Hofstadter, Chapters 3-5

These chapters are mostly a history of American religion, chronicling our fall from the halcyon era of educated Puritan clergy to the modern era.  To be fair, after the eruption of new denominations, many of them eventually moved away from their "Any idiot can be a minister based on their understanding of an English translation of a text written in Greek and Hebrew" roots and developed a more educated clergy. Still, they were never as scholarly as the Oxbridge graduates who ministered to the Puritans of New England.

I want to quote a few choice items from Chapter 3. First, regarding the Puritans:

...this rather odious image of the Puritan clergy...has dominated not only our popular historical lore but also the historical thinking of our intellectuals. The reputation of this, the first class of American intellectuals, has gone down in infamy, and subsequent generations of intellectuals have often led the campaign against them.

Yeah, there were the witch trials, but he notes that the clergy were mostly urging restraint, while the laity were going crazy and leading the mob. And afterward the devout of New England mostly became peaceable, until the 1850's when they went to Kansas and killed slave-owners.  I mean, if you absolutely INSIST on deviating from Christianity, that's definitely the one time to do it.

On page 63, he notes that:

By the close of the seventeenth century, the leading clergymen were much more liberal in thought than the elderly uneducated laymen who controlled a great many of the rural congregations or the provincial politicians who often invoked religious fundamentalism because it was popular with the growing electorate.

After 1680, the Puritan ministry was more tolerant and more accommodating to disseneters such as Baptists and Quakers than was the Boston public at large; and the influential Boston ministers--including the Mathers--were more liberal in this respect than the older preachers of the countryside.

Also on page 63, and relevant to our current circumstances with the COVFEFE-19 virus:

So far as the encouragement of science is concerned, this was almost entirely in clerical sponsorship before about the middle of the eighteenth century (Harvard had its first lay scientist in Professor John Winthrop, who began to teach in 1738). In the most controversial and stirring of all scientific questions of the day, that of the adoption of inoculation for smallpox, outstanding clerical intellectuals once again took the lead in defending innovation.

He then goes on to discuss the Great Awakening, which I won't recap in depth. But at the end of the chapter he gives the following overall appraisal of the clergy over the centuries, and how they dealt with an illiterate frontier nation:

They would have been ineffective in converting their moving flocks if they had not been able to develop a vernacular style in preaching, and if they had failed to share or to stimulate in some degree the sensibilities and prejudices of their audiences--anti-authority, anti-aristocracy, anti-Eastern, anti-learning. The various denominations responded in different ways to this necessity: but in general it might be said that the congregations were raised and the preachers were lowered. In brief, the elite upon which culture depended for its transmission was being debased by the demands of a rude social order.  If our purpose were to pass judgment on the evangelical ministers, a good case could be made for them on the counts of sincerity, courage, self-sacrifice, and intelligence.  But since our primary purpose is to assess the transit of civilization and the development of culture, we must bear in mind the society that was emerging. It was a society of courage and character, of endurance and practical cunning, but it was not a society likely to produce poets or artists or savants.

I think that much the same could be said of those who teach at non-elite state schools.  We're teaching the (cultural, if not always genetic) descendants of the unlettered frontiersmen whom the evangelical denominations desperately tried to civilize. It is inevitable that some of us will "go native"* and lower our standards. Perhaps by spending too much time reading and thinking about human issues, and not enough time thinking about physics, I have "gone native" in my own paradoxical way.

I won't recap the next two chapters in any detail except to note that evolutionary biology was a big sticking point in the fight between intellectuals and the public.  It's ironic that biology has done so much to cleave us from the public, even while the "Two Cultures" phenomenon among intellectuals makes so many educated people unashamed to confess their ignorance of science.  Academics will gladly look down on a public that doesn't understand science, yet also unashamedly admit their own ignorance.

*And yes, I'm aware of how awkward that metaphor is in regard to ministers joining and emulating European colonists taking land from indigenous people.

