Hofstadter, Chapters 7-9

Just a few quick thoughts.

Chapter 7: The only other thing that leaped out from it was that Teddy Roosevelt was, in many ways, a pretty intellectual guy, but he was acceptable to the public because he also projected an image of vigorous, well-rounded masculinity.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with being well-rounded, of course. I'm glad that my undergraduate institution emphasized extracurriculars.  Nonetheless, while the public only wants its scientists and writers and thinkers to also show a "human" side, the public never expects its athletes to be smart.  Many of them are, but it's not an expectation, and they certainly don't have to be well-read.

Chapter 8: Mostly about New Deal experts (accepted by the public) and Adlai Stevenson (not so accepted by the public).  I don't think this is much of a mystery. In a crisis, people will put aside prejudices if they think an expert will help them, and the essence of FDR's New Deal policy was counter-cyclical economic spending.

Likewise, right now much of the public likes Dr. Fauci because we're afraid we'll die and he's a really smart doctor. Doctors are one of the few professions in which the public will accept elitism.  Yes, there are cranks who reject vaccines and whatnot, but they are (fortunately) a small minority.  And, yes, everybody ignores their doctor's advice to eat less and exercise more, but that's less about intellect than inertia. In general, the public likes the idea of a smart doctor. They might gripe if a doctor is cold or impersonal, but they'll never gripe that the doctor uses a lot of big words.  You need to be a college professor or the like in order to signal your virtue by saying "I prefer a doctor who appreciates a balanced life to a doctor that is really smart." Nobody else says this. Nobody else sits in the ER, thinking about the blood that they just urinated, and says "I don't care if the person making the calls here is smart."

As to Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, I admittedly wasn't around in the 1950's, so I never witnessed that campaign coverage, but Eisenhower masterminded the most complex military operation that the US had ever pulled off.  I can't really fault the public for trusting him to run the government.  If they'd selected some handsome private who had a medal and claimed to have more common sense than the eggheads, I'd have a different take. But I really can't fault the public for entrusting the federal government to the guy who successfully pulled off the most complex task the federal government had ever executed.

Chapter 9: It's mostly about business and the public's preference for businessmen and practical knowledge.  It's hard to fault the public for this.  In fact, as a science professor I'm keenly aware that most of my students will go straight to the private sector after college, and I want to teach them skills that they can use in a job.

Also, on page 238 he starts discussing the American attitude toward the past.  He starts by noting that America is a land with many fewer ancient ruins than Europe, so we have less respect for accumulated knowledge. That's largely true, but I'd like to note a few things about the societies that were here before Europeans:
1) Yes, they mostly left fewer ruins behind than the older societies of Europe, but not every corner of Europe is replete with Roman ruins and whatnot. Many (not all) parts of Scandinavia and Russia have less in the way of old civilizations building with stone. Mexico, Central America, and large parts of South America are a different matter.  Climate determined where people could develop the knowledge base to build large cities with stone.
2) To the extent that we do have Native American ruins, for most Americans they fit into narratives of something other than "Our Glorious Ancestors." To some they elicit guilt about the past, and for others they arguably buttress a sense of pride in being part of the culture that "civilized" these lands.

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.