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Book Notes – Liar’s Poker

Michael Lewis, freshly graduated with a Master’s degree in economics from LSU, got a job working for investment bank Salomon Brothers in 1984 (how he got the job is a story to itself; as encouragement to read this witty book, I’ll just tell you it involves the late Queen Mother). Salomon Brothers expanded and created branch offices in Tokyo and London, giving Lewis an opportunity for some cross-cultural comparisons. He wrote about them in Liar’s Poker:

When Gutfreund appeared in any American branch office, the employees put on a show. They affected a casual confidence. Although their stomachs churned and their pants moistened, young Americans jested with the wandering Gutfreund. They said nothing terribly adventuresome, you understand. Jokes about the latest bond issue were in. Jokes about Gutfreund’s wife were out. As long as the ground rules were properly observed, Gutfreund gave it right back.

When Gutfreund visited the Tokyo office, the Japanese employees bowed their heads at their desks and worked the phones furiously, as if playing charades and assigned to communicate: Men At Work… No young Japanese peered skyward to chat with cherubic Gutfreund-san. An American friend of mine happened to be in the Tokyo office on one of Gutfreund’s visits and was taken aside by the boss for a discussion. When my friend returned to the trading floor, he recalls, “All the Japanese were staring at me as if I had just had a personal conversation with God and He had made me a saint.”

In London, Gutfreund was treated, quite simply, like a gauche American tourist. It would only have confirmed many people’s opinion of him if he had turned up wearing psychedelic Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with a camera round his neck. People laughed behind his back, especially as the firm spiraled into decline. (p. 181-2, paperback edition).

Zemanta (below) points to an article titled, Lewie Ranieri wants to fix the mortgage mess (money.cnn.com). If you’ve read Liar’s Poker, you’ll think (after you’ve picked yourself off the floor) that this is like Nero offering to “fix” Rome.

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C.S. Lewis and the Great Divide

Recently, I’ve been reading as much of and about the British author C.S. Lewisas I can, as you can see from my Amazon reading list in the right-hand sidebar. My original reason was to inform myself as I will teach two of his Narnian stories next academic year. I found Selected Literary Essays in our university library. The book contains some real gems, but is apparently and unfortunately out of print.

The first essay is Lewis’ inaugural lecture as Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance English Literature in the University of Cambridge, delivered in Cambridge on 29 November, 1954 and published in 1955 by Cambridge University Press: De Descriptione Temporum. ( Walter Hooper’s very helpful notes can be downloaded from the website as a Word document.) This My Blog summarizes the lecture:

Lewis also talks about the difference between the Renaissance and modern culture- even recent modern culture. The secularization of society, increase in skepticism, and emphasis of progress are wholly different from the ideologies that tie every other period of history together. We are not returning to paganism, we are rejecting religion altogether. We do not seek to conserve and preserve the goods we have already acquired- we want newer, better things. Modernization has brought about the biggest change thus far in history, Lewis argues.

Finally, Lewis claims that he is a student of this [the pre-modern] era of literature. He may not have the best understanding of it, but he reads Medieval/Renaissance literature as if he lived then. So, what he lacks in understanding hopefully he’ll make up in character. You learn more about dinosaurs by seeing one, not by reading about them for years. In the same [way], Lewis hopes to teach the rest more about Medieval literature, because he is, in a sense, a dinosaur.

First, Lewis discusses the Great Divide traditionally located between mediaeval and Renaissance periods, and points to scholars who were then beginning to doubt whether it was such a great divide as people had thought. He identifies a change which has been coming over historical opinion within my own lifetime. It is temperately summed up by Professor Seznec in the words: “As the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come to be better known, the traditional antithesis between them grows less marked.” (Prof. J. Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques(London, 1940)). He then admits both the relative arbritariness of such historical periods  (in the reality studied, there is no Great Divide. There is nothing in history that quite corresponds to a coastline or a watershed in geography) and at the same time, the existence of a Great Divide: one between modern man and Old Western culture. Lewis felt himself to be a man of the Old Western culture, rather than of today, and while this identity had something to do with his religion (Christianity), it was not the whole story.

This was the point of his which interested me most, so I will quote at length from the lecture to illustrate it. It is, in a nutshell perhaps, Lewis’ conservative philosophy.

