Hofstadter, Chapters 10-12

Just a few scattered thoughts.  I don't have it in me to blog chapters 10-11 in detail, and I'm only part-way through chapter 12.

Chapter 10 is "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology", which continues to discuss America's preference for the practical over the theoretical. There's a lot of reverence for "self-made men", never mind that they are extraordinary, and even at their best they are reliant on employees who are decidedly not "self-made." America is a country where everyone believes that they can and should be above average, and so should their kids.

Chapter 11, "Variations on a Theme" talks about a lot of things.  One of them is the labor movement, which was not truly successful until it shed the leftist intellectuals who wanted broad social reform and focused on very specific, tangible goals like wages, working conditions, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with favoring the practical over the theoretical. That's not the sort of anti-intellectualism that distresses me in academia.

Chapter 11 also discusses farmers, and the divide between gentlemen farmers, who saw their farms as businesses that could and should adopt new technology, and "dirt farmers", who had a deep resistance to agricultural science.  They saw farming as a cultural matter, a practice handed down in families, not something to be improved via soil science, plant science, etc. Interestingly, when the land grant universities were founded, few children of farmers attended, and those who did often studied things that would get them out of farming.

Chapter 12 notes that as much as Americans distrust intellect, they have deep hopes for schools.  Schools are not to challenge people and push them to ever-greater heights.  Rather, schools are to shape people into (depending on the era) Christians, citizens, assimilated members of an Anglo-dominated culture, workers, or whatever else the era needs. The schools exist to mold us, not to challenge us, build up that which is best in us, or push us to the frontiers of knowledge (unless pushing us to the frontiers of knowledge will help us build weapons to defeat Russia).

It's something of a paradox that a country with such long traditions of racism nonetheless believes that humans are infinitely malleable, fully determined by nurture.  Or, at least, while racists might believe that different groups have different potentials, within those confines they are completely malleable, and so schools should shape each group to fit into some vision of society. It defies the simple dichotomies that people usually bring to "nature vs nurture" discussions.

(Since I've touched on that third rail, I need to make it clear that I don't believe for one moment that there are meaningful differences between races.  We are too similar if you actually get to know people, the boundaries are too fuzzy, and the cognitive and social challenges that our ancestors faced spanned basically the same range on every continent. For a hundred thousand years we were mostly hunters and gatherers, then agriculture and herding commenced virtually everywhere, and everyone started specializing and trading. Finally, however meaningless racial boundaries and comparisons might be on a global scale, they're even less meaningful in a country like America.  We have too much mixed ancestry, and the groups that have been most at odds--southern whites and African-Americans--have the most shared ancestry of all, due to their complicated and tragic histories.)

Finally, chapter 12 notes that, as much as Americans think schools are needed to shape society, nobody has ever wanted high taxes for schools.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.