Liberal Thursday V: Special Bauerlein Edition!
Last month, Mark Bauerlein wrote a Chronicle of Higher Education essay in which he said this:
In What’s Liberal ... ?, conservatism suffers similarly from stigmatizing references. Bérubé focuses on the anti-academic conservatives and fills his descriptions with diagnostic asides. Gay-rights debates “transform otherwise reasonable cultural conservatives into fumbling, conspiracy-mongering fanatics.” The columnist George Will is “furious,” and the columnist Michelle Malkin writes “shameful” books pressing “‘interpretations’ that no sane person countenances,” while Horowitz exaggerates “hysterically.” Such psychic wants explain why, according to Bérubé, “we just don’t trust cultural conservatives’ track record over the long term, to be honest. We think they’re the heirs of the people who spent decades dehumanizing African-Americans and immigrants, arguing chapter and verse that the Bible endorses slavery and the subjection of women."
Note the lineage: Not a line of reasoning, but a swell of mad wrath. Not Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, T.S. Eliot, and Leo Strauss, but slaveholders, nativists, and sexists. Nothing from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Harvey C. Mansfield, and the late Philip Rieff, to cite more-recent writers who may be termed “educational conservatives.” The scholarly conservative case against higher education is overlooked, while Bérubé devotes too many words to the claims of discrimination by a conservative student on television’s Hannity & Colmes, to a worry by a state legislator about “leftist totalitarianism,” and so on.
By my count, there are three things deeply wrong with this. I’ll get to them on Saturday, but if you’d like to see something even wronger with Bauerlein’s essay, read the whole thing (as they say on blogs) and wait ‘til you get to his treatment of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. You know, there really is only one intellectually respectable way to discuss D’Souza’s The Enemy At Home, and Mark Warren has recently provided a handy demonstration of that way in the pages of Esquire. Bauerlein, by contrast, decided to go the route of the D’Souza Enabler—offering a measured assessment of The Enemy at Home, the kind that helps Dinesh burnish his credentials as a Serious Person. And yes, I’ll get to that on Saturday too. But rest assured that I won’t associate Harvey Mansfield with racism in any shape or form just because he went around for years claiming, without a shred of empirical evidence, that grade inflation at Harvard was the work of molly-coddling liberal professors trying gamely to mask the shortcomings of Harvard’s African-American students.
In the meantime, consider this completely unrelated conundrum: Boogie Nights is very much like Ed Wood in that it is a very good movie about the campy very badness of very bad movies, and it continually (and rather gracefully) walks the line between ridiculing and paying wry homage to its subject. (I mean, Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell really are great names!) And yet Boogie Nights is also like The Kids Are Alright insofar as it takes its name from a song that is entirely appropriate to the subject yet appears nowhere on the soundtrack.
Coincidence . . . or mystery?
In your musings on movies, might you find a connection, somehow, to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? which (as you know) takes its title from a very good movie about… not campy movies, but making movies--Sullivan’s Travels. I don’t know if it can be shoe-horned in, but it might be fun to try. I love the Cohen brothers’ movie-house scene and its connection to the one in the earlier movie.
The meta of movies extends, of course, from movies about movies to books about movies, going back to things like Merton of the Movies and Minnie Flynn. And how’s Queer People for a title of a Hollywood novel (perhaps the first r eally successful one) from 1930?
Bauerlein’s article is one of those abundances or riches leaving one wondering where to start. A box of chocolates all equally compelling. I look forward to seeing what you pick first--daintily, of course.
Captcha: “brought” As in “Brought to you by the people who brought you.”
Posted by Aaron Barlow on 01/04 at 09:40 AMBauerlein’s article is one of those abundances or riches leaving one wondering where to start.
Yep, right now I am having touble getting past:
Sullivan combines academic learning and public engagement in an exemplary model for aspiring intellectuals, and his blog The Daily Dish displays the World Wide Web at its best.[emphasis added - JP]
Tim Berners-Lee must feel so proud right now.
Posted by on 01/04 at 10:28 AMThat is, er, a rich article. Here are some fish in a barrel observations.
Bauerlein’s goalpost-moving--is he talking about “conservatives” or “conservative intellectuals?--is breathtaking. Check this out:
Notwithstanding the outcome of the recent election, in one respect, the last few decades mark a breakthrough era for conservative intellectuals. Their visibility has soared. Thirty years ago, the only place to find conservatives on television was Firing Line, William F. Buckley’s urbane talk show. Today they appear on Meet the Press and 60 Minutes. Conservatives reign on talk radio, and the political-blog universe tends to the right, too, especially to the libertarian view.I wasn’t aware that (American) talk radio was home to any intellectuals--whatever they are--conservative or otherwise. Note that when he finally gets around to listing conservative intellectuals, most of the people he lists are dead. Why not put Augustine and Aquinas on his list, while he’s at it?
And shouldn’t a movement--pace the IHE commenters who think Ward Churchill has as much power as Stanley Fish--be defined by the members and discourses that have the most influence? Hirsch might have been a weight 20 years ago, but today, it’s Coulter, Malkin, Savage, &c., and if Bauerlein declares them not “true” conservatives, as Sullivan does with theocrats, there’s a bit of ‘no true Scotmanism’ going on.
...and then the medievalist goes, what?, at this: When a distinctive intellectual identity emerged 100 years ago in France, it did so as an adversarial one.
What’s Chaucer’s clerk, chopped liver? Or is he talking about some kind of intellectual identity that’s particular to France c. 1906?
I asked the question over at Kaufman’s blog: what’s the relationship between the nerdy academic (think Ball of Fire) and the too cool for school avant garde academic (Socrates, Abalard, Wyclif)?
Oh: mystery.
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:23 AM...and then the medievalist goes, what?
Hang on, Mr. Steel, are you a Grouchy Medievalist? If so, I completely missed where you stopped saying “Ni!” If not, I will use two whole data points to extrapolate a trend about medievalists named Karl. And thence to abandonment of science for economics. I hear AEI is hiring.
The scholarly conservative case against higher education is overlooked
As are flying unicorns who release hit records. For shame, Professor!
to a worry by a state legislator about “leftist totalitarianism,”
Yes, how foolish to spend time worrying about the views lawmakers hold on higher education. It’s not like they have any authority over, say, state colleges. Far, far better to address the cogent arguments of Reginald Butterbut Hedley-Smythe, Baronet, in his 1823 pamphlet “Girlies and Darkies, Oh My!” Since that’s what’s most relevant to the state of higher education in America today.
By the way, I was being sarcastic.
Posted by on 01/04 at 12:39 PMThe relevant point is that conservative ideas aren’t disengaged from power, or conservative intellectuals from paychecks.
This is a relevant point. Bauerlein bemoans the fact that conservative ideas are not seen as independently legitimate, yet he doesn’t deny that they’re propped up by vested interests; he just disparages critics who point out the fact. His conclusion is that intellectual dismissal of conservative ideas must be due to a liberal conspiracy. However, there’s another plausible explanation: stripped of their backing—so-called wingnut affirmative action—the ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Perhaps the conservatives should strive for independence, like the French of 100 years ago, and shrug off their corporate masters.
