American Idyll: Intro

 Liu's book is a heavy read. She assumes a reader well-versed in intellectual history, political philosophy, etc. The intro was a hard read, rapidly summarizing many different ideas over the years. She gives a lot of attention to Richard Hofstadter in her intro, and her synopsis of him matches up with my recollection.

A few choice quotes:

If in the 1890's the People's Party demanded economic justice for producers, the populists of the 1980's demanded freedom from cultural condescension. (page 4)

I freely admit to having some of that sneering condescension in me. I know that I shouldn't, but it's hard to let go of it. As much as educated liberals can drive me crazy, their opponents refuse vaccines while pushing back against elites by rallying behind a rich asshole from NYC (Trump) and previously a rich asshole from Connecticut (Bush The Lesser). How do I not look down on that? At least when I support an elite I'm a knowing elitist, you know?

But I just did what she's talking about: I shifted from economics to culture war. That's her point. Everyone shifted from economics to culture war. Maybe it's in part because calories are now cheap, so the economics of farming is no longer so politically central? We've hardly solved all our material problems, but we solved a key one: Getting enough calories. (Yes, I'm quite aware that calories aren't the be-all and end-all of nutrition, but getting sufficient energy is certainly important. If anything we have the opposite problem now...)

Also on page 4:

For the most extreme academic populist, any criticism of popular culture and popular taste was associated with elitism, universalism, normative masculinity, consensus politics, liberalism, and Marxism.

I don't know the humanities as she does, but certainly I've seen more celebration of middle-brow culture. That's not all bad--Shakespeare did plenty of stuff for the low-brow and middle-brow parts of the audience. But, yes, there is insecurity about denoting something "high" culture. We're all supposed to be egalitarians now.

On page 6 she critiques right-wing populism for embracing superficial trappings of common life--pork rinds, NASCAR, etc.--while pushing policies that dismantle or privatize the post-New Deal state. We can debate how much has actually been dismantled, but she's certainly summarizing a well-known critique. She spends a lot of time on Thomas Frank, who has made these points better than I have time to summarize. (I've only read him in excerpts, not full books.)

Her outline of the rest of the book is as follow:

Chapter 1 will critique meritocracy and standardized tests. I'm not favorable to such critiques, but given her sympathies we might be able to find some common ground. Chapter 2 will continue the critique of standardized tests and take on the concept of the "average student." I think I have some common ground with this notion: As much as I think tests tell us something with some relevance for some endeavors, they aren't everything, and the big middle ground of humanity needs varied paths. In chapter 3 she looks at advice, self-help, counseling, etc. She freely admits to covering some of the same ground as Hofstadter in "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology." In Chapter 4 she looks at myths about student radicals in the 60's and how that played into critiques of elites and experts. Finally, in Chapter 5 she looks at Cultural Studies and the Professional Managerial Class. Apparently there will be a discussion of Alan Sokal and the Science Wars of the 90's.

Should be an interesting read.

Hofstadter, wrapping up

For some reason I don't have it in me to laboriously type out every awesome quote in chapters 13-14. I'll just note two things:

1) Hofstadter's description of the "life adjustment" movement, which tried to make high school more relevant to the kid who isn't going to college, initially makes me sympathetic to them. The biggest challenge I face is working with kids who were pushed into college by progressive educators, not kids who were steered away from college by progressive educators.  Progressive education sure has changed!  In an earlier era they thought it was silly to put college on a pedestal, but now they want everyone to go!

The problem with "life adjustment", alas, is that they also didn't think much of preparing a subset of the students for college.  They thought everyone should get that same lowest common denominator, rather than different strokes for different folks.  If progressive educators actually appreciated individual diversity they'd be fine with individualized paths.

2) The chapter on Dewey is full of awesomeness, and I'm not going to quote all of it.  Several years ago I quoted the awesome closing line of the chapter.  This time I'll quote something from near the beginning:

[Dewey] has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasion read.

I've tried reading Dewey, and he's boring.  But one of these days I will make myself read a couple of his essays all of the way through, because I hate myself that much.

Now I'm off to read a few books that I probably won't feel like blogging.

Hofstadter Chp. 12, continued

Hofstadter had a lot to say about the history of American education and attitudes towards teachers. Teaching has never been a high-status profession in this country. He claims that it is (or was, in 1963) a high-status profession in other countries, and I've heard some anecdotal reports that it's a high-status profession in countries that do better than us on international tests (e.g. Finland, the country where I want to be). A few fascinating points from the reading:

1) On page 313, he notes that some towns got teachers via a mechanism remarkably similar to Teach For America:

Others accepted the fact that a permanent schoolmaster was all but an impossibility and employed briefly a serious of ambitious young men who were on the way to other careers, perhaps in the ministry or law.