"Teaching with technology"

All classes are now online, obviously. Many people are talking about the allegedly unprecedented nature of such large-scale "teaching with technology." I agree that the scale of this particular pedagogical moment is unprecedented, but I disagree that "teaching with technology" is a good descriptor for it. I have been teaching with technology since the start of the semester, it's just that the technology was simulation software for doing sophisticated calculations, not web conferencing.  And I was teaching with technology in many semesters prior to this one, since I've been using Zemax, Python, and other professional computational tools in many (not all) of my classes for some time now.

In my first week of college, I was hired into a research lab, where a professor promptly commenced teaching me with technology.  That technology included CAD software, vacuum equipment, oscilloscopes, various acids, magnetic shielding materials, simulation software, and numerous other things.  In graduate school I took a class that was heavy on "teaching with technology."  That technology included a cleanroom, spin-coater, photolithography, various etches, furnaces, vacuum chamber for deposition of metals, etc. My PhD advisor taught us with technology, including lasers, computers, fume hoods, glassware for chemistry, spectrometers, microscopes, etc.

I wish they would say "teaching with communication technology", because the implication of "teaching with technology" is that those of us who don't normally make extensive use of information technology in our classes aren't making use of technology. Check out my Zemax assignments and then we'll talk about whether I've been teaching with technology.

Re-reading Hofstadter

Chapter 2 is largely about the difference between intelligence (being good at hard cognitive tasks) and intellectualism (enjoying ideas), and why America disdains intellect (and, increasingly, intelligence). Some choice quotes:
1) On the propensity of intellectuals to get involved in political and social issues:

...it is the historic glory of the intellectual classes of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it on the social scale.  Behind the intellectual's feeling of commitment is the belief that in some measure the world should be made responsive to his capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and order; out of this conviction arises much of his value to mankind and, equally, much of his value to do mischief.

I think the last part is a reference to progressive education.

2) On zealots:

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

The origin of kool-aid, IMHO.

3) Of course, the antidote for kool-aid, the surest defense against the allure of one over-riding idea displacing all others, is a sense of playfulness.  And so I love this quote:

But in using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.

Indeed.  There are few things more wonderful than the serious expression on the face of a child busily drawing or stacking blocks of scooping mud into buckets.  They are engaged in a complicated task of their own devising, working hard to get it right. They are not merely adorable little people (though they certainly are that), they are also showing all the signs of taking seriously their role as members of a species that uses symbols and tools. They are throwing themselves into the glories of being a human engaged in quintessentially human tasks. The most engrossing play is when we are most truly human.

In that sense, "action shots" from a classroom where people are sitting around smiling at each other miss the most important action of all: Focused, concentrated time on task.

4) Also on play:

...in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.

Indeed.  We revel in sports and chuckle at the debate team.

5) Finally, on the disease that ravages my university, and many others:

American education can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise.

In fact, an administrator once boasted to me of her allegedly low IQ. (Her words, not mine.) I actually think she's quite smart, and that the dumb things she does are calculated plays to gain favoritism in an anti-intellectual system. But she felt the need to insist on a low IQ, because that's the system we work in. In this era, I should have asked her if trade wars are good and easy to win.

Next book blogging project: Re-reading Hofstadter

While I'm quarantined I think I'm going to re-read Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, to see how I feel about it five years later.

One thing I definitely don't feel five years later is any better. I don't think that spending so much time reading and thinking about the weirdness of this pseudo-egalitarian academic culture has made me any happier with it.

Our diversity obsession in a less diverse world

Given Jacoby's observation that the world is actually becoming less diverse, why do people nonetheless fixate on diversity?  A lot of reasons.

One reason, of course, is that race and ethnicity are still correlated with socioeconomic class, and there are good reasons to want to do something about that. There's now just enough racial and ethnic diversity in the world of the upper-middle class that we can't ignore the fact that other groups exist, but not enough to declare problems solved.

Another is probably romanticism.  Other groups aren't actually that different, both because of the declining diversity of practices in this world and the ever-present universality of human nature.  Nonetheless, historically there has been enough variation in practices between groups that we find it fascinating.  Somehow this always manifests as ethnic dance troupes, probably because it's the sort of thing that can easily co-exist with Little League: People gather in gyms to engage in physical activity with adult supervision on Saturday morning. More seriously, it's very visual and exciting, and invigorating for those who do it.