Posted by on 01/04 at 01:28 PMAlso, Mansfield testified at the Colorado Amendment 2 trail (the one about removing gay rights from the laws of Denver and Boulder) that, in his expert opinion, “homosexuals undermine civilization.” So, we gay kids at Harvard went around putting up posters saying things like “Harvey Mansfield thinks that Plato [of W. H. Auden or Alan Turing or Michelangelo] undermined civilization.” What a hateful man he is.
Posted by ted on 01/04 at 02:19 PMThe people who neglect the full expression of the conservative tradition the most are movement conservatives not liberal professors. I think we should be reading their books and then we should take them apart bit by bit while they watch.
BTW the Cultural Studies section at our local Barnes and Noble is right next to the True Crime. I thought you should know I think it adds to the danger.
Posted by on 01/04 at 02:21 PMOnce the conversation reaches the conservative-versus-liberal or left-versus-right stage, the conversation is exactly one step from evoking Hitler and calling it a day.
Posturing for ill-defined abstracts is a cultural low.
Posted by Centrally Certified Content Publisher on 01/04 at 02:32 PMHang on, Mr. Steel, are you a Grouchy Medievalist?
Yup. Gradually outing myself. And becoming less grouchy.
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:08 PMI think the telling phrase is “The scholarly conservative case against higher education.” Note that he doesn’t say, “against higher education as currently constituted” or “against the liberal domination of higher education.” It is the “case against higher education.” Full. Stop.
This is exactly right, of course. Higher education itself is what conservatives really despise. Higher education depends on an autonomous group of experts who decide for themselves what is and is not worthy knowledge and who have academic freedom that protects their inquiry. Conservatives, from Bill Buckley in ‘51 to Bill O’Reilly today object to the whole enterprise.
And that is also why it doesn’t matter a bit if Buckley was/is urbane and smart and Malkin is hysterical and stupid. Because Buckley argued that people like Malkin should be in charge of higher education. The “The scholarly conservative case against higher education” amounts to putting the yahoos in charge by eliminating academic freedom.
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:13 PMYup. Gradually outing myself. And becoming less grouchy.
Too bad about the lessened grouchiness. But if “Karl the Grouchy Medievalist” can reveal himself to be “Karl Steel,” it might be time for me to pull aside the curtain and acknowledge that mds is really “Buck Naked.”
Though “Karl Steel” also sounds like the sort of pornlike character name that distinguishes the “Left Behind” series (see Slacktivist for details). We’ve got Buck Williams, Steve Plank, Rayford Steele...I was almost expecting “Stanley Powerdrill” to turn up. Either LaHaye or Jenkins must be looking pretty Haggard by now.
Hmm, Rayford Steele...Karl Steel. If, in the books, Rayford’s young son and namesake could be nicknamed “Raymie,” one could almost as easily get “Karl” out of it as well. Coincidence...or mystery?
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:21 PMBuck Naked! What’s going on here?
I thought you were Celine Dion’s sister?Weird real-life moment: We’re young teenagers at a Chuck-E-Cheese pizza restaurant and my friend insists on chasing Chuch-E-Cheese the mascot, pulling his rat-like tail at every opportunity.
Finally, she chases him into a corner. He briefly pretends to cower. I wait from a distance to see what will happen. To my shock, he slowly turns around very slowly, faces her, and flips her the bird.
“F**k you” from Chuck-E-Cheese. Now that hurts…
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:41 PMThat’s a pretty off-the-mark reading on what is going on with Hayek and his absence from colleges. Austrian economics isn’t taught anywhere (mainstream) in the US, for reasons related to theory and study. Thomas Frank’s assessment that he associates British welfare state with Nazism is on the mark. His appreciate of Pinochet hurts his “commitment” to freedom.
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:44 PMAnd my guess for one of the three things wrong is this statement: “Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville [and] T.S. Eliot” don’t get enough critical attention in the academy. wtf? I’m pretty sure you could re-build New Orleans with the weight of dissertations written on those three.
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:47 PMBuck Naked! What’s going on here?
I thought you were Celine Dion’s sister?The same! You didn’t think “Dion” was our real family name, did you? How far do you think Celine would have gotten in Canadian music if her last name made her sound like a barenaked lady?
Posted by on 01/04 at 03:56 PMI suppose you have a point there, mds. Although look where a lack of panties has gotten Ms. Brittney Spears. She’s simultaneously viewed as sexy and crazy.
“The Barenaked Crazy Canadian Lady?” I guess I would buy such a band’s records out of sheer curiosity…
Posted by on 01/04 at 04:07 PMMark Warren was too kind to Dinesh’s book.
Posted by on 01/04 at 04:07 PMNot that it matters, but I guess Arab=Muslim is an equation an apologist for “conservative intellectual thought” is allowed to make and not worrry about how accurate it actually is.
“Hollywood movies and sitcoms, pop music, romance novels, and YouTube fill the Arab street from Tunis to Tehran. . . “
I guess he couldn’t find any Moroccan city that would be made an appropriate alliteration with that well-known (by conservatives?) Arab city Tehren.
Posted by on 01/04 at 04:29 PMHe’d probably be better off with “The Muslim world from Timbukto to Taliwang,” but even reformulated, the idea’s as vacuous at its heart as “the Xian World from Johannesburg to Juneau” or, say, from “the Vatican” to “Vicksburg.”
JPJ: apt.
MDS: trust me, it’s my real name, inasmuch as I could be said to possess such a thing, &c. First name’s a venerable family name going back to the Fjords or whatever, and the last name goes way back to 1922, when some functionary at Ellis Island, I think, engaged in a bit of orthographical flattening that was intellectually of a piece with the whole “Tunis to Tehran” thing.
Posted by on 01/04 at 04:52 PM“Tunis to Tehran”? That reminded me of a song with other towns alliterating on the letter “T.” And then I just couldn’t help myself. I destroyed it.
With apologies to Lowell George:
Gull’ble
I been warped by the right, lied to by their Snow
I’m drunk and dirty don’t ya know, and I’m still, gull’ble
Out of my mind late at night, Seen pretty vict’ry in every headline
Vict’ry, Texas vict’ryI’ve been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Hearin’ every kind of lie that’s ever been made
Drivel from the rightwing that I shoulda marked paid
And if you give me: screed, lies, and whine
and you show me a sign
I’ll be gull’ble, and believe ‘emI’ve been kicked by the cons, robbed by the rich
Had my head stoved in, but I’m still on my feet and I’m still… gull’ble
Now I ate a buncha crap of folks from Mexico
takin’ all the jobs, sneakin’ up from Mexico, and I’m still gull’bleAnd I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Hearin’ every kind of lie that’s ever been made
Drivel from the rightwing that I shoulda marked paid
And if you give me: screed, lies, and whine
and you show me a sign
I’ll be gull’ble, and believe ‘emCaptcha: “similar,” but I reject that. Certainly, were he still alive, Lowell George would deny any similarity....
Posted by Aaron Barlow on 01/04 at 05:14 PMAccording to the Cute Tiny Farmer:
“Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus, is a high-profile academic, liberal and progressive but skeptical enough to scorn his colleagues for their cloistered reflections upon the world.
Oh Herr Dr. Professor Berube, sir, say it isn’t so!
