difficulty of reaching definitive conclusions in the Humanities, this means they should be scorned. That their study is somewhat pointless and people will not only reach different conclusions but those with axes to grind will, as one letter writer put it “obfuscate in fields where one man's opinion screeched loudly and repetitively can be fobbed off as 'fact'”. I hold though that the situation is more akin to that of complex scientific questions: you are much better off, then, having the deepest and widest range of knowledge on these matters than not, especially since (again as is common in science) knowledge remains incomplete even while advancing. In my considered opinion, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a well-refined Bovine Fecal Matter Detector but it certainly assists in its development and function. Who do you think is better off in a situation where someone is trying to pass off garbage as truth – not just in a situation related to humanities, but ones related to science, too: an intelligent person with little or no background knowledge in the matter being discussed, or that same person with a decent amount of knowledge in the field(s) related to the question at hand? I think the answer’s pretty obvious but judging from the attitude of some of the letter writers they see a distinction without a difference, at least when it comes to the fields affiliated with humanities.
So let me make two other arguments. Science, and by that I mean not the wretched social science, but biological science, has tried to apply itself to the study of the human animal and why it does what it does. So far the best they’ve been able to come up with are axioms that are, sure, interesting, but almost banal and broad and consist of generalities designed to be unfalsifiable. Certainly no such thing as Asimov’s “Psychohistory” has resulted from the efforts of hard science to determine the answers to these questions (read that post!). Sure, they can apply these things as retroactive explanations to events that have already happened, but any astrologer or magi or soothsayer can do the same with as much conviction, but they're no better at predicting than any of those and certainly have no deeper understanding of the human condition, and in many ways less, than is found through a through study of the humanities. Humans are a damn complex machine, especially in groups. A lot more than some of the "Humans = Chimps" simple-answers theorems understand.
Yes, that means things are somewhat fuzzy and indistinct and people will have different interpretations of the same "data" and thus are more likely to reach different conclusions than they are when it comes to the answer of what 2 + 2 equals. This makes sound judgement all the more important, and fostering it all the more vital. It also makes knowing as much as you can more important, assisting in reaching sound judgements and conclusions.
Now to my second argument, mentioned above. I mentioned Asimov and I'm betting that many of my critics are also fans of Science Fiction. Now, really think about it, what are most works of science fiction really about, at bottom? Science? Is Heinlein's Starship Troopersabout high-tech battle armor and weapons? Or is his main thrust in that book something else? Steven Den Beste had a good post on everyone's favorite subject, Orbital Bombardment, the other day, in which he invokes Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (a book which ranked high on the RWN book list). Is that book mainly about the science and technology of mass drivers and their feasibility? As Steven observes:
[Heinlein] waved his hands really hard to ignore the fact that his moon colony could not have been built unless there were such catapults on Earth, because if there had been his political and military scenario would have changed a lot. This wasn't an oversight; it was a deliberate choice of a good story teller.
The point is, even in "hard" S/F, where the author takes pains to make the science part plausible (rather than just magic-disguised-as-technology), ultimately getting everything technically right takes a back seat to something else that the author considers more important to the point of the story that is being told.
Science fiction isn't usually primarily about science or technology - though it may be about man's use or misuse of science and technology. What makes it compelling are the insights that we might probe into things that are enduring about human nature. Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't about the science of telescreens (now closer to possible due to the magic of cameras connected to the internet). These things are of interest because of the effort, both on the author's part and the reader's, to examine some aspect(s) of the human condition that are presumed to hold true regardless of the setting (or even when the “human” isn’t depicted as human, but as, say, Centauri or Narn).