A side interest of mine is language, and people understandably lament the death of languages.  I'm not interested in persuading people to hang on to dialects that will act as walls between them and neighbors, but I do hope that languages are at least documented before they die.  There's a lot of history encoded in languages, because the distribution of a language tells you something about past migrations. But my interest is in recording the past, not freezing the present into the mold of the past. Frankly, it's a GOOD thing that people in remote villages can speak the same languages as the judges and officials appointed by rulers in the capital city.

Finally, while a more uniform world means more people interacting and sharing the same experiences, we humans remain a tribal species. We instinctively look with caution upon those we see as outsiders, and now we're suddenly able to encounter them because of global trade, standardized languages, etc.  There are people who are only alive today because they successfully ascertained whether the stranger looking at them funny was a Catholic or a Protestant, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Sunni or a Shia, a Serb or a Croat. This makes us attuned to tribal markers. Yet we have to interact in this global marketplace where cheap travel and rapid migration of workers bring us into contact with people bearing different tribal markers like skin tone, facial features, and hair. No, they aren't infallible predictors of ancestry, as there's huge diversity within groups, but still, some patterns do manifest more often than not. More importantly, whether or not we SHOULD react to those patterns, the masked gunmen at the checkpoint often DO react to those patterns, making our ability to anticipate their reactions a deep-rooted instinct.

Sure, a corporate office today doesn't usually have masked gunmen at checkpoints.  (The Security Professionals at the metal detector wear uniforms and show their faces while providing excellent customer service. :) But we're all descended from people who survived by quickly identifying and steering clear of people from other tribes when relations switched from trade to warfare, so as soon as we look at people we take note of their backgrounds.

Go ahead and deny it if you must, insist that YOU don't see these things, but everyone else does. Bigots note difference disapprovingly, warm and fuzzy people note diversity approvingly, and everyone else at least notes it as an adjective to file away in their mental lists. When I'm learning names and faces in a large group, ethnicity helps me take mental shortcuts to remember.  I'm probably not supposed to admit that, but it's just a fact. My worst nightmare would be to learn names in a room where everyone is the same race, the same gender, and same hair color.

OK, so we're noting difference. We can't avoid that.  The question, then is what to do about that.  Well, suppressing it won't work.  People will just note it even more, and treat it a a forbidden fruit. But that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. Just as we have instincts that note difference, we also have instincts that transcend difference, and those that transcend difference are, frankly, the nobler instincts.

For instance, we react with immediate affection to the face of a baby, no matter what color that baby is.  People feel empathy for the lame and sick and elderly across color lines.  Some of that is surely because the very young and very old members of neighboring tribes never took up arms against our ancestors' tribes, but doesn't change the fact that we have these relationships and affections in common with other tribes.

Also, people experience love and sexual attraction across tribal lines.  We know that this phenomenon is widespread, even when interracial relationships aren't, because so many societies have worked so hard to enforce prohibitions on marrying across lines of color and tribe. If nobody felt an attraction across those lines, nobody else would bother to suppress it.

One of our species' greatest survival tools is trade, and that has always happened across tribal lines.  It's what people have always defaulted to as soon as fighting stopped.  We have conflicting attitudes toward outsiders, simultaneously fearing them and wanting to marry them, wanting to build a fortress to keep them away and build a trading port to gain from them. And trade simultaneously requires diversity (different economic parties having different comparative advantages), promotes it (there's always a greater variety of goods available when people can trade freely), and yet also erodes it (everyone can now enjoy the same things).

Storytelling is an instinct that crosses lines, and we are able to appreciate stories from other cultures.  The main reason Disney is making characters with a greater range of colors and ethnicities is that the basic tropes (heroes and villains, princes/princesses and paupers, etc.) transcend race and ethnicity. Little kids want movies with knights and princesses who look like them, but do the same things as every other knight or princess.