Posted by Hattie on 01/04 at 05:16 PMMDS: trust me, it’s my real name, inasmuch as I could be said to possess such a thing, &c.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply criticism. If you were a character from “Left Behind” (dirty!), I’m sure you’d still be welcome here. Though your dialogue would be much more stilted, and you’d more obviously be making a lot of phone calls. On the other hand, with your real name available, I can now admire your blog. If you know what I mean.
Posted by on 01/04 at 05:17 PMSorry, but this little screed is further evidence of MB’s unfortunate habit of going after soft targets--D’Souza, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, and that pack of hacks and flacks, while ignoring the really troublesome phenomena that really do smack of enforced orthodoxy. Let me mention a couple, just to be concrete:
--The treatment of Ward Connerly at Columbia (MB’s alma mater and that of my kids) when he was invited to give a talk. The man was literally shoved off-campus by protestors while the administration looked on benignly. Of course, Connerly is probably high on your list of cranks and hit-men (I wouldn’t object to that characterization), but that doesn’t vitiate the point. In any event, here are some further instances of non-cranks/hitmen getting it in the neck.
--E.O. Wilson, in connection with his book “Human Sociobiology.” Wilson, too, was physically assaulted while speaking, but that’s relatively minor compared to the campaign of vituperation instigated by Gould, Rose, Lewontin, et al., which led to sociobiology becoming, for many years, a vile epithet in most campus discourse. Wilson happens to be a liberal New Deal Democrat, but that didn’t count for much. The reflexive attitude of many campus mandarins of the ostensible left was that the guy was, ipso facto, a sexist, racist, crypto-Nazi--an attitude that I have personally witnessed in action, and which still leaves traces in such things as G. Levine’s new book, “Darwin Loves You” (see my fothcoming review of same in “Skeptic"). In the long run, sociobiology has flourished modestly, though discretion forced its euphemization into “evolutionary psychology.” But the odor of burning books still lingers.
--The hatchet job on E.D. Hirsch and cultural literacy performed, most notably, by the egregious Barbara Herrnstein Smith in the NY Review of Books some years ago. Hirsch is another liberal egalitarian--but no matter!
--As a very minor instance, I’ll cite my own experience as an invited lecturer in a Rutgers course on Multicultural Identities. My own role was to say something about the misrepresentations of science and its history in the multi-culti lit offered to undergrads, particularly that concocted by Afrocentrists. I was indiscreet enough to point out some obvious facts, for instance: Ancient Egyptians were by no means superscientists whose achievements incorporated quantum mechanics and aviation technology--in particular, their mathematical achievements were, on the whole, rather modest and were not the source of the great breakthroughs of Greek mathematics; Egyptians were not “African” in the sense assumed by Afrocentric writers, in either the cultural sense or in terms of “race”. They had virtually no connection with the West African peoples and cultures ancestral to black Americans.
Such remarks evoked considerable outcries from the black students in the class, who were, I believe, much under the influence of another egregious case, Rutgers’s own Ivan Van Sertima. Nonetheless, the course co-ordinator, a rather daring fellow, promised to invite me back for further discussion. Unfortunately, an unrelated racial uproar erupted at Rutgers a few weeks later, and my host felt he had to cancel the invitation since the points I wanted to make had suddenly become too inflammatory for his charges.
---------------
This kind of orthodoxy still befogs academic life, though it is more muted than formerly. It’s not the stuff of loud showdowns on FOX; but its ultimately much more important to the issues at hand than the turd-slinging of O’Reilly et al. But MB seems all to eager to sidestep such pathology.
Posted by on 01/04 at 06:48 PMFrom Tunis to Tehran, or Milan to Minsk? I guess it all depends upon who’s making the journey, and why.
Posted by on 01/04 at 06:49 PM[In unison]: Noorrrm!
Good screed. There certainly was an overabundance of “levity” around here.
Posted by on 01/04 at 07:39 PMEvolutionary psychology is denigrated by many not because it is politically incorrect, but because it is bogus pseudoscience. By the way, the fact that evolutionary psychology is not only making a “modest comeback” but actually quite en vogue seems to suggest that the “orthodoxy” is not very well enforced.
But no matter; the main problem I have with Norman’s argument is that he seems to have convinced himself that disputes internal to academia are somehow “more important” than what the “soft targets” - all of them with (varying degrees of) influence in the real world - have to say. I’d wager that the terrible influence of Ivan Van Sertima isn’t comparable to that of, say, O’Reilly. Of course in an ideal world D’Souza and company could be dismissed without discussion - but in the real world somebody has to do the dirty work and take them apart.Posted by on 01/04 at 07:57 PMAnd I fed a troll… (bows head in shame).
Posted by on 01/04 at 07:58 PMIf Bauerlein’s synopsis of D’Souza’s book is correct, it sound a lot like Jerry Fallwell’s comment on 9/11:
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
The idea that our “sinful” culture brings down the wrath of God upon us is certainly not new; it was prevalent in the Calvinist churches and Christian school of my youth, along with the idea that America was ripe to be God’s country, if only everyone would straighten up and fly right.
When Bauerlein writes, “It would be healthy for everyone if the academic curriculum broadened its scope, if the lineage of conservatism were consolidated into a respectable course of study,” my question would be, which secular conservative intellectuals could you possibly find to buttress D’Souza’s (and Fallwell’s) argument?
(Hopefully this post isn’t “supersaturated with non-sequiturs”—ref. comment 50, here.)
Posted by on 01/04 at 08:27 PMSo what would the hard targets be, Norman?
And I wonder if you appreciate how damaging the rest of your posting is for your own position. You conflate reprehensible attacks *on* speech, like violence or intimidation, with things that are everyday occurrences *within* public or academic dialogue: (a) people publish critiques of each other’s work all the time, and yes, some of those critiques may strike one as unfair. Big deal. (b) It is a routine part of the experience of being an invited lecturer, especially on a controversial topic, that some members of the audience will be harshly critical. Enough whining!
Posted by on 01/04 at 09:07 PMIn re #26. from christian h.
On what authority does c.h. declare evolutionary psychology a “bogus pseudoscience? There are thoughtful critiques, and the matter is hardly settled definitively. But note that among the prominent scientists who work with the idea we find Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Melvin Konner, Steven Pinker, Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Borat/Ali.G), and Richard Dawkins. This, to say the least, does little to support the villification of ev. psych. as a “pseudoscience”. The fact that the field has (finally) gained a reasonable academic foothold doesn’t refute the patent fact that for years it had to fight vigorously against the stigmatizing rhetoric directed against it, which was indeed an artifact of “left” orthodoxy on the subject, an orthodoxy to whose persistence c.h.’s posting testifies.
This episode is, in my view, more important to deal with than noise from a bunch of tiresome rabble-rousers whose vogue is quickly passing because it points to something unhealthy internal to academic culture, a pathology whose disappearance is by no means guaranteed.
NL
Posted by on 01/04 at 09:09 PMWhat christian and Colin said. I’d like to add the point that both E.D. Hirsch and E.O. Wilson wrote bestselling books, in categories which generally do not produce bestsellers. My guess is that the “odor” is something else.