The first division that naturally occurs to us is that between Antiquity and the Dark Ages - the fall of the Empire, the barbarian invasions, the christening of Europe. And of course no possible revolution in historical thought will ever make this anything less than a massive and multiple change….The partial loss of ancient learning and its recovery at the Renaissance were … both unique events. History furnished no rivals to such a death and such a re-birth. But we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists. If one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth.

Lewis elaborates:

To Gibbon the literary change from Virgil to Beowulf or the Hildebrand, if he had read them, would have seemed greater than it can to us. We can now see quite clearly that these barbarian poems were not really a novelty comparable to, say, The Waste Land or Mr. Jones’s Anathemata. They were rather an unconscious return to the spirit of the earliest classical poetry. The audience of Homer, and the audience of the Hildebrand, once they had learned one another’s language and metre, would have found one another’s poetry perfectly intelligible. Nothing new had come into the world….

(For a critique of  “modern” poetry by a more recent conservative, see Sean Gabb’s excoriation of “the non-poetry of Carol Ann Duffy“.)

The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not…. Surely the gap between Professor Ryle and Thomas Browne is far wider than that between Gregory the Great and Virgil? Surely Seneca and Dr. Johnson are closer together than Burton and Freud?

How so? How can Seneca and Dr. Johnson be “closer” than Burton and Freud? What Great Divide separates them greater than the one of time and culture? Lewis has already hinted at it when he wrote of “a man who could not read Virgil though his father could”. He develops his theme:

I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott…

First, he examines political change:

The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness”. But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeals”,  “drives”, and “campaigns”. Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness”. And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers”. “Leaders” is the modem word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality”.

Next, the arts:

I do not think that any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true of the art I love best, that is, of poetry…. Skaldic poetry was unintelligible if you did not know the kenningar, but intelligible if you did. And – this is the real point – all Alexandrianmen of letters and all skalds would have agreed about the answers. I believe the same to be true of the dark conceits in Donne; there was one correct interpretation of each and Donne could have told it to you. Of course you might misunderstand what Wordsworth was “up to” in Lyrical Ballads; but everyone understood what he said. I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium on Mr. Eliot’s Cooking Egg. Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means. I am not in the least concerned to decide whether this state of affairs is a good thing, or a bad thing. I merely assert that it is a new thing. In the whole history of the West, from Homer - I might almost say from the Epic of Gilgamesh - there has been no bend or break in the development of poetry comparable to this.

The third change is in religion, or what Lewis calls “the un-Christening” of the world:

Thirdly, there is the great religious change which I have had to mention before: the un-christening. Of course there were lots of sceptics in Jane Austen’s time and long before, as there are lots of Christians now. But the presumption has changed. In her days some kind and degree of religious belief and practice were the norm: now, though I would gladly believe that both kind and degree have improved, they are the exception. I have already argued that this change surpasses that which Europe underwent at its conversion. It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ” relapsing into Paganism“. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

The fourth change is the rise of technology and the development of machines:

Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect. How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word “stagnation”, with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called “permanence”? Why does the word “at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort. (The only pejorative sense which Johnson gives to Primitive in his Dictionary is, significantly, “Formal; affectedly solemn; Imitating the supposed gravity of old times”.) Why does “latest” in advertisements mean “best”? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin’s theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier. For the two great imaginative expressions of the myth, as distinct from the theorem -Keats’s Hyperion and Wagner’s Ring - are pre-Darwinian. Let us give these their due. But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.

I thus claim for my chosen division of periods that on the first count it comes well up to scratch; on the second and third it arguably surpasses all; and on the fourth it quite clearly surpasses them without any dispute. I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.

Lewis sees the period since the Iliad was composed till Waterloo was fought as having a continuity that does not extend after that fateful battle:

Of course within that immense period there are all sorts of differences. There are lots of convenient differences between the area I am to deal with and other areas; there are important differences within the chosen area. And yet despite all this-that whole thing, from its Greek or pre-Greek beginnings down to the day before yesterday, seen from the vast distance at which we stand today, reveals a homogeneity that is certainly important and perhaps more important than its interior diversities.