It’s one way of trying to gain, illustrate, illuminate, probe, and impart knowledge of that. And, I hate to break it to you, but as a literary endevour it’s part of the humanities, not part of the sciences (I know that’s going to be hard for some of you to take, but it’s the truth). One way, but not the only way, just as a good scientist may use a variety of means and instruments to collect a range of data on a complex subject. It may not even be the most efficient and effective way but we still find it not only enjoyable but useful (thought-provoking) because it might offer insights in a way that some other instruments and methods do not, or at least reinforce (or counterpoise) them. But we also use the other methods and instruments as well, this being a rather complex problem. These things are of interest because of the effort, both on the author's part and the reader's, to answer certain questions, perhaps even while "knowing that I would I would never arrive, but knowing that I would grow ever closer, and that was every bit as good" (I told you to read this post, but you didn't believe me! Why didn't you believe me?)
Boiled down to its essence it amounts to finding answers to the question that was asked of Conan; What is best in life? Actually, the answer Conan gave originated with Genghis Khan, but I'd like to think that we've learned that hearing the lamentations of our enemy's women, while sometimes necessary, doesn't come anywhere near approaching what is best in life, the objections of postmodern relativists to the contrary that "perhaps it is in their culture" notwithstanding. That is, we have learned something from history, sociology, all that humanities stuff that inquires into these questions. Now more than a few of my respondents are making arguments are based on an unstated and perhaps even unconscious acceptance of the relativist, postmodernist argument that we haven't, such things are unknowable and any answer is equally valid (or, the flip side of the coin preferred by the critics, worthless and not productive to study). Meanwhile, here I am trying to fight to salvage what we have learned. Is it any wonder that finding that so many who are supposedly "on my side" in this fight have an outlook that is really little different from the views I thought we were fighting against distressing and upsetting? The fact is, we have learned a lot only it has become such a given, taken for granted in how we live and expect to be treated, that we don't recognize it.
Yes, I know that currently these Humanities departments are infested with people who want to obfuscate what we have learned and use rhetorical tactics to try and mystify and even destroy that knowledge. I want to combat it and some others seem to be trying to convince me that we should throw up our hands because, well, those post-modernists are right: its impossible to reach definitive conclusions in these fields, all sorts of interpretations are possible. Lets just stick to science, where things are concrete and no one ever reaches different conclusions and interpretations of the same available, often incompletely comprehensive, data (shhhyah, right).
Now, in sum, as a result of a series of e-mail exchanges with someone, I’ve thought a bit about something, and come to a conclusion that he and probably others are going to want to reject. That conclusion is this: being humans, it probably is true that the most important field of study is ourselves (even with all its indeterminacies and lack of soothingly clear-cut finality of conclusions, at least for some). It ain’t called the Humanities because it is the study of matter formation at the heart of a star in the crab nebula (“on a thirty-six year mission to the Crab Nebula. We've made this trip dozens of times. (to audience) You know, they say sometimes people go CRAZY on these long trips.”) Which brings me to Hagemaier's post.
The problem with this post is it is built upon misinterpretations of what I wrote. So when I write that "this post would make even less sense if the lesson from it was that "independent study" is bogus, listen to your professor and follow what Fromm tells you about understanding Orwell", he imposes an interpretation that I mean just that: that I'm asserting the unquestionable Authoritah of the University and its current Professorate. Corrected in e-mail, he then (in e-mail) asserted that when I wrote techne I meant technology and technical stuff and was denigrating the sciences as a result, even though I defined the term in said post this way: "Techne, advancements in method (a concept that includes but is broader than technology or even "hard sciences")" and throughout the post analogized social method to scientific method in a way that identified them and showed how similar Techniques were useful; far from expressing contempt for it I was highlighting its value, not simply to science but more broadly. It became rather evident that perhaps Hagemaier was misinterpreting what I wrote because, possibly, he was trying too hard to find something to criticize. In any case, he wrote:
The advantages of the Civilization to which Porphyrogenitus refers is not a creature of the Humanities, or even the University. It is a characteristic of Western intellectual life. We could take the great universities of history and plop them down in the centre of Cairo, endowed with every advantage and a bottomless fund of wealth, and a single generation would leave those universities a blasted expanse.