Posted by on 01/04 at 09:16 PMChristian: It’s a little harsh to call Norman Levitt a troll. His posts are neither inflammatory (considering standard discourse here) nor off-topic, or even insincere. Because people tend to throw the term around in a way that’s well, quite trollish, and manages little more than to convey arrogance without substance, I’d advise using it reluctantly. It also sort-of smacks of that brand of protestant rigidity North America has had such a troublesome time shedding. Just say’in.
NL: There are millions of people MB has not taken to task. That’s a fair observation. However, in the case of higher education versus the dominant culture, it makes sense that one who is in higher education would focus their efforts on those in the dominant culture (throw in Christian’s remarks here for good measure). In this case, it’s not an issue of whether or not militant orthodoxies can manifest within an institution (I suspect it’s a likely result within most institutions), but how much control political institutions should have over academic institutions. The conversation you want to hear about campus behavior, is, I believe, a different one.
Posted by Centrally Certified Content Publisher on 01/04 at 10:18 PMIn re #29 from Colin Danby:
Of course there is, or should be, debate and critique, some of it pretty merciless. I’ve engaged in quite a bit of polemics myself, as you know. But there is a continuum that connects vigorous contention with the kind of orthodoxy that muffles contention, and essentially bars one side of an argument from making its case, at least within the academy. The villification of Wilson and sociobiology produced the latter effect for some years. This was not enforced by intellectual conviction stemming from debate and discussion but by a culture of groupthink, wherein many of the most vehement denunciations came not from biologists, anthropologists, or psychologists who at least understood the issues involved, but from fields like literature, women’s studies, and cultural studies where knowledge of any of the germane scientific maatters was minimal, to say the least, but where Manichean politcal categories had firmly taken root. It was on the basis of those ideological fantasies that a reasonably promising field of study was declared to be forbidden territory.
As to my supposed thin skin at being yelled at during a lecture: You’re dead wrong about that, if only because I perversely enjoy that sort of thing. But I was greatly saddened, not because black students were pissed off by me, but because my university had, in effect, put many of them through a kind of indoctrination adminstered by palpable nutcases like Van Sertima, who, like some other folks whom one might name (Ward Churchill, e.g.) gained preferment for reasons having nothing much to do with scholarly acuity. (As it happens, much of the blame for Van Sertima goes to Transaction Press, a conservative outfit run by the very conservative Irving L. Horowitz, which published Van Sertima’s idiotic book “Blacks in Science, Ancient and Modern” because there was, by their standards, big money in it.) On the other hand, the further decision to rescind an invitation to me was precisely the kind of academic pussyfooting that really does piss me off.
For the rest, I leave the whining to you.
NL
Posted by on 01/04 at 10:40 PMPennebaker’s Dylanmentary, Don’t Look Back, did not include the Boston song from which it took its name.
Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan on 01/04 at 10:51 PMSure is nice to return from my sabbatical and see that this blog’s throe weight hasn’t slipped a bit, despite rumors. Saturday it is!
Posted by Romy B. on 01/04 at 10:53 PMI have long wanted to ask this question, but have always felt it was too stupid. Nevertheless, I will now bite the bullet:
What is THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT supposed to mean? What are the broader social issues explored in this song?
My understanding is that a guy has a girlfriend whose parents don’t like him. He is bad at planning, so he’s not going to ask her to run away with him. Instead, he will leave her to party with his (presumably younger?) friends. He doesn’t mind her dancing with them, since “the kids are alright.”
But how much younger can these “kids” be than the singer/protagonist, if he is worried about annoying her parents? He sounds pretty wet behind the ears, and pretty ditzy to boot.
Is the protagonist trying to sing the virtues of his own generation by saying “The Kids Are Alright?” Or is he an older guy with problems, coming to terms with the idea that he’s going to leave his woman with the Slacker crowd? (I guess they would have been Gen-Xers in the making back then)?
Any thoughts?
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:04 PMI’m with Norm. I hate it when it’s suggested that people living 4,000 years before me had the same intellectual capacities I do, especially when those people didn’t have my racial make-up and the people doing all the suggesting are Afrocentrists. It’s insulting on so many levels.
Don’t worry, Norm. Things are looking up for Rutgers: the multi-cultis are on the wane and the football team promises to be in the big time for decades!
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:05 PMNot to mention those cool new buildings coming to New Brunswick. Go McCormick!
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:09 PMThanks for the reply, Norman, but you ignore my first question re #23 about who the hard targets are.
Re the rest of that paragraph, I had my undergraduates reading Wilson just a few quarters ago. Sarah Hrdy commonly appears on Women’s Studies syllabi. Sociobiological research flourishes. So your “a reasonably promising field of study was declared to be forbidden territory” is hysteria. Yes, folks have been and still are sharply critical of Wilson. I don’t think anyone who reads him carefully would be surprised by that! Part of Wilson’s virtue is that he is not a conciliator or difference-splitter: he inexorably and with exemplary clarity follows premises out to their conclusions, no matter how reductive, in areas like art or religion, those conclusions may appear to most readers.
I agree with you and Mark B that we need more thoughtful and critical conservative writing in academic life. But still all I’m seeing in your postings is a lively sense of personal grievance, projected onto an imagined orthodoxy.
(CCCP is quite right, though, that you’re in no way trolling.)
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:41 PMIn re #37 from Steve (any last name?)
Are you actually offering an opinion, or is it merely a sardonic exemplification of what is allowed to pass as an opinion in some precincts of the academy?
If you have any facts to offer about scientific or mathematical achievements of Africans or Egyptians or Eskimos or Daughters of the Confederacy ca. 2000 BC, please present them.
Otherwise, you merely incarnate once more the following all-too-familiar logic: (1) So-and-so (name your favorite example of victimhood) has got it in the neck from western civilization these past few centuries; (2) It would therefore be palpably unfair, goddam it, if So-and-so couldn’t claim credit for the early anticipation of some remarkable “western” achievement (quantum mechanics, say); (3) Unfairness isn’t allowable, and besides, some guy (who can’t tell a self-adjoint operator on the separable Hilbert space of square-summable complex functions on configuration space) from a sack of potato chips) managed to self-publish a book that claims that So-and-so invented quantum mechanics in 1729, BC, thanks to the mystic wisdom inherent in their ancestral bloodline; (4) Ergo, So-and-so developed quantum mechanics 3800 years before the Europeans (take that, Heisenberg!) (5) Corollary: I’m a very virtuous political person for believing all the above.
So: either come up with some interesting evidence (and I do mean evidence) or take your fucking dumb-ass sarcasm and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
By the way, my major campus polilticking, such as it was, over the past few years was devoted to the quixotic struggle to prevent Rutgers from plunging headlong into the filthy culture of big-time football. The results are depressingly obvious. (See
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30E17F73C540C728CDDA90994DE404482 )
This stuff with MB is just a minor sideline.
NL
Posted by on 01/04 at 11:42 PMWell, I just got back from dropping off Number One Son at JFK, and I note that Stormin’ Norman still hasn’t read my book but is stopping by the blog every so often nonetheless to tell me what it does and doesn’t do.
As I said at the MLA, my blog has helped bring me to the attention of some of the most remarkably barking-mad people in the English-speaking world. And roughly seven of every ten of my weirdest trolls have been professors.