Lewis announced himself, in this lecture at least, as the spokesman of Old Western Culture, albeit in such halting fashion as I can. Lewis then reassured his audience:

In the individual fife, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. Dante read Virgil. Certain other medieval authors evolved the legend of Virgil as a great magician. It was the more recent past, the whole quality of mind evolved during a few preceding centuries, which impelled them to do so. Dante was freer; he also knew more of the past. And you will be no freer by coming to misinterpret Old Western Culture as quickly and deeply as those medievals misinterpreted Classical Antiquity; or even as the Romantics misinterpreted the Middle Ages. Such misinterpretation has already begun. To arrest its growth while arrest is still possible is surely a proper task for a university.

Lewis concludes his talk thus:

the vast change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room… I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours… You don’t want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modem anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners… It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

Here are some further gems I found memorable:

We can’t get into the real forest of the past; that is part of what the word past means.
We notice in Beowulf that an old sword is expected to be better than a new one.

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Book Notes – The Shadow University (2)

Following on…

Catherine MacKinnon and Stanley Fish… are explicit in their disdain for the First Amendment’s absolutist and noncontextual approach. In her influential book Only Words, MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar at the University of Michigan, introduced her chapter “Equality and Speech” with the blunt statement that “the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country.” (p. 76).  … MacKinnon noted that … Claiborne Hardware [v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] brought the dichotomy between speech and action into the service of saving the nation’s oldest and best known civil rights organization. She claimed that it was unjust  to accord the two groups the same protection under the First Amendment, as properly interpreted. For MacKinnon, it was not problematic to define a principled basis for treating the NAACP and the Klan differently under the law: “Suppressed entirely in the piously evenhanded treatment of the Klan and the boycotters – the studied inability to tell the difference between oppressor and oppressed that passes for principled neutrality in this area as well as others- was the fact that the Klan was promoting inequality and the civil rights leaders were resisting it, in a country that is supposedly not constitutionally neutral on the subject.” As with Marcuse, the crucial distinction was between the “regressive” and the “progressive”. Stanley Fish’s attitude toward the current judicial interpretation of the First Amendment is refreshingly overt in the title of his 1994 book There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech… And It’s a Good Thing Too.(p. 77.)

Justice Felix Frankfurter, himself the member of a religious minority…recognized that the issue in the case [Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 1940] reflected the “profoundest problem confronting a democracy – the problem which Lincoln cast in a memorable dilemma: “Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Posing the question that way virtually assured the answer that liberty was going to have to be compromised…. A mere three years after Gobitis… the Court reviewed another flag pledge case… and this time, by a vote of 6 to 3, even with America herself at war, the justices disavowed Gobitis. ….. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)… (w)riting for the majority, Justice Robert Jackson had not quarrel with West Virginia’s requirement that certain courses be taught, nor with its attempts to inspire patriotism by exposing students to national history and traditions. However, the board’s flag salute requirement was different, because it compelled a student “to declare a belief [and]… to utter what is not in his mind.”(p. 188.)

The Court now found that what underlay its decision in Gobitis – the supposed conflict between liberty of conscience and the state’s ability to survive – was both an exaggeration and a distraction from the core constitutional question. The issue was not weak or strong government, but see the strength of America in “individual freedom  of mind” rather than in “officially disciplined uniformity for which history indicates a disappointing and disastrous end.” … Jackson explained why even men of good intentions should not possess the awesome power to compel belief. Both the good and the evil had attempted “to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential.”… In short, Jackson wrote for the majority of the Court, “compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard…. the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”(p. 189.)

I would amend that last sentence to read “The strength of America lay in her “individual freedom of mind”, and not in strong government; and that confusing the one with the other paved the way open (as it inevitably would) to overbearing and interfering government and eventually tyranny”. In a word, the road to serfdom.

“The purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution”, he concluded, was precisely to protect “from all official control” the domain that was “the sphere of intellect and spirit.” Barnette, not Gobitis, became the landmark, defining the constitutional and moral norms: the primacy of individual conscience over the social benefits of conformity, the need for each individual to enjoy liberty in order for a common liberty to exist, and the intolerability of restricting even one person’  liberty in “the sphere of intellect and spirit” in an attempt to create some better world. (p. 190.)

Colleges and universities have accepted a new “compensatory” version of separate but unequal. Whites obviously could not veto the presence of nonwhites in a college dormitory. Such inequality arises from the universities’ belief that its students are not individuals, but instances of blood and history. (p. 201.)