What is the font of "Western intellectual life"? It itself is generated by certain concepts, ideas (oh, those!) that have produced methods that work better than other alternatives (and yah, those ideas would work in Cairo if they took root there). One of those methods was, um, that, well, a center of learning - we call it a "University" - is a good way to promote and advance knowledge across a wide spectrum of fields. That is, when said universities function according to their purpose. If they are as unimportant to the process as Hagemaier seems to think, then it wouldn't be worth the effort to combat what is breaking them. Who could care?
The problem is that these institutions I am concerned about, of which the university is one example (an emblematic one) are part and parcel of that which constitutes "Western intellectual life". Now, perhaps someone will come up with a better mouse trap - something that will replace and be better than, an improvement upon, the University, an institution that yes, now, in the wrong hands and infected by bad ideas may be sliding into decadence. But we also need to remember that institution's importance to the Dawn as well, and until someone comes up with something better then restoring functionality to the University is a key to perpetuating Western intellectual life. Not the only key - there are other things, too, and it's not the only institution. But in my posts I haven't talked only of the need to restore to vitality only one institution. But we have to start somewhere, just as they did.
Regarding his "smart ass" response to my remarks on theories of cycles, I note that in order to make those remarks he omits any reference to where I say "Or, rather, their is a grain of something to that [cyclical theory] but not in the way they ["Progressive" reactionaries] stressed it". Hagemaier has been reading this site long enough to know that I favorably reference, for example, Generational theory (see here and here and here), and did so in the first "Sisyphus Shrugs" post, so his condemnation of me on these grounds is based on another spurious misreading of what I have written.
Basically, in his response, Mitch is being as big a jerk as he can, apparently deliberately. I have no idea why since I have been cordial in previous exchanges with him even where we disagree. However, here I don't really see disagreement so much as an effort on his part to invent some, for whatever reason. If there is another explanation for the nature of his post and the misinterpretations that are in essence repeatedly attributing to me the opposite of what I argued, I'd welcome hearing it.
Now, we did end up with a real disagreement amid the ones he invented, because, yah, I do ultimately believe that, with us being human and all, the study of humanity is of the most vital importance to us. “Not to be a smartass”, but he’s free to disagree and believe that understanding what is best in life for an electron is of equal or greater importance (but, then, I thought he wasn’t a postmodernist?). Anyhow, it won’t bother me a bit if he wants to believe that. I’ll make my arguments and if they don’t convince him, he can make his. I do, however, always and invariably strongly object to and negatively react to mischaracterizations of my positions. It simply won’t do, and it’s not conducive to amity and cordiality on my part. Like I said, my heroes are people like Scarlett and Cartman. Not really the kind of people who, when slighted, respond with a smile and a shrug. Oh, not at all.
Right Wing News has a rundown of books that a number of Rightish bloggers say influenced their thinking. I wasn't asked, so I didn't tell, which is probably fine since I'd have a hard time with a list without fearing I'd leave something out.
Counting a series (such as the Chronicles of Narnia or the Hitchhiker's Guide books) as a single entry, I've read about half these (ironically, considering the titles of some recent posts, not including "Atlas Shrugged"). If I were making a ranking in order I'd probably place Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty ahead of his The Road to Serfdom, though the latter is certainly more widely read and cited and was of major impact when it was published, the arguments in the former are more fully formed and wider in scope.