Posted by Michael on 01/04 at 11:51 PMIn re # 39 from Colin Danby:
It’s nice that you’re assigning your students Wilson (in what context, BTW?), but not terribly germane to my point, since the demonization of Wilson and sociobiology was in full flower between the late ‘70’s and the early ‘90’s, but has tailed off considerably since, probably because Wilson is such a vociferous champion of biodiversity and preservation of fragile environments. (See, e.g., Andrew Ross’s fulminations ("The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life")for a bit of the old-time religion).
As to hard targets--hard, in the sense that there is some inevitable emotional pain in dealing with them--I’m talking about the fact that the liberal academic establishment, using the L-word in several senses, still has some work to do putting its ethical house in order. One of the major reasons that Horowitz and his minions can get away with so much crap is that they can start from a position that has some plausibility, because, specifically, of the high-handedness and censoriousness toward unwelcome opinions and the eagerness to proselytize to a captive audience of which the left professoriate has frequently been guilty. This is a real phenomenon, not just a Coulterian fantasy. I’ve even seen it, though infrequently, in math courses (of the math-for-poets variety). My students have certainly been aware of it (along, presumably, with their parents). Indeed, so were my kids, who went to college in the ‘90’s. For a fact, my daughter, who is every inch a bleeding-heart lefty, came home from Barnard from time to time with disdainful tales of “feminazis”.
That being so, an air of injured innocence when such things are mentioned is not particularly wise, tactically speaking.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:05 AMWell, Norm, you’re on to me. I don’t have a last name, and I have stuck my sarcasm where you’ve indicated. I’m not about to extol the virtues of ancient Egypt, especially since their achievements (here I’m thinking of pretty pictures I’ve seen of pyramids and such) involved slavery (so I hear). But I wasn’t interested in the Egyptians to begin with--only with the story you were telling, apparently to Black students, that the great achievements in scientific thought don’t belong to them. On reflection, I guess it’s possible my reaction resulted from indoctriation that makes me sensitive to encoded power grabs. By the same token, and on further reflection, I was right to bet in my post above that I could tell exactly what you thought about Rutgers football, College Ave. renovations, and I would even now say I could predict what you thought about the racial incident that kept you from returning for that second guest lecture (which I imagine was that comic in the Targum). So hey, you can talk crap about my groupthinkyness if I can make fun of yours.
Respectfully,
Steve SomethingPosted by on 01/05 at 12:18 AMNorman, I fully, enthusiastically agree that in a lot of areas debates should be opened wider and I periodically yell at people on this and other blogs who stigmatize conservatives as reactionary know-nothings. Just the other week one of the Valve crew called me a Republican for doing that. I don’t however buy that there’s a single crushing orthodoxy out there. Part of what I am delighted to find we agree is Horowitz’s crap is a tendency rapidly to generalize from the stupidities that any huge, shaggy system will throw up (how many institutions of higher ed are there in the United States?) to the idea that there is one massive academic conspiracy against Truth and Justice and the American Way.
Just to circle back, and then I’ll try to shut up, Mark B argues that Michael is shootin’ farm-raised quail—anyone can confute Horowitz, even after a couple beers, but there’s a more serious “scholarly conservative case against higher education” that he’s dodging. I want citations. So I read your “soft targets” in that context; it looks like you meant something else. In any case I think you’ll find when you read WL that it has a slightly more complex argument.
As to your what-context question, I put Wilson in “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Inquiry,” the required intro course to the upper-level interdisciplinary program in which I’m privileged to teach. Wilson is among other things an important interdisciplinary thinker. We also read part of Allan Bloom’s _Closing of the American Mind_. I’m very much on the lookout for stuff of that caliber.
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:57 AMFrom today’s RedState front page.
Caption 1 (from Bauerlein)Herein lies the plight of conservative intellectuals. They seek to reflect upon the events of the day, but the ideas they draw upon are ignored by professors and cheapened by liberal intellectuals.
Caption 2: (again Bauerlein)
More important, however, the conservative tradition remains a vital resource of ideas and theories, a heritage that claims world triumphs.
Caption 3:
Dick Cheney commandeers Gerald Ford’s corpse to travel back in time and trigger a GNF “back when it would’ve fucking helped.”
Caption 4: (after the last panel in WLAtLA: The Graphic Novel)
Students queue up for a chance to get off campus for Spring Break!
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:58 AMOn what authority does c.h. declare evolutionary psychology a “bogus pseudoscience?
You might look to Susan McKinnon’s Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology. While McKinnon’s approach isn’t perfect--she’s wedding to a sharp divide between humans and animals and committed, so far as I can tell, and ironically enough, to a liberal model of free will--the targets that Pinker et al. provide are big enough that she knocks them down, to my mind, convincingly. The evidence, NL, is on her side.
Small potatoes vis-a-vis your other points, which I’ll leave to others, but potatoes nonetheless.
Posted by on 01/05 at 01:02 AMNL: “biologists, anthropologists, or psychologists who at least understood the issues involved, but from fields like literature, women’s studies, and cultural studies where knowledge of any of the germane scientific maatters was minimal…
That statement strikes me as dubious on oh so many levels. As the t-shirts say, “Ask me how.”
As it stands, the above could read “People who are into literature, women’s studies and cultural studies don’t know anything about science.” How do you know that?
BTW: My husband, a physicist, has trouble thinking of anything in your list of “sciences” (except for biology and bone digging) as science!Posted by Hattie on 01/05 at 01:16 AMCertainly there are a number of valid criticisms of evolutionary psychology by folks like McKinnon and Ehrich, but it hardly warrants the label of “bogus pseudoscience”.
I will say just this. The reception in the scientific and political communities of approaches such as Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (and many prove to be overstretches and will certainly fall by the wayside - “memetics” for sure & possibly ev psych) illustrate the long slow complications (we are clearly still well in the societal/political tail of evolution itself) that arise when “scientific” approaches are pursued that come within shouting distance of the consensus reality self-images held by any sizable group(s) (and in particular those with any form of societal power.) And further, they illustrate why Science Studies is such an important, intriguing, difficult and controversial field. (As does why NL chose those examples in the first place, why christian h. chose to reply with such an overheated label, why Karl and I felt compelled to chime in further - and what areas Hattie’s husband views as legitimate sciences.)
And looking ahead, if I were Bette Davis I’d say: Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy century.
Posted by on 01/05 at 02:24 AMAfter reading this discussion, one might conclude that this Norm is simply incommensurable.
Posted by on 01/05 at 02:32 AMIn re #43 from Steve @#&&#$*
No, great scientific achievements don’t belong to black students. But that’s a mere consequence of the fact that they don’t belong to any students. Your ancestors don’t do your thinking for you, a fact which the academic left, in its contemporary degenerate state, finds it difficult to grasp. By the way (as I mentioned to those self-same black students) insofar as I can determine, it’s most unlikely that any of my ancestors could have had aught to do with with significant scientific achievements. They were in the wrong place and the wrong culture at the wrong time. This is a fact of which I am neither ashamed nor proud; it’s amazingly irrelevant to a scientific career.
What is relevant, however, is the ability to face facts in whatever arena of inquiry one is working in. It was this ability that was being disparaged and repressed in the black student culture taught to venerate “Afrocentrism.” By implication at least, you seem to approve of this intellectual deformity.