If one truly believes in the liberty of gay and lesbian students, of course, the real struggle is not for special privilege, but for equal rights. (p. 203.)

The academic mania for group identity presupposes what free individuals must decide for themselves – the nature and compound of their own individual lives. Blacks are free to be , by their own individual choices, radical, moderate, conservative, or apolitical; separatist or assimilationist; Afrocentric of South Carolinian. They do not need universities to assign them identities. (p. 204.)

On December 6, Robert Chatelle replied on the sexual-minority listserve of the National Writers Union, observing that “gay men are no more or less ‘vulnerable’ (or ’sensitive’ of ‘artistic’) than any other class of citizens.” Indeed, Chatelle noted, Pearson “was engaging in negative stereotyping,” which, “ironically enough … is forbidden under the speech code she was defending.” “Scratch a defender of ‘political correctness’,” he observed, “and you’ll find some variety of bigot. For Chatelle, “defenders of ‘political correctness’ subscribe to two myths that are damaging to the rights of minorities: … vulnerability and .. interchangeability.” The “myth of vulnerability,” Chatelle observed, is based on the patronizing belief that “members of minority groups are so damaged by discrimination that we become incapable of speaking for ourselves… We are not. We want equal rights. But it is difficult to make that argument convincing when people like Sue Pearson are going around and stating that gay men are ‘vulnerable’ people who need ’special’ protection.” The “myth of interchangeability,” for Chatelle, was equally dangerous. It “holds that there is such a thing as ‘the women’s viewpoint,’ the ‘gay/lesbian viewpoint,’ [or] the African-American viewpoint.’” (p. 205.)

This mentality, or the “myth of interchangeability”, sounds like polylogism, from which, perhaps, it originated: Marx and the Marxians, foremost among them the “proletarian philosopher” Dietzgen, taught that thought is determined by the thinker’s class position. What thinking produces is not truth but “ideologies.” This word means, in the context of Marxian philosophy, a disguise of the selfish interest of the social class to which the thinking individual is attached. It is therefore useless to discuss anything with people of another social class. Ideologies do not need to be refuted by discursive reasoning; they must be unmasked by denouncing the class position, the social background, of their authors. Thus Marxians do not discuss the merits of physical theories; they merely uncover the “bourgeois” origin of the physicists.

A perverted, but very common, form of this is hilariously illustrated by C.S. Lewis in his allegorical story, “The Pilgrim’s Regress“:  to refute the “argument” that two plus two equals four, the “correct refutation” is “You only say that because you are a mathematician!”

The assumption is that the identity of individuals at our universities is inseparable from those official categories that the university recognizes, quite independently of how such individuals view themselves. Diversity means the acceptance of those distinctions by blood and history. Multiculturalism means the acceptance of the view that individual students exist not as individuals, but as instances of group identity useful to some partisan  understanding of the history of oppression. (p. 206.)

To understand the moral consequence of academic official group identity, consider the appalling predicament of students from multiracial families. At Penn, in 1995, students formed an organization with the sardonic name “Check One”… [which] “takes its name from the fact that one is asked literally to check one race or ethnic group when filling out standardized forms… We are largely an ignored people, and segregation, which preserves and reinforces culture, can also serve to exclude us.” Members were not “half-and-half”… because they were not made up “of segmented parts… distant and separate pieces.” (p. 208.)

This resonated with me: in Japan, children of mixed marriages are dubbed “half”. I could never understand the American predilection for checking off one’s racial identity; what if you did not belong neatly into any of the categories offered? And why is it so important for the authorities to know?

At Standford, Carl Hicks, a Korean and black senior, formed, with other students uncomfortable with Standford’s official group identities, an organization called Prism. He understood the immoral and intended consequence of current academic multiculturalism and anti-individualism: “When I got to Standford I didn’t think of myself as black or Korean or white. I thought of myself as Carl Hicks. But everyone kept labeling me.” (p. 209.)

Out of the mouths of babes…

Attendance at group-identity organizations is often minuscule as a percentage of the intended population, and militant leaders complain endlessly about “apathy.” Whites don’t feel particularly guilty about being white, and almost no designated “victims” adopt truly radical politics. Most undergraduates unabashedly seek their portion of American freedom, legal equality, and bounty. What to do with such benighted students? Increasingly, the answer to that question is to use the in loco parentis apparatus of the university to reform their private consciences and minds. (p. 211.)