I'm somewhat surprised that none of Thomas Sowell's books appear on the list. I'll take that to mean I should keep hawking them. {*_+}
Related to the subject of Democrats and giving them their props when it is due is this blog of her impressions of a trip to Iraq by Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. Also, I saw this piece on the efforts of David Wellstone, son of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Now, I certainly wouldn't share a lot of his views, but what impressed me was that he seemed to have a great distaste for what Arnold Kling called "rhetorical rubble". It seemed he wants to promote debate on the substance without personal demonization of those who disagree or hyperbolic animosity. Also, recognition is due of Andrew Cuomo's recent observations. Now, I disagree with him that the Democrats are "bloodless" (their blood is certainly up), but he was on the money in saying "fumbled the seminal moment of our lives ... We handled 9/11 like it was a debate over a highway bill instead of a matter of people's lives" and in trying to prod the Democrats towards more a more solid position. I also want to give props to, of all people, former Gore Campaign Manager Donna Brazile, who has been giving the Democrats some very sage advice along the same lines according to what I've heard on the radio from time to time over the last couple months. Every time I hear about it, though, I can't find something on the web to link to and quote from on it. Which is too bad because, yah, sure, I'm not going to share her views on domestic policy but if the Democrats would listen to people like her, and Cuomo (Andrew) and Zell Miller and their like when it comes to what these Democrats have to say about security and foreign policy, I'd be a lot happier (and I bet folks like Armed Liberal would be ecstatic). And the Republicans would have some real competition on the issue. Which might help keep them focused rather than considering bailing.
See? Having a good "Loyal Opposition" is good for everyone.
So, remember before the war, when the Human Shields were going over to Iraq? And whenever someone even hinted that they were supporters of Saddam they would denounce that, and say that no, they abhorred Saddam and his policies but were for the Iraqi people?
Ok, so I've been reading the news accounts of the latest round of bombings in Iraq. I figured that if anything was deserving of such protection as having a ring of human shields to prevent bombing, it might be a Red Cross facility dedicated to succoring the Iraqi people. But no mention of any human shields. But then I thought: Of course, they left Iraq after the fighting (some left during the war). But of course now they should be planning on returning to Iraq, right? Out of the same interest for the well-being of the Iraqi people. I mean, sure, they don't like Bush's policies, but they claimed they didn't like Saddam, either. So I scanned the papers and news wires for stories of their plans to return to Iraq. I haven't found any such stories about any of the former human shields who went to Iraq to protect it from American bombs planning on returning to Iraq to place their bodies between bombs and Red Cross facilities now. But surely they must be doing just that, if they were sincere when they said they did not support Saddam, only the Iraqi people. I just haven't found the stories. Do you happen to know where the human shields are?
I'm unsettled and dissatisfied with my reply to Terrey Cobb's idea in the previous post. I'm going to leave that one up anyhow if only because, along with the Bio-rant, which was generated for other reasons than biographical and is being left as-is "Just to Show 'em", it's the closest anyone is going to get to a "biographical-related" post for some time. That post is a hopeless tangle but I'm not going to untangle it.
But I'm not dissatisfied with it only because it's a mess. I wasn't happy with the tenor of my response even when I made it. I'm afraid I'm giving the impression that I'm insufferable, easily exasperated, and don't value input. Quite the contrary; even stuff I disagree with I value getting. With out it there isn't any real dialogue, and for me at least, stuff I disagree with prompts thinking.
Cutting through the exposition (already), here is a better and more pithy response to Terrey Cobb's proposal and why I recoil from it:
To me, everything that we think of as Civilization, all the accumulated wisdom and examples of folly, are embodied in the Humanities. The techne is the product, not the source, of that. This again emphasized where I disagree with Marxists: as someone else once put it, ideas matter most. This was a Foundational conservative insight (at least when it comes to conservatism of the American variety) which I think is correct. It is civilization, ideas, accumulated human experience, that produces what we have. Yes, the byplay is a little more complicated than that: some ideas do not become possible until after certain techniques (technologies, whatever) make them thinkable, which in turn produces later innovations, &tc. (c.f. James Burke, who is not always right but is on to something).
But technical aptitude does not sustain, much less create, Civilization or its advances. It is fostered by the the Civilizational backdrop. This is a insight that many of us all too readily acknowledge when it comes to analysis of What Went Wrong in relation to why Islamic Civilization began to lag behind Western Civilization and does not foster much scientific or technological innovation.