As to the incident that touched off the cancellation of my invitation (an infinitesimal fragment of a major shitstorm), you happen to be dead wrong in your guess. I’ll leave it at that.
Posted by on 01/05 at 05:45 AMIn re #45 from JP Stormcrow:
You quote, contemptuously, from Bauerlein
“More important, however, the conservative tradition remains a vital resource of ideas and theories, a heritage that claims world triumphs.”Your argument seems to consist of conflating the conservative intellectual tradition with some clown of a redneck blogger.
I have to infer that Bauerlein was referring to a roster of thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Herder, Smith, Burke, Toccqueville, Ricardo, Carlyle, Hawthorne, Adams(Henry), Eliot (along with various Agrarians), Faulkner, and even Bellow and Friedman.
Do you think such people should be ignored or merely cited as cautionary examples? I don’t. I think they should be studied quite seriously. This goes especially for left-radicals, not because they should be disabused of their radicalism but because they need desperately to learn not to rely on lazy arguments and weak thinkers.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 06:03 AMIn re #46 from Karl Steel
I hadn’t heard of Susan McKinnon. A quick trip to Googleland informs me that she’s a cult. anth. forged in the dark Satanic mills of post-Geertzian cult. anth. and with much of the postmodern soot still clinging to her hide. That’s as may be. But I also note that her chief collaborator seems to be Sarah Franklin, which fact sets alarm bells to clanging at hellish volume. I am familiar with S. Franklin of old from her piece “Making Transparencies”, which appeared in the issue of Social Text that Alan Sokal turned into a source of innocent merriment (Social Text 46/47). Since this was an arrant hatchet-job directed at lil’ ol’ me, I feel no compunction whatever in categorizing Franklin as a mendacious, libelous pig-turd.
Of course this is no smoking gun as regards whatever argument McKinnon makes. In theory, her reasoning may be sound and telling. My characterizations are obviously ad feminam and nothing but. But still, one’s eyebrow shoots up a yard or two when told to rely on the acumen of a scholar whose taste in co-authors is so foul.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 06:26 AMCertainly there are a number of valid criticisms of evolutionary psychology by folks like McKinnon and Ehrich, but it hardly warrants the label of “bogus pseudoscience”.
Possibly not, at least as opposed to out-and-out sociobiology. I’m willing to give Trivers the time of day, for instance. Though I doubt he’s the sort of scholarly conservative thinker Bauerlein (or Levitt) has in mind. And in a general sense, consilience is kinda cool; Astarte knows, we physical scientists have a distressing tendency towards reductionism. But hey, what can we do? We’re genetically programmed to be reductionist scientists.
Now, attacks on the credentials of critics of evolutionary psychology are almost humorous coming from someone who is dismissive of Gould (and presumably Lewontin), even though expertise in evolutionary biology could naively be considered a requirement for evolutionary psychology. Oh, right, though, Pinker is your main man, and he wouldn’t recognize falsifiability if it bit him on the ass. “Not a single theory, but a large set of hypotheses.” Whatever you say, Professor Pinker. Gad, sometimes I wish Kuhn had become a shoe salesman. Undermining the fiction that science is a purely objective, incremental pursuit seems to have led to people thinking that absolutely anything can be “science” if it’s controversial enough. Observations, testable hypotheses, and predictions still need to be in there somewhere. But that’s enough over-the-top dissing of
superstring theoryevolutionary psychology for one comment.And as an elderly intertubist, may I say that in some sense Mr. Levitt is a troll, since in the pre-blog era a “troll” was someone who dragged deliberately provocative statements behind their boat to get things hopping in a newsgroup thread. Contrast this with “Stupid libs, you should all die.” But the old-style trolling was not always a bad thing; hasn’t discussion here become lively in a somewhat on-topic way?
Oh, and Foucault: I realized that some of your gender confusion arises from the use of “Buck.” It was a more obviously feminine “Buq” in the original québécois, but I Anglicized it in protest of Celine changing her last name to “Dion.”
Posted by on 01/05 at 09:53 AMI’m not telling you to rely on her acumen. I’m suggesting that you read the book and make up your own mind. It’s very short and cheap.
Some other points: if Bauerlein wanted to cite those thinkers, he could have. He didn’t. He referred to conservative “intellectuals,” and somehow, slyly, folded “conservative” talk radio into that category. In other words, the charge you level at Stormcrow, NL, goes just as well for Bauerlein. As I said in #3.
I also wanted to mention, above, that the bizarro MB also played to the groundlings by characterizing the conservative blogosphere as tending towards libertarianism, which strikes me as ludicrous, given the “conservative” blog world’s defense of unlimited surveillance on American citizens and “defense” of marriage. You probably don’t fight a two-front war here, NL, by defending Bauerlein’s article.
Your ancestors don’t do your thinking for you, a fact which the academic left, in its contemporary degenerate state, finds it difficult to grasp.
Well, that’s astonishing, unless you’re talking about the late 80s and Black Athena. That was hot then, when I was starting college, but it’s hardly “contemporary.” Strikes me that the current state of the academic left--if we want to collapse it into one borgy mass--is rather more committed to frustrating any claims to origin and descent. For that matter, it’s also big on confounding nostalgia, whether of the left or right (example of nostalgia in your post: the well-neigh pleonastic adjectives “contemporary degenerate"). As a member of the academic left (or, rather, as a leftist member of academia), and a medievalist, I think looking to the past for justification--whether it’s to a perfect point before academia went off the rails, or, say, to a Irish women-centered Xianity before the Council of Whitby throttled it--is generally bad thinking. It normally has to ignore a lot of facts to make its narratives work. Nothing new here: in being against all foundationalism, at least so far as concepts go, I think I’m a pretty typical.
Posted by on 01/05 at 09:53 AMAhem. First, let me say that comment 52 shows why Norm is the last person to complain about labeling. As for bogus pseudoscience: yes, I was being deliberately strong there. My beef isn’t free will, nor do I dispute that some behavior and traits are genetically determined - I think it very likely, actually: of course some human behavior is based on instinct (what the lit-crits here might call “Id"), and instincts have been formed by evolution.
My problem is that in order to establish itself as its own field, evolutionary psychology has to, let’s say, bite off way more than it can chew. This leads to a large number of ex-post-facto explanations of psychological phenomena - or alleged psychological phenomena - thereby abandoning the scientific method and opening the door wide for political exploitation. As a concrete example I offer the claims that one reason there are fewer women in the “hard sciences” is that male intelligence (or most any trait, actually) has, for evolutionary reasons, a greater variance than female one.
These claims are typical in many ways: they happen to support the societal status quo and in fact take it as a data point to support the conclusion (circular reasoning); they are based on very incomplete data even if taken on their own terms (i.e., even if we somehow convince ourselves that SAT’s and such measure innate intelligence); there are lots of unexamined assumptions, the biggest of which is that there even is such a thing as “intelligence” that can be measured; and a clever person could likely find an evolutionary explanation for the opposite data as well.By the way, happy new year to all (somewhat late...)!
Posted by on 01/05 at 10:03 AMEr.. thank you, Buq (or Buck), for clearing up at least some of my gender confusion. Although I’m still not sure if you are Celine’s brother or sister, I see that your lovely feminine name also seems to function in Arabic, where it denotes a kind of trumpet. Are you *all* musical in your family? It seems that way.