Penn [State University] simply set about to control the ways its students thought about and valued the world. It viewed incoming students as incapable, on their own, of sorting out their differences and their common humanity, of understanding how to live decently, and of thinking critically about America. Above all, the university viewed its students as ignorant of the real nature of their group identities. One student on the subcommittee on “Diversity Follow-Up Program” complained in a memo about the planners’ contempt for individualism and individual identity, their “desire… continually to consider the collective before the individual.”… A fellow committee member, an administrator, underlined the word “individual” on the student’s memo, and replied that “This is a ‘RED FLAG’ phrase today, which is considered by many to be RACIST.” “Arguments that champion the INDIVIDUAL over the group,” he informed her, “ultimately priveleges [sic] the ‘INDIVIDUAL’ belonging to the dominant group.” Indeed, he concluded, “in a pluralistic society, individuals are only as significant their groups.” (p. 213.)

There are core beliefs of current thought reform. An individual is not an autonomous moral being, but a member of a racial and historical group that possesses moral debt or credit. There is only on e appropriate set of views about race, gender, sexual preference, and culture, and holding an inappropriate belief, once truth has been offered, is not an intellectual disagreement, but a act of oppression or denial. (p. 215.)

Katherine Balmer, assistant dean for freshmen [at Columbia University], said, “You can’t bring all these people together and say, ‘Now be one big happy community,’ without some sort of training [ emphasis added]” (p. 218.)

Northwestern University, for the planning of its New Student Week in 1989, formed a Cultural Diversity Project Committee…  One pleased committee member told the reporter, “It’s basically a white guilt organization.” The next day, New Student Week began, and the keynote speaker informed fifteen hundred freshmen that there were not to blame for the “customs and habits of thought” inherited from their parents and communities, but that they now must remake their lives, ridding themselves of “the ugliness, the meanness, …[ the] narrowness and[the] tribalism.” Students then had to discuss the lecture, led by the “facilitators” who had been trained the day before. (p. 221.)

The shame is that it does not require deep courage to resist the sacrifice of liberty and legal equality for peace. There are nations in the world where a college president indeed would risk his life by standing up for academic freedom. That is not the situation in the United States today. What is required is not so much courage as dedication to liberty and legal equality supported by just a bit of backbone. The fact that our academic leaders are not up tot his task is alarming. The fear of disruption, of causing offense, of being associated with controversy, linked to careerism, has produced a hollow, unprincipled cowardice. (p. 329.)

And speaking of the Supreme Court’s upholding the First Amendment against the rising tide of political correctness, just one month ago,

Today, the United States Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Citizens United v. FCC, voting 5-4 to stand by the Constitution and protect our First Amendment right to free speech. Justice Kennedy, writing for the Court, said, “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.”

Penny Young Nance, Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) Chief Executive Officer, said, “The Court correctly concluded that judges should stop playing semantics with our Constitution and read the text as it is written. The government should not be limiting political speech because someone is rich or poor, or because they disagree with a particular point of view.”

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Book Notes – Deschooling Society (2)

Following on…

For most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. ((From the introduction.)

the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social criticism (p. 37)

The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. (p. 39)

once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all non-professional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with input; and that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates. (p. 39)

School teaches [the myth that] instruction produces learning. The existence of school produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. (p. 39)

Knowledge … is conceived of as a commodity put on the market in school. (p. 47)

School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. (p. 47)

Knowledge is not a commodity which can be forced into the consumer. (p. 50)

[Schools should]

• be convivial places which folk do not have to be convinced to use (p. 55)
• move towards praxis (action) and away from poesis (making) (p. 62)
• increase the opportunity and desirability of human interaction (p. 63)

Institutions men use without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so… (p. 55)

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Book notes – The Shadow University

I heard about this book and was inspired to read it by a speech given by Ralph Raico on the occasion of his being awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. (Read the speech on the Mises Institute website.) Here’s the relevant section from the speech:

Today America is in the grip of a dominant political class.  It consists of the media, the educational establishment, and the state apparatus–the federal bureaucrats, the federal judges–as well as their supporters at every level of government.