Techne, advancements in method (a concept that includes but is broader than technology or even "hard sciences"), are fostered in a situation where people have the best (humanly) possible access to reliable data on results of past experiments (to use a less "soft, humanities" oriented description) - and, again, this is, when humans are concerned, not limited to the results of "hard science" experiments. It is, indeed, very Hayekian to say that it extends to all human experience. "Look, see, over here and over there and in this other place they tested Rousseau's theorem of forcing people to be free, and the result was a nightmare each time" (to take one of the more obvious examples).
At least when I was at Uni, one of the things that was all the faddish rage among "Progressive" academics (both faculty and "Progressive" students) was that, well, the Western concept of time is linear but "Native Peoples"/"Traditional Peoples"/{fill in favored term of the moment} have a cyclical sense of time and, gosh, isn't that just the bee's knees? Wouldn't we be better off if we understood that things are cyclical?
Um, No. Or, rather, their is a grain of something to that but not in the way they stressed it. See, the "Progressive" Reactionaries found that concept most attractive for reasons that we might find abhorrent, because it means precisely that people are unable to accumulate reliable information (note that this was often paired with "de-privileging" written accounts and exalting pre-literacy oral traditions); "the Left refuses to learn from history because they want to repeat it": there is no progress here (but that's fine, since they lived in harmony with the earth, unlike the West. That's why the romanticized vision of "Traditional Peoples" are "Native Peoples" and Europeans are never considered natives to any part of Terra by the "Progressives"). There is no real way of passing along knowledge or even forming the sort of decentralized knowledge that Hayek talks about as informing society and which no centralized elite can duplicate unless society is vastly simplified. . .
Those "annoying electives" that Computer Science majors are forced to take simply are requirements of a University education (as is at least a basic knowledge of sciences that us Humanities majors are compelled to take). Not necessarily in the form they're taught now. But spreading the meme that "the Humanities are Bunk" is not really a means of passing the torch of this Civilization forward or even keeping its flame lit. We need more widespread knowledge of the kind that real Humanities - of philosophy and political science and history (which provides a context of how the former may work in practice; philosophy and polisci are the "thesis", and history the lab experiment), of literature at its best with its insights into human nobility but also human foibles and failings. Wide and deep so we see the value of other cultures but also of our own, and the commonality of vice and corruption and the origins and sources of progress in humanity (in all that word's meaning). People don't know how to get from where we are to where we might want to be unless they have reference points (simple physics, right?), don't know whether we're travelling in the right direction and at what speed without them, either. Don't even know which direction is preferable, which goal is worth striving for, unless they have a good grasp of what is possible.
These are things that apply not just when we're discussing what is technically feasable in the realm of physics, chemistry, aeronautics, and the like with respect to the range of options we have for applying kinetic force to a problem, but the entire range of human goals. Indeed, one must go beyond science to decide whether that kinetic option is one that's on the table, into a realm where all these "soft science" (with "science" used loosely if not scoffingly) humanities muses live. What path do we think will be the best to walk on the road to the future? It helps to know what paths people have tried in the past and how that worked for them.
It also helps to know because then one has yardsticks of one's own upon which to come up with independent judgements, rather than being gulled into the shell-game of applying the standards others select for you in any given situation (for example, a "zero error" standard when it comes to the policies of Republican Presidents or a standard of forgiving lenience when it comes to the retroactive claims of former Democratic Presidents, to pick just one example out of a hat at random). As Thomas Sowell has put it, any standard set sufficiently high is impossible to meet and any standard set sufficiently low can be met by anyone. It's harder to independently judge whether someone is, um, massaging the standard in a unfair way in certain contexts unless you know about a range of roughly comparable situations and contexts and are able to analogize and come to independent judgements.
Many people point to their respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the American people but ultimately all these things require more than simply being smart. You need the relevant basis of comparison so you can apply your intelligence and also sufficient intelligence to recognize when you don't have such knowledge; it then is somewhat helpful to know how and where to try and get it. Do you reach for Howard Zinn's book because you heard that really brilliant Math kid praise him in the movie? Or do you have at least sufficient background knowledge to do some sifting and winnowing based on your own judgement rather than having to rely on some Expert telling you that "Chomsky is the source on things like this"?