Where is Lee Edelman when you need him? He would fix all of your wagons with his critique of the logic of reproductive futurity!
Posted by on 01/05 at 10:44 AMAre you *all* musical in your family? It seems that way.
Why, yes. [Beat] Except for Celine.
Where is Lee Edelman when you need him?
Isn’t that a meaningless question? We don’t need him, unless he’s willing to contribute to the reproductive success of our species.
And uh, what christian h. said, more cogently and less vituperatively than I. (Grumble, grumble. Curse you, dr. h, you, you… Doob!)
Posted by on 01/05 at 11:02 AMYou are very funny, and so mean to your poor sister!
Other thoughts:
Can you add and subtract, multiply and divide, using of the knowledge of the past so as to make it relevant to your everyday life? If so, then the scientific achievements of the past belong to you regardless of your skin color.
****
If white students and teachers have no problem feeling that their musical legacies include James Brown, Motown, Jimi Hendrix, the Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and related artists, then I don’t see why black students and teachers can’t lay claim to the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptian scientists.
If white suburban young men entertain the idea that they are black ghetto rappers, then why can’t black ghetto rappers fancy the idea that they are descendents of Albert Einstein?
Though not an Algerian Jew, I feel “related” and “indebted” to Jacques Derrida. I feel the same way about William Shakespeare and Rosa Parks. And when it comes to scientific accomplishments, I think we owe a tremendous debt to the animals from whom we evolved, and on whom we experimented to make our finds.
Posted by on 01/05 at 11:31 AMBuck Naked : Yeah, I’m reassessing my defense of Norman. But ya know, once someone has been called a Troll, it sort-of legitimizes the subsequent screed - something about social norms. Granted, he’s still being a little childish.
Norman Levitt: Your arguments are increasingly tangential. I’m lost. It seems you disagree with some ideas commonly considered “leftist” to the point where you consider those who hold those ideas to be pathological. I agree. I seem to recall that MB has disagreed with many of those ideas himself. I think we all have many things we agree and disagree with. What you haven’t made clear is how exactly those differences amount to a conspiracy. More importantly, you haven’t demonstrated or reasoned how or why academia should be directed by external political bodies, which, if I’m not mistaken, is exactly what’s at issue. Is it not?
Posted by Centrally Certified Content Publisher on 01/05 at 12:24 PMThree things fascinate me about the sociobiology/EP controversy:
First, sociobiology and its offspring of evolutionary psychology cannot seem to make a case without indulging in conspiracy rhetoric: “They’re all against us! I would have produced that key if they hadn’t pulled the Caine out of action!” This can range from Levitt’s hysterical “stench of burning books” here to Pinker/Cosmides/Tooby’s strawman of the “standard social science model” they claim that is held by EVERYONE without, you know, actually citing anyone who actually holds to the dictates of the model.
The nifty thing about conspiracy rhetoric is that normal standards of argumentation do not apply. Once you’ve started with the idea that the leftists conspired against sociobiology, all evidence can be reinterpreted as proof of the conspiracy. Vigorous criticism becomes unjustified persecution. That the research program had trouble getting published is interpreted, not as weaknesses in the research program or that the critics were right, but that poor sociobiologists were being stifled by the leftist puppetmasters who control all publications and tenuring.
Second, the claim that literature folks, cultural anthropologists, etc. are not qualified to comment on EP or sociobiology. You know, the folks who are actually EXPERTS on the things EPers purport to explain. Mashall Sahlins points out in in the 1970s that the sociobiologists simply don’t understand “culture” which Sahlins has spent his life studying and sociobiology’s defenders argue that cultural anthropologists aren’t qualified to argue about the nature of culture. Right.
Third, many staunch evolutionary scientists, Gould, Lewontin and, I would argue, Lewontin’ teacher Theodosius Dobzhansky (one of the architects of the modern synthesis) all objected to the kind of Darwinism put forth by Wilson. Which means that when sociobiologists portray this as “biology vs. unscientific humanists” they are being dishonest. This is an internecine conflict within evolutionary biology and they should not be allowed to claim Darwin’s mantle the way they do.
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:30 PMIn re #59 from christian h.
Let’s analyze, in some detail, where this posting goes amiss:
The claim being criticized is one that was made famous (or notorious) by Larry Summers, but it is somewhat inaccurately stated here. What Summers expounded, without specifically endorsing it, was the notion that high-order mathematical talent is found in many more men than women for reasons having to do with the statistics of innate cognitive difference (just as many more men than women are more than 6’5” tall). Therefore, gender disparity in academic fields like math, theoretical physics, and so forth, at least at high-quality research institutions, will exist even in the absence of gender bias within those communities or generalized cultural bias against women entering those fields.
Note that this hypothesis has nothing directly to do with evolutionary psychology, per se, since it is not necessary to resort to a Darwinian explanation of the antecedent in order to bolster the conclusion. It is, however, a hypothesis about sexual dimorphism in neurocognitive development, whatever the origin thereof.
What is the evidence for this view?
The basic empirical support comes from the brute fact that a whole spectrum of tests and so forth designed to measure mathematical ability displays a consistent sexual disparity, namely, the mean score for males is slightly higher and the variance is likewise higher for males. This is a brute fact, irrespective of how one wishes to explain it.
There are ancillary suppositions as well whose plausibility singly and jointly may be scrutinized. First of all, there is the notion that the measured differences cited above are indeed the result of innately different patterns of neurocognitive development. This is obviously a vexed question, but, for various reasons, most psychometricians seem to think that innate difference is the most likely and parsimonious explanation, given the cross-cultural persistence of the pattern in question.
There is the further supposition that scores very high on the scale are a predictor of what one might call serious mathematical talent, the sort of thing required of researchers in analytic number theory or superstring cosmology. This is plausible but somewhat dodgy, since these tests are designed to measure fairly low-order mathematical skills (by the standards of professionals in the mathematical sciences), not genuine mathematical creativity.
It must also be supposed that the respective statistical distributions of these scores for males and females are Gaussian-normal (bell curve). Roughly speaking, this is clearly the case, but at the high end of the curve numbers are very low and simple models might no longer be reliable.
A further piece of evidence, apart from test scores, resides in the very phenomena that upset gender egalitarians, viz., the marked prevalence of men in first-rate math and mathematical science departments. Since the disparity is much less in other scientific fields like biology and genetics, and since the idea that mathematicians and physicists are somehow more prejudiced against women than people in the (mathematically) softer sciences seems, on the surface, not terribly likely, the natural inference is that the difference is more likely to be explained by “nature” as against “nurture”.
All that being said, given these facts and assumptions it follows, as a matter of simple mathematics, that the number of males at the high “tail end” of the curve will be appreciably greater than the number of females, and consequently the number of males available for recruitment into fields requiring the highest order of mathematical ability will be correspondingly greater than the number of females. Moreover, this will be so for “biological” rather than “sociological” reasons.
This conclusion seems to fall into the category “plausible”, as the Myth Busters would put it. It has very non-negligible evidentiary support, but it is still far from being firmly established. This is pretty much what Summers said; sensible as that was, it failed to deter the lynch mob.