Paul Gottfried has described this political class and its aims and goals very well, in his book, After Liberalism [I'm reading that, too. Book notes to follow].  It is a self-appointed elite that fully intends to bring about a radical restructuring of our society, to alter all of our inherited ideas and values in the direction of egalitarianism and socialism.  In the end, there will be a systematic redistribution of property, from the rightful owners to the “needy.”  So, massive expropriation, together with a crusade to remake the nature of man–the Bolshevik Revolution, but without, to all appearances, any need for mass murder.  It will all be done through what passes for “democracy” today.

In the colleges and universities, the agenda of this political class is virtually unopposed. Unless you are actually in the midst of academic life today, you will find it hard to imagine what it is like.

There are whole departments, Women’s Studies, Black Studies, in some places Chicano Studies, and others devoted to this task.  On every campus there is a Diversity Office, dedicated to bringing more professors of victimology on to the campus.  There are speech codes and the incessant war against fraternities.  Agitation and violence are sanctioned and permitted for privileged groups, while conservative speakers often are not even allowed on the campus because of a threatened riot.

In many schools–including the best schools– “sensitivity training” for the whole class of entering freshmen is mandatory.  A new profession has been created, sensitivity “facilitators,” whose job is to remake the personalities of the students. You can read about this in documented detail in the excellent book by the distinguished scholar Alan Kors and the civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.

The book does an excellent job of tracing the roots of political correctness in American universities, and illustrating that root with lots of examples (actual cases of students and faculty accused of “crimes” against political correctness codes, cases which either made it into the newspapers, or to the law courts, or which were known to the authors because of their positions – Alan Kors is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and was often requested to act as counsel in such cases).

The roots of political correctness, according to the authors, go back to the ideas of Marcuse: The contemporary movement that seeks to restrict liberty on campus arose specifically in the provocative work of the late Marxist political and social philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a brilliant polemicist, social critic, and philosopher who gained a following in the New Left student movement of the ’60s. Marcuse developed a theory of civil liberty that would challenge the essence and legitimacy of free speech.

The importance and influence of Marcuse’s thinking is well illustrated by actual quotes from various university people and publications in later chapters of the book. The reader will no doubt recognize several key concepts and arguments (you may even agree with or believe some of them), because they have permeated much of present-day thinking in a number of areas, not just in academia. For this reason, I will give several long quotes from this chapter:

Marcuse built on the work of Rousseau, Marx, and Gramsci to articulate an alternative conception of liberty, placing him at odds with the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment doctrines, academic freedom, and the values of most liberal democrats. Indeed, this alternative framework for liberty, which used some traditional terms but assigned them new meanings, became the foundation of academic speech codes.

In a 1965 essay entitled, “Repressive Tolerance“,  Marcuse concluded that the supposedly neutral tolerance for ideas in the America of the 1960s was in reality a highly selective tolerance that benefitted only the prevailing attitudes and opinions of those who held wealth and power. Such “indiscriminate” or “pure” tolerance, he argued, effectively served “the cause of oppression” and the “established machinery of discrimination”. For Marcuse, as long as society was held captive by institutionalized pervasive social and economic inequality…”indiscriminate tolerance” necessarily would serve the highly discriminatory interests of regression.

The holders of power, Marcuse argued, maintained their control by keeping  the population “manipulated and indoctrinated”, so that ordinary people “parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters”.  In such circumstances, “the indiscriminate guaranty of political rights and liberties” is actually “repressive”… He believed that “within the framework of such a social structure, tolerance can be safely practiced and proclaimed” by those in power because dissenting – even radical – voices were powerless to change that structure.

Marcuse did not directly assail Holmes’s and Brandeis’s notion that ideas for societal change should be, in Marcuse’s words, “prepared, defined, and tested in free and equal discussion, on the open marketplace of ideas and goods.” Rather, he asserted that the current “marketplace” was rigged because of its “background limitations.” Before a true marketplace of ideas could be established, where genuine democracy could flourish, current inequities would have to be eliminated, and this could not be done while equating the rights of dominant regressive expression and of marginalized progressive words and ideas. For Marcuse, true equality included equality of circumstances, but the playing fields were so far from being socially, economically, or culturally level that equality in contemporary society was a myth. If the powerful and the weak were required to play by the same rules, he argued, the powerful always would win….