The problem is that people aren't being well served by the humanities courses as they've become, but they aren't going to get it from simply taking all the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering courses they can, either.
Civilization is the source of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, not the other way around, and if you want to understand Civilization, if you want to know about what goes on under the hood of a Civilization, you get that knowledge in the humanities, for better or worse, or not at all. Now, it doesn't have to be in a formal classroom (this post would make even less sense if the lesson from it was that "independent study" is bogus, listen to your professor and follow what Fromm tells you about understanding Orwell). But it can't just be blown off and indeed, if one thinks that, sure, you can read books on Computer Science or Electrical Engineering on your own time but it really does help to have someone - say, teachers with proven knowledge - to guide you through the learning process. . .as long as said teacher isn't sabotaging you or mistakenly promoting flawed or counterproductive ideas.
If professors of the hard sciences were, for whatever reason, be it well-intentioned but mistaken concepts or for some other reason, then I think most people's sane reaction would be that the answer would be to correct the problem and fix things so they were serving the Telos (purpose) properly, not just do away with the whole thing and let the whole thing "wither away, as would their influence".
When it comes to what T.C. proposes with respects to the Humanities, I really do think that amounts to saying "stick a fork in our Civilization, it's done". Sure, let the kind of professors we're talking about go howl; I have no brief for them. But don't confuse them with the topics of the Humanities themselves. Just because they're often taught badly or mistaught doesn't mean they are without value. Indeed, there is a reason why people with certain axes to grind took them first in their Long March Through the Institutions; not because they are valueless, but precisely because of the value of holding such strategically vital ground. It's the Prime Mover of everything else, the hub at the center of everything.
Again, don't forget the lessons of Orwell and Huxley on the central importance of such knowledge and why they (not the authors, but the elites in the societies their novels depict) want to keep people in the dark and feed them bovine fecal matter.
Update: Charles Mitchell Hagemaier replies, but in a way that gets at least one of my main thrusts very wrong. Strong Post to Follow on my part, as they say. It'll probably be up by tomorrow morning, along with other mail & comments.
In response to yesterday's post, Terrey Cobb wrote a letter that I'll get to in a second. First, though, this is a fairly unusual post in that it contains more autobiographical and "me, I, myself" stuff than usual. It also, in part because of the autobiographical stuff, contains some bad writing habits that I've been trying to get away from, rambling and with numerous parenthetical asides (sorry, Joe). Terrey Cobb's letter is pithy and to the point, though:
As to the problem which you have described about how the radical left have entrenched themselves in our colleges and universities, I tend to agree with you that the problem will not tend to work itself out.
But perhaps there is a partial solution. For the most part, the truly destructive elements tend to be concentrated in the areas of the "Humanities" and "Social Sciences." But how many people really major in such subjects? If my experience from twenty years ago is really any indicator, most of the people who signed up for Anthropology 101 did not do so because this was their major or because they had any interest in it whatsoever; their degree plans required that they had to take a certain number of courses in various "areas," and therefore they chose to take such courses based on practical nescessity and how well it would fit in within their schedules considering the "real" courses they wanted to take.
My partial solution? Let's start requiring state owned universities to start confering different sorts of degrees. For example, for those wanting a degree in Computer Science let students pursue a degree without having to take any of the annoying electives. Once they are no longer required to take X number of courses in (choose either Sociology/Psychology/Anthropology/Ethnic Studies/etc) I think that the number of students signing up for such classes would dwindle away. And really, once the classes in Sociology started having an average of two students per semester, how long would it be before resources began to be reallocated away from them?