2) On page 316, he notes that in the 19th century America did a very unusual thing, and adopted a European educational practice.  That practice? Sorting students by grade.  Previously (and continuing into the late 19th century in some places) children were almost entirely educated in one-room schoolhouses with ages and grades mixed.  But with the sorting of students came specialization, larger facilities, and hence respectability.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, while Hofstadter claims that sorting students led to respectability, he also claims that it opened the profession to women, because of increased demand for teachers.  Given that high-status professions have historically been slow to open to women, I'm a bit skeptical of this claim.

He doesn't do much to reinforce it, because he goes on to note that skeptics of women teachers were silenced by the realization that they could get away with paying women less.  On the one hand, it is unsurprising that people would be OK with paying women less, and that they would put aside other concerns if they could get something for cheaper.  Still, that doesn't buttress his claim that teaching became a respectable profession.

That said, I love this sentence about low-paid women teachers:

Here was one answer to the great American quest to educate everybody but do it cheaply.

3) A few pages later, Hofstadter quotes a New Jersey school administrator lamenting in 1855 that you can't attract men of ability and promise to the teaching profession when teaching is a low-paid and still disreputable profession. This seems to undercut the claim of a few pages ago.

4) Finally, on page 320 he discusses the feminization of elementary school teaching. He claims that (1) American elementary schools have many fewer male teachers than peer countries around the world (a claim for which I don't have 1963 data at hand) and (2) this is another cause of American anti-intellectualism, because it sent the message that the life of the mind is not masculine.

Regarding the percentage of teachers who are female, in this era the number seems to be highly variable around the globe. But regarding the alleged message that studying isn't masculine, I'll just note that the percentage of male teachers increases going from elementary school to middle school to high school to undergraduate institutions to graduate schools. If anything, this sends a message that the highest tiers of knowledge are very masculine, and the lower tiers of knowledge are feminine. I don't think it fits Hofstadter's claim.

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.

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.

Final quote from Chapter 6 of Hofstadter

On page 159, Hofstadter quotes a description of the 1824 election as a contest between:

John Quincy Adams who can write
And Andrew Jackson who can fight.

That was apparently intended as an argument for Jackson. Nice to know that Americans have always been this dumb.

Hofstadter: More of Chapter 6 and into Chapter 7

Before starting with Chapter 7, I want to note something from Chapter 6: On pages 167-168, Hofstadter notes that Jefferson was able to invite talented and accomplished men who were educated but hardly wealthy to run for political office with the support of a strong party system, but this was less feasible once we moved toward popular democracy.

This is relevant to the topic of civil service exams in Chapter 7. Hofstadter chronicles the myriad objections to exams and other civil service reforms, all centering around a fear that only rich kids from Yale could pass them. It didn't matter that the statistics said otherwise, nor did it matter that the content of the exams was hardly college material. Everyone was terrified of being ruled by intellectuals. I find this darkly amusing, because when I think of people who could ace exams, the very last people I think of are the sort who got into Ivy League schools in the 19th century.  Frankly, even today's Ivy Leaguers have a sizable contingent of legacy admits. And the people I know who most vehemently object to standardized tests in university admissions are disproportionately (though not exclusively) people from the sorts of families that don't actually need good grades to get into good schools, if you know what I mean.

It's also worth noting that federal civil service jobs have long been a path to the middle class for African Americans, and this was true long before the feds did anything that could be construed in any way as affirmative action.  Civil service exams may not be perfect, but they seem to be a bit more than just a means for Ivy Leaguers to feather nests for themselves and their children.

Hofstadter, Chapter 6

In Chapter 6, Hofstadter discusses the fall of the intellectual aristocrats from the Founding generation.  His take is that America ceased to revere aristocrats because the aristocrats soon became divided between political parties, and so they cast aspersions on each other while courting the masses.

On page 155 he quotes Thomas Jefferson (among the most learned and thoughtful of the Founders, even if deeply flawed in his own ways) praising the commoners over the elite:

State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well, and often better than the later, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

Hofstadter goes on to argue that Jefferson was only asserting the moral superiority of the common people, not the technical and intellectual superiority. However, in public affairs there is an inevitable intertwining of moral and factual questions.  "Should the government fund this program?" is, of course, an "ought" question, but virtually any individual will include a cost-benefit analysis in their moral calculus. Yes, some (e.g. libertarians) will oppose all programs of a given nature, and some (e.g. the more naive leftists) will have unreserved enthusiasm for all programs of a given sort, but most will either overcome skepticism for a sufficiently beneficial program, or overcome enthusiasm for a sufficiently costly program. So "ought" and "is" are intertwined.  If you hold up ordinary people as being not just sufficient judges of these matters (the basic premise of democracy), but actually superior judges (the anti-intellectual premise of populism) then you are, at a minimum, discounting the value of the expert voice in favor of the "ought" side of the question.