… the indoctrinated had to be given the tools with which to see the truth. How were people to be freed from the bonds that keep the prisoners under a purely illusory tolerance? Marcuse responded that “they would have to get information slanted in the opposite direction, [which] cannot be accomplished within the established framework of abstract tolerance and spurious objectivity”. Marcuse posited that there was a true and superior species of “tolerance” which enlarged the range and content of freedom”. This tolerance, however, was “always partisan”, because it was “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”.

… Marcuse was refreshingly frank.  The “reopening” of the channels of true toleration and liberation, now “blocked by organized repression and indoctrination”, must be accomplished, sometimes, by “apprently undemoractic means”. Marcuse suggested that these would include “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”

Marcuse was untroubled by his double standards… “liberating tolerance”, Marcuse wrote, in contrast to “indiscriminate tolerance” or “repressive tolerance”, would be “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. Thus duality”would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion of propaganda, of deed as well as of word”. It was important that intolerance apply to regressive words as well as to regressive deeds, because, for Marcuse, words had real consequences, and if the consequences were to be avoided, the words must be silenced.

Marcuse’s premise, which separated his political philosophy fundamentally from First Amendment jurisprudence, was that liberty, in the current stage of historical and social development, was a zero-sum game: “The exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise”.  For Marcuse, … to achieve a society of universal tolerance, once could not tolerate reactionary ideas.

Marcuse focused on the education of the young: “The restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior”. Because students already were so heavily brainwashed to think in the manner that established power had ordained, true “autonomous thinking” was virtually impossible, and one had to take steps to wrench students from the regressive channels into which society had cast their minds…. Marcuse proposed that the academic shock troops of this revolution undertake to “prepare the ground” for effecting such changes, even if that might involve a resort to violence. Marcuse was not troubled by this, because “there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and the oppressors.”…

In short, to produce conditions in which freedom could flourish first on campus and then in the greater society, reeducation in a progressive university was essential… This reeducation alone could create a “progressive” society, where true freedom and democracy would reign. Once this had been achieved, Marcuse promised, there would be no further need for such “anti-democratic” expedients that were, after all, aimed simply to redress the imbalance between “oppressor” and “oppressed”. Censorship, during this “reversal”, was essential… Indeed, censorship, for Marcuse, must be deeply pervasive, although historically temporary..

Marcuse’s prescription for a progressive society have not noticeably taken root in the “real world”" outside the academy. Most of the trends toward greater free speech for all – trends that he so abhorred -have accelerated in the three decades since he published his essay. Nevertheless, Marcuse’s prescriptions are the model for the assaults on free speech in today’s academic world.

Recognize any of these arguments? The Marcuse essay referred to “Repressive Tolerance” is dedicated to my students at Brandeis University. Ironic, considering the opposition provided by the Supreme Court to the fulfillment of Marcuse’s ambitions and of those of his followers, and in support of free speech.

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Book Notes – Deschooling society

Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of  Ivan Illich’s classic Deschooling Society, which I recently re-read. The quotes are sentences or ideas that caught my attention. They are not necessarily representative, either of the book itself, nor of Illich’s or my thinking; that is, you won’t get an objective summary of the book by reading these quotes.  (For a 1971 libertarian review of Illich’s book, click here). With that disclaimer out of the way, here we go.

Chapter 1: Why we must disestablish schools.

[Schools school students] to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, … the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

… In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence. … I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when non-material needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or “treatments”.

The ideology of obligatory schooling admits of no logical limits. [Illich goes on to illustrate using as an example the proposal of]
Dr. Hutschnecker, the “psychiatrist” who treated Nixon before he was qualified as a candidate, recommended… that all children between 6 and 8 be professionally examined to ferret out those who have destructive tendencies, and that obligatory treatment be provided for them…. Indeed, preventive concentration camps for predelinquents would be a logical improvement over the school system.

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Upgrading PHP, or Scribefire Plugin Problem fixed

This is to test if upgrading my PHP has solved the problem of stripped HTML tags, which I referred to earlier.

It seems it is now working, and a test post from Scribefire (now re-instated) also seems to work fine.  And thanks to the tech folk at Siteground for responding so promptly and telling me how to upgrade my PHP. (In case you’re curious, it was very simple: go to my root directory using cPanel’s File Manager, and edit the .htaccess file by adding the following line of code (I upgraded to version 5.3, as per Scribefire’s instructions):

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php .php5 .php4 .php3

Scribefire plugin problem

Scribefire is a blog-editor plugin that allows you to blog directly from a website to your blog without going to your blog, if you get my drift.