And as a practical matter, considering todays ever changing economy, would it not be to our advantage if our workers could retrain themselves by acquiring degrees in a minimum time? Why, for example, should someone who wants a degree in Electrical Engineering be forced to complete foreign language requirements, especially if they are working at a full time job and have to take classes on the side?
The net effect of such a change would be to put the rancid abscesses of Academia under siege. Deprived of conscripted students, they would tend to wither away, as would their influence.
Its just a thought. If you have the time and/or inclination I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
*Sigh*
I hope T.C. won't mind a somewhat impatient reply. A lot of people apparently no longer understand what is valuable in study of the humanities. From what T.C. is advocating, people may as well just go to technical school if we no longer see value in a broader education ("UNIVERSity").
I believe what leads Terrey Cobb to this conclusion is an accurate understanding that it's folly to send people to classes where they will be miseducated (and their is an obvious reason why many Universities dropped requirements for taking classes in, say, American History or Western Civ and added requirements for "Ethnic Studies" classes; indoctrination being the aim). However, I'm opposed to solutions that throw the baby out with the bath water or would leave us really no better than before.
Allow me to use two books as an example. I may assume that readers are familiar with Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (perhaps you read it as an assigned text for a class). INGSOC went to really amazing efforts to deprive people of historical context, to manipulate the record and even people's memories of the past ("but enough about 'The Big O'"). Why is that? It is because people who are unable to put things in proper context and perspective lack a means of making judicious, informed decisions on their own, making independent judgements by applying historical experience or accumulated human wisdom (broadly speaking, what the Humanities is or should be all about) to the present and in guiding them in choices of directions to strive for ("Who Controls the Present Controls the Past, Who Controls the Past Controls the Future"). INGSOC not only ruthlessly suppressed knowledge about history relevant to their rule and their rise to power, but also literature and art in general (though their was tawdry stuff available). Why is that? I'm sure they didn't mind having as many skilled technicians as they could train, but they recognized - that is, Orwell recognized - that what is decisive in people's ability to either be able to make independent choices of their own or be manipulated and controlled by others is precisely what kind of knowledge-base they have in history, literature, art, &tc of the sort that informs us of humanity in general, its traits and tendencies, how things have and haven't worked &tc.
I've been pondering lately why I didn't remain a Liberal or become a Leftist, though I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, went to school there, went to Churches where pro-Sandanista, pro-FMLN, pro-Nuclear Freeze &tc messages were the order of the day (people talk about the "Religious Right", but there is a vast "Religious Left" out there that doesn't get the attention it deserves), I went to the University of Wisconsin (almost entirely Humanities courses, btw; the only non-Humanities courses I took were requirements. . .), &tc.
Well, ever since at least the 5th grade I have had an interest in history, read it on my own. Read it as a hobby. Early on it was WWII, the Civil War, some WWI, the Revolutionary War, and Mediaeval stuff. Shortly, Roman History as well. Via some of the books I read on the Crusades I became interested in this "Byzantine Empire" thing. I read some on Ancient History, Greek and Middle Eastern. Fiction I read was typically at least tangentially related to history (I donno how many people read Once an Eagle anymore, but I recommend it). I got interested in politics and through that political science and ultimately philosophy. I seemed at many stages to reach interests when lots of "old" books were available, things unaffected by radical revisionism. In 11th grade I exposed myself to the first radical book I read (a screed called "Hey, Whitey!" – it had a subtitle, too, but I’ve forgotten it); (it was part of a class assignment for a history course, we were supposed to pick a book in the school library - I don't even remember the exact topic assigned, related to the Civil Rights era or something along those lines - read it, and do a book report. The title of that one struck me for some reason, I picked it up knowing nothing about it. I doubt one could find it now). When Chomsky gave a speech at the UW I went (I was still in High School at the time), and when WFB gave a speech at the same place, I went to that, too. What's the point of all this?