Also, as intellectual as Jefferson was, he had the common intellectual drawback of eccentricity, coupled with a decidedly rural sensibility. This made him skeptical of the urban culture that is most conducive to intellectual work.  I say that not to disparage the mental demands of farm work and the like (frankly, it's one of the hardest and most essential tasks of civilization), nor to deny the creative benefits of retreating from the city (many a great work has been composed in a rural retreat), but simply to note its highly specialized nature, and the fact that specialization is the defining trait of urban economic activity. Jefferson's skepticism of cities meant that while, as an individual, he could be a contributor to intellectual culture, as a leader he could never be its champion. (That's fine; most writers, scientists, artists, etc. will never be good at making their case to the wider public. But we shouldn't be surprised when they lead political parties that don't make the case for learning.)

Anyway, at first I was skeptical of Hofstadter's point about the division of the educated aristocrats in the Founding generation.  Wouldn't that just give both parties a set of intellectual heroes? But thinking about it more, I realized two things:
1) Many countries have, at least in their past if not in their present, an aristocratic party and a labor party (and perhaps also a separate agrarian party). We have arguably had labor and agrarian interests ascendant in our parties at various times, and we've had plenty of commercial parties, but Blue Blood parties? Even the old Republicans were a party of capitalism more than aristocracy. Academic work has always had an aristocratic element, making it more of a "Guardian" tradition than a "Commercial" tradition (in the terminology of Jane Jacobs).

2) Being a deeply religious country, we raised our Founders to the level of demigods rather than thinkers. We took their words as dogma to absorb, not as ideas to play with.  In an earlier chapter Hofstadter said that intellectuals play with ideas rather than accept them uncritically, but we view the Founders as geniuses beyond questioning.  I remember being struck in high school by the seeming inevitability of the Constitution. It was taught as though every clause (excepting slavery-related ones) added up to a seamless whole embodying a single idea. It seemed like a necessity for freedom.

And then I learned that plenty of wealthy, liberal, and democratic countries had governments with either unicameral legislatures or very weak second chambers, and executives chosen by the legislature. It's 100% the opposite of our seemingly inevitable Constitution of checks and balances...yet it works. Clearly there's more than one way to do this.

A tangential observation: On a different note, on page 154, Hofstadter summarizes an early critic of aristocratic politicians as arguing that if a learned class could do nothing but support privilege then we shouldn't have a learned class.  I think that many of my colleagues would sympathize with that argument, given some of the things that they've said against teaching abstract and complicated concepts, or selecting PhD students based (in part) on their mastery of complicated and abstract concepts. (Yes, for real.)

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.

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.

We are so screwed.

The author of this essay "The Promise of Intellectual Joy" was accused of "white supremacist rhetoric" and subsequently fired.  For an essay that cites Hofstadter extensively and proclaims that every child can and should feel the thrill of intellectual challenge.

We are so screwed.

Let's talk about Heritage

Every reader of this blog knows that one of my favorite books is Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  Another favorite book is Albion's Seed.  Both of them have a lot to say about the Puritans.  The Puritans were arguably the most intellectual of America's founding cultures.  Their clergy were educated at Oxbridge, and their sermons were transcribed and distributed publicly for discussion.  There were meaningful parallels with the Jewish tradition of reading the Bible, reading the commentaries, and then discussing and debating the primary text and the commentaries.s

They were also among the most egalitarian Western societies of their era, in terms of their laws on marriage, divorce, property, and inheritance.  They fell far short of our modern standards, but they were ahead of their time, and helped to enable the progress that has been made since.  They did own slaves, but they owned fewer than other American sub-cultures and abolished it well ahead of others.

Since America is currently debating whether Nazis and Klansmen are bad, let me note that some of the most ardent abolitionists were New Englanders of Puritan heritage.  They marched to Kansas with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, determined to prevent Kansas from becoming a slave state.  Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist novel dripping with Biblical references, was written by a scion of the Puritans.  John Brown was of Puritan descent.  Though we typically think of New Englanders as less militaristic than Southerners, fire-breathing abolitionists of Puritan extraction eagerly matched the Confederate ardor for civil war.

So, you want to talk about Heritage?  Yeah, let's talk about Heritage.  Some of us trace our cultural influences to New England, and the people who crushed the Confederacy are our Heritage.  Some of us look at the Confederacy the way we look at Nazi Germany.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Well, here I am, blogging late at night/early in the morning after a shocking election.  I have no interest in dissecting partisan politics here, only intellectual politics.