Religion is a human phenomenon that some modern thinkers would denounce, but it's an undeniably powerful and widespread phenomenon. For all the evil that has been done in the name of God, a lot of good has also been done in His name, and many religions cross lines of color.  Malcolm X softened his opinion of white people when he was in Mecca praying next to white people.  Christianity has spread around the globe, bringing out the best (and worst) in people everywhere.  I mean, Koreans are some of the most devout Protestants around, and Filipinos are as Catholic as Catholics can be, and both countries are very far (both in distance and culture) from the places where Christianity was founded and grown.

Our conflicting instincts, universal and tribal, noble and feral, are in all of us. The implicit bias trainers are right to note that we can never fully escape from our responses to difference, but that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. I'm more likely to connect with somebody by talking about what we have in common than by achieving enlightenment about the profound importance of difference. This doesn't mean that we should never talk about difference and diversity, but I think we'll get farther with common humanity.

Thoughts on Russell Jacoby's "On Diversity"

I'm part-way into chapter 4. After laying out a broad picture in chapter 1, chapter 2 is largely about the homogenization of the modern world, with fashion being a particularly illustrative focal point. Besides the obvious fact that many people around the world have adopted Western attire, Jacoby also notes that within the confines of Western fashion the visual differences between rich and poor have become more subtle, at least in day-to-day attire.  That's not to say that some clothes aren't more expensive than others, but if you aren't a fashionista and you're looking from a distance, the difference between an expensive pair of slacks and a cheap pair may not be obvious. On the other hand, the finery of an earlier era was often more ostentatious.

Jacoby notes ways in which both the left and right have lamented decried sartorial homogeneity. Conservatives of the modern era may be cautious about saying this out loud (and may not even believe it anymore, in many cases) but in an earlier era there were people who decried commoners looking like their "betters." (In the present, I suspect that conservatives willing to decry modern fashion would lambast the poor for NOT dressing as respectably as their successful "betters.") Likewise, many leftists lamented that with fashion gaps closing between rich and poor the poor were going to feel less solidarity with each other.

Chapter 3 is about childhood and how children spend less time on spontaneous, unorganized play and more time in either structured activities or indoor amusements.  This is hardly a novel observation, and some of this is no doubt a function of class (one sees more kids outside in working-class neighborhoods), but he made two interesting points:
1) This was going on even a century ago, when sociologists went and studied children's games and found that over the decades there was less variation in the rules of games played on streets.  Whereas kids improvised more of their own rules in earlier eras, as time went on more homogeneity set in, even when kids were playing without adult supervision.  I suspect that mass media promotion of professional sports inspired more homogeneous rules.  Formal schooling with gym classes may also play a role.

2) Though the phenomenon of suburban parents spending the entire weekend sitting in various parks and gyms watching kids in organized sports may be more or less modern (at least as a large scale thing), people were noting and lamenting the onset of this phenomenon several decades ago. Adults and leagues impose more uniformity on childhood rites of passage.

Chapter 4 (which I'm only part-way through) is about the concept of diversity throughout the ages.  He notes the many thinkers who spoke approvingly of diversity, of the right of individuals to differ.  But he also notes the efforts to standardize weights and measures in the interests of trade, to standardize national languages and assimilate speakers of local dialects, etc. I don't know that we lose much culturally if everyone measures weighs grain in the same units, but commercial standards enable people to join a global economy, and also enable the global economy to enter the local village.

Cultural and technological innovations spreading across the world is hardly a new thing.  Wheat was domesticated in the Middle East, the horse was probably domesticated in the steppes of Eurasia, and the wheel was invented in the Middle East, but these things quickly spread around the world, and even entered into religions. Writing originated in a handful of places, but religions based on holy books came to supplant religions based on oral traditions.

Still, what is new is the extent to which everyday life becomes similar around the world. We're actually becoming less diverse, not more diverse.  However, we talk so much about diversity because we're bringing more people under this common umbrella, which means that we sometimes encounter a wider range of skin tones, facial features, hair types, etc. in our standard-issue malls, recreational sports leagues, chain restaurants, and corporate employers.

(Never mind that even today, the lower economic classes continue to live in neighborhoods that often have more small businesses than comfortable suburbanites sometimes realize, perhaps because catering to low-income consumers is something that not every large company wants to pursue, whereas everyone loves to go for affluent consumers.)

My next post will deal with the implications of this.