Well, having read stuff on my own, I don't know if I have a great understanding of people or not. But I became able to form judgements of my own (oooh. . .bad! We're are all now taught that judgementalism is WRONG!!!; why is that promoted? Is it because those promoting it do not make judgements? No, it’s because those they are instructing to not use their own judgement will then be unreflective putty to be molded and shaped) on things; if someone claimed that the West was a font of sexism, racism, slavery, war, imperial expansionism, &tc, I was able to make comparison and contrasts based upon independent knowledge of history including the histories of other civilizations and times (so I didn't have to depend upon skewed accounts of these other civilizations or be easily mislead into thinking that whatever violence, warfare, internal strife and viciousness in an area was introduced by the West and a "legacy of colonial exploitation". Knowing that "shit happens" everywhere immunized me from crap). I knew the context of the Crusades and what set them off, and thus how one-sided portrayals of the Crusading Europeans as an unprovoked invasion inflicted on innocent victim Moslems was inaccurate (there was both nobility and ignobility on all sides, the Crusades themselves however were a reaction to the aftermath of Manzikurt, that is a rather destructive and bloody Turkish conquest of Anatolia and the Levant). Via reading stuff on World War I I read something on the American intervention in Russia after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government, and via that some other stuff on the era. That helped immunize me both against rather romanticized views of the Soviet Union (and for example how we were provoking “legitimate security concerns” by our militarism and hysterical ‘Red Scare’ view of Communism) and cynical views of our role in the world. Knowledge of how ideas have worked in practice helped immunize me to following down certain paths that have, historically, invariably led to bad outcomes (example: I can’t count how often I’ve heard people sympathetic to the Socialist or Communist ideal say that, well, yah, human nature being what it currently is, maybe it doesn’t work in practice – but people can “evolve” to fit the idea; this always reminds me of New Soviet Man, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Year Zero in Cambodia, and the like. It also makes me look askance at one of the uses that “evolved” is often put to – or at least was ~ten years ago; that is, in describing someone of Left views as being “evolved”). Having such knowledge helped me understand that, warts and all, the Free Market is the best we've got and making the "perfect" (especially in the form of Leftist fool's gold) the enemy of the good is folly. It immunized me from utopianism (oh, my pre-school experience did that, too, immunizing me likewise against the idea that anarchy is potentially wonderful and moronic ideas about the raising and educating of children). Historical knowledge and literary knowledge immunized me from the Unilateral Disarmament/Pacifism/Nuclear Freeze stuff that was so prevalent at the time (such knowledge and, again, the pre-school experience of the obedient people being effectively disarmed in the face of the bullies, and also the family military background; indeed, many of the books I had read were ones on my Grandfather's or Uncle's shelves).
I was a Liberal because I was for civil equality, racially and sexually, believed in helping people in need (and at the time thought that meant via the government as the obvious or at any rate best means), and the like and because at the time I thought Republicans were mainly just people who didn't care about anyone else (but I suppose I should've guessed where I'd end up when the character in "Family Ties" that I most sympathized with was Alex P. Keaton and I found the hippie parents insufferable; nor did I like Hawkeye on MASH because I found the anti-military rants to be not only self-righteous but crass; his attitudes towards war were not even in my view then - as a fairly young kid - idealistic, they were inane and destructive; of course, I didn't know the meaning of "insufferable" or "crass" or "inane", so I had unarticulatable but negative feelings. Come to think of it, I didn't like Meathead much either. Any of you Lefties out there reading this and wondering "What Went Wrong" with me should blame those damn fool grad students who ran that University pre-school lab I was sent to as my pre-school, and their application - or misapplication {there is some dispute in my household over that} of Piaget's theories; I have only vague memories, but it ruined airy-headed thinking detached from the consequences for me forever, even before I was able to identify it as such. When "idealistic" theory meets "Lord of the Flies" reality in one's life at a very young age, you get a strong bovine fecal matter detector when it comes to such things, out of a sense of survival. And you end up identifying less with Archie Bunker's Little Goil or Edith (much less Meathed) and more with Scarlett O'Hara. Because a