In the 1990's, an interregnum between the Cold War and War on Terror, academics drew knives on each other for the "Science Wars."  We got to hear from a certain type of humanities student that science is just, like, a Western hegemonic patriarchal cultural construct.  That all ended when Bush The Lesser took office, and all academics agreed that global warming is objective scientific fact.

In recent years we have been going at each other in higher ed over a somewhat different set of issues, but I suspect that we'll come together again.  Most academics will be on the same page about Trump, and there will be a degree of internal unity that we haven't previously enjoyed.  Even many academics of rather conservative views on certain issues (e.g. me) feel that Trump is illiberal, uninformed, and reckless.

What are the things that we will declare a truce on?  Well, we have been talking a lot about unconscious bias and invisible advantages, the subtle things.  But we are now confronted with a large number of people supporting a man who spouted undisguised, clearly visible, not-at-all subtle bias.  The problem we face is not good people who are slightly biased in spite of good intentions, but something much more blatant.

That's the part where I ask for people to give less emphasis to something that I disagree with.  Here's where I give less emphasis to something:

I've been going after the anti-intellectualism of progressive education.  I'm still opposed to it, and I will still pursue the path that I believe is most intellectually appropriate.  But anti-intellectualism manifests in many ways and in many aspects of American life.  Progressive educators cannot be my only targets.

Everyone wants some magical solution for their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic

A new study from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University (a college that Hofstadter spent some time mocking in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life) gives us a magic fix to community college retention and graduation rates:  Students should take 15 units in their first semester, instead of the 12 units that some people recommend as a gentler start.  Their study shows that taking 15 units in the first semester predicts student success.

There's just one problem:  We don't know if the students who take 15 units do better because their more rigorous first semester provides them with a good foundation for success, or because being able to take 15 units means that they don't have a lot of family responsibilities and don't have to work long hours.  If the former case is true then people should absolutely advise students to take 15 units in their first semester.  If the later case applies then taking 15 units is just spitting in the wind.  In reality it is almost certainly some of each, but we don't know to what extent each effect applies, or if one is much stronger than the other.  We can hazard informed guesses, but this study does not actually offer any evidence in favor of one guess or another.  This is conceded in footnote 6 (page 10 of the .pdf) and confirmed in Table 2 (page 20 of the .pdf) where they show which variables they control for.  None of the variables are direct measures of a student's outside work hours or family responsibilities.  Yes, they control for gender, and gender can be a proxy for greater outside responsibilities, but it's a very crude proxy.  They also control for high school GPA, and certainly a higher GPA may be a sign of a favorable family environment, but many families expect more from a person once they finish high school, and high school is a much more structured environment than college, so high school GPA is a poor proxy for family and work responsibilities.

Nonetheless, this study is getting a lot of attention, because everyone wants to believe that there are easy fixes.  Even worse, they want to believe that these easy fixes are rational, so that they can get magical solutions without magic.  Alas, there are no secret tricks, no correct politics, just liars and lunatics.

It is worth noting that this is pretty much part for the course when it comes to elite discourse about the lower classes.  The world wants to believe that there's a cheap and easy way to help the disadvantaged.  Having them take one extra course isn't all that hard in the grand scheme of things, or at least it isn't that hard for the people telling them to do it.  Whether or not the fix works is less important than the fact that it has been identified and they've been told that they better go do it.

The Age of Reform, Chapter 4: Making connections

I'm party way through chapter 4.  The argument of Chapter 4 thus far is that the Progressives of the late 19th/early 20th centuries were mostly small-town or urban upper-middle class people who picked up the causes of the rural/agrarian Populists and put them in more genteel form.  The upper-middle class was enjoying comfort in this time, but they knew that they were being eclipsed by the growing industrial interests, and that while they were comfortable they were suddenly less important than they had been.  They felt this keenly.  This dovetails to some extent with a point that Hofstadter made in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:  That in the late 19th century giant new commercial interests emerged and had little use for the formally educated.  In that book Hofstadter focused mostly on the self-made industrialists who had little education.  Here he gives a more nuanced take, noting that plenty of the men who made money in that era were from comfortable classes, but they took positions in massive commercial interests of national prominence when the country was becoming more integrated, and these national interests eclipsed the upper-middle class professionals who had formed a sort of social glue.  While he doesn't specifically address education here, certainly the traditional elites are going to be more traditionally educated and have more traditional sympathies than the titans of new industries.

We see some of this today, in an era of increasing economic inequality. We see the rise of tech companies founded by college dropouts, so people start talking about how nobody needs college, they just need MOOCs. And even the upper-middle class now feels precarious, as evidenced by the profile of the support for Bernie Sanders or the number of private college grads in Occupy Wall Street.  Whatever you think of the merits of their proposals (I will not claim to be a big fan of all of Sanders' policy proposals) the precariousness