Despite having Scribefire plugin loaded into my Firefox browser, I haven’t used it recently, because it posted garbage. Specifically,

“When I post to Wordpress, all of the HTML is stripped out. e.g., <br /> appears as ‘br /’.”

The same thing happened when I tried to blog from Flickr. Questions in WordPress fora went unanswered, so I took the plunge today and uninstalled Scribefire, rebooted Firefox and prepared to blog about it. Going to the ScribeFire homepage, however, I read the following:

One of the most common bugs reported for ScribeFire is a variation on this theme:

“When I post to Wordpress, all of the HTML is stripped out. e.g., <br /> appears as ‘br /’.”

This is not a bug in ScribeFire; rather, it is a bug in a piece of software called PHP that is used to run your blogging software.

The (hard) solution to this bug is to get your Web host to upgrade their version of PHP to version 5.2.9 or greater. If that’s not possible, you can fix it yourself by installing this Wordpress plugin.

Thanks to all of the ScribeFire users that have reported this problem, and thanks as well to the other users that supplied links to the fixes.

I go to my Web host, but am unable to ask them to upgrade their version of PHP: there is no way to contact them – all the “contact us” pages direct me to endless pages of FAQs…

There is a WordPress plugin that fixes this, if you cannot get your Web host to upgrade (or if they have cleverly removed any contact email address from their “help” pages).

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The Answer Sheet

Scenes from the Battleground’s Twitter feed points me to this Washington Post article: The Answer Sheet – teaching without gimmicks.

Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: “No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!”  Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson’s content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students “on task,” reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.

Solid good, yet uncommon, sense here. In its questioning of the value of “objectives”, it reminds me of something by a retired British teacher-trainer, James Atherton, Against Learning Objectives:

Some people manage to talk in the same breath about being “student-centred” and the need to have clear objectives (even behavioural objectives) for their teaching. They may even be arrogant enough to want to specify the “outcomes” of their teaching.

Formulation of objectives, particularly in its extreme form as “outcomes” is naive, objectionable and patronising.

Here’s an entry on Atherton’s blog, Recent Reflections, on the same subject: On the perfect lesson

Similar considerations apply to the evaluation of teaching sessions. Yes, there are clear(ish) thresholds below which practice fails to contribute to learning and may indeed inhibit it. But beyond that we can judge only very broadly. And that is where Ofsted inspectors and QAA reviewers (now of blighted memory) get it all wrong;

• They tend to assume that the perfect lesson is the result of following a standard recipe (they deny it, of course, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary). For Blumenthal, it may be true. The “perfect chilli” is contained in his recipe. But there is no guarantee that the diner will like it. Technically, the system is defined too tightly, according to that which lends itself to measurement/judgement.
• They assume therefore that the process of teaching (and learning) is a series of tableaux or set pieces, which can be judged independently. Were the lesson objectives spelt out at the start of the lesson? (Yes = good; No = bad.) Thus we inculcate ritual knowledge (Perkins, 1999) with no understanding of its significance. Are the experiential targets spelt out at the start of the opera? the stand-up routine? the liturgy?

And another one On Nostalgia:

I signed up for a Cambridge University Extension course on epistemology, but I missed the first session last week, unfortunately. We are a group of about sixteen people; I may be the youngest, and the oldest is clearly well into his eighties (I hope I am as acute, when/if I reach that age). We are also, sadly, entirely white and –I suppose almost by definition– middle class.
However, I got a course outline (two sides of A4) which specified a “syllabus” with “aims” and “content” but no “objectives”, a sheet of guidance for the essay (it was already clear that submission of the assessment was primarily to ensure the continued funding of the course by the university, and had little to do with assessment of learning, although one can apparently accumulate credits towards a certificate if so inclined), and a reading list.
The session was around two hours, with a coffee-break. The tutor lectured, with occasional questions and thought experiments directed at us, and occasionally (well, quite regularly) having to field spontaneous questions from “students”. He had a white-board, on which he wrote basic propositions, about three times. There were no handouts. There were no transparencies. There was no PowerPoint.
It was brilliant.

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