Why this should have been so is somewhat apparent in c.h.’s posting. It is not merely that he notes that there are possible escape hatches from the argument outlined above; it is his refusal to concede that, escape hatches notwithstanding, the argument might well prove correct in the end. The logic seems to be that an alternative (even a less plausible alternative) trumps the original hypothesis and, indeed, overthrows it altogether, provided only that the alternative is more politically palatable than the original.
This, I submit, is not a very scientific way to look at things. And here I unabashedly use “scientific” as an encomium.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:40 PMYou are very funny, and so mean to your poor sister!
Other thoughts:
Can you add and subtract, multiply and divide, using of the knowledge of the past so as to make it relevant to your everyday life? If so, then the scientific achievements of the past belong to you regardless of your skin color.
****
If white students and teachers have no problem feeling that their musical legacies include James Brown, Motown, Jimi Hendrix, the Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and related artists, then I don’t see why black students and teachers can’t lay claim to the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptian scientists.
If white suburban young men entertain the idea that they are black ghetto rappers, then why can’t black ghetto rappers fancy the idea that they are descendents of Albert Einstein?
Though not an Algerian Jew, I feel “related” and “indebted” to Jacques Derrida. I feel the same way about William Shakespeare and Rosa Parks. And when it comes to scientific accomplishments, I think we owe a tremendous debt to the animals from whom we evolved, and on whom we experimented to make our finds.
Posted by Foucault on 01/05 at 10:31 AM
In re #58 from Foucault
You make my point! You’re entitled to stand on the shoulders of whatever giant you please, irrespective of your genetic connection or lack thereof.
I would, however, dumur about “Egyptian scientists.” The egyptians don’t seem to have been inclined to speculative science. You’re on somewhat firmer ground if you want to alk about Egyptian engineers, though of course that raises slightly uncomfortable pollitical issues.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 12:53 PMIn re #59 from Centrally Certified Content Publisher
My claim is pretty simple and doesn’t invoke much in the way of conspiracy theories. Break it down this way:
1- Starting about 1980, the “left”, very broadly speaking, rapidly gained an ascendent position in US academic life, especially in the humanities and the social sciences (economics always excepted). Without trying to disentangle the reasons, I think this point is almost self-evident.
2-In many instances, elements of this somewhat diffuse “left” used their newly acquired power in ways that were demonstrably high-handed, arrogant, and intolerant of skepticism or dissenting opinion. Many departments, particularly the newly-minted ones in “oppression studies” of one kind or another, became ideological monocultures.
3-The situation may have calmed down somewhat in the last decade, but not to the point that the ethos just described has utterly faded away. It still generates nasty incidents, some of which I have pointed out on this list. In any case, the image of a pugnacious and intolerant academic left has taken root amongst students, parents, and the public in general. Exaggerated though it may be, it still derives from fact, not hallucination.
4-The existence of this reputation provides the claims of Horowitz et al. with a patina of plausibility. In other words, the slime is topped by a veneer of truth.
5-It folows, then, that given MB’s stated concerns about keeping the yahoos from taking control of campuses, it might be a good idea for him to concede that there are unpleasant aspects to current academic life for which the left rather than the right is responsible and that it is time, at long last, to clean house. (I would suggest that speech codes and thought-reform programs might be a good place to start.) Instead, when these matters come up, MB turns his focus away from such issues in order to concentrate on obvious “outside agitators” of the right. Frankly, I can’t see him taking the lead on issues involving censorship from the left or speech codes, and this is a shame.
NL
Posted by on 01/05 at 01:16 PMHey Norman,
Sorry: I must be clueless, but what sorts of uncomfortable political issues would be raised by talking about Egyptian engineers? I’m fine with calling them engineers if that’s what they were--but why would ‘scientists’ be more p.c. than ‘engineers?’
Finally, while students may be *entitled* to stand on the shoulders of whatever giants they please, I think it’s the fact that certain races of giants are *validated* by cultural authorities more than others that makes certain races more appealing with which to identify.
And I think it’s different to encourage students to stand on the shoulders of those whom they wish, versus telling students that the achievements of the past do not belong to them. I mean, maybe these statements *mean* the same thing if you think about them for long enough, but the second one seems a bit more alienating and delimiting, though I understand how you mean it.
Best,
FoucaultPosted by on 01/05 at 01:18 PMFoucault,
One of the things I love to do in my writing classes is show students the connections between Anglo-Saxon poetry, Hopkins’ “sprung” rhythms (which themselves look back to the Anglo-Saxons), Woody Guthrie’s “talkin’” blues, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Rap.
Influence and inheritance, as you point out, are not racially bound.
Captcha: “Similar.” Yes.
Posted by Aaron Barlow on 01/05 at 01:31 PMFascinating. Levitt claims NOT to be employing conspiracy rhetoric and then proceeds to carefully lay out everything we would expect from a conspiracy! And he isn’t aware he’s doing it!
“The left” takes over in the 1980s and from their powerful positions in “oppression studies” departments virtually shuts down sociobiology in the 1970s! Sure, it all makes sense when you explain it that way. I know that on my own campus the biologists don’t make a move without the official “go ahead” from the girls over in Women’s Studies.
As I argued previously, in conspiracy rhetoric, normal standards of argument do not apply. Consider the novel concept of “evidence” for a claim. There is not a scrap of evidence for any of Levitt’s claims, but who needs evidence because, as he claims, his points are “self-evident?” Given that the political right has been complaining about leftist universities since Buckley’s GOD AND MAN AT YALE in 1951, I wonder what evidence Levitt could possibly have for his claim that the The Great Leftist Takeover didn’t happen until the 1980s.
Levitt writes that “the image of a pugnacious and intolerant academic left has taken root amongst students, parents, and the public in general” so it MUST have a basis in fact. Uh huh. Lets just reword a little, “The image of a pugnacious and intolerant evolutionary biologists refusing to teach the scientific theory of young earth creationsim has taken root amongst students, parents, and the public in general” so it must be true that evolutionary biologists are conspiring to forbid its teaching.Posted by on 01/05 at 01:34 PMNorman, your point #5 in comment # 63 is precisely the sort of thing that chips away at your credibility here. If you were to take the time to read WLATLA, you’d see that MB does, in fact, “concede that there are unpleasant aspects to current academic life for which the left rather than the right is responsible.” The concession may not go far enough for you, but it’s clearly there. So, before you post further on what MB is or is not saying / doing about the climate on campus, why not do the responsible thing and read the book?
On the subject of EP, if anyone here is truly interested in substantive and dispassionate analysis of EP, you can hardly do better than http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/behavior/buller/. The book that the keeper of the blog is discussing here, Adapting Minds, is also a worthwhile read. I find myself sitting very firmly on the fence re: EP, and can confess to being one of the thousands who have purchased books on the subject both pro and con. For anyone here who interprets the success of books by Pinker and Wilson as de facto evidence that their conclusions are being gobbled up unquestioningly by the masses, you might try giving us a little more credit. Personally, I think the success of such books is merely evidence 1.) that there is very keen interest among educated but non-academic readers in learning more about the mind & brain, and 2.) that Pinker and Wilson are fairly engaging and clear writers. It certainly shouldn’t be reflexively assumed that every person who has purchased a book by Pinker or Wilson is a true believer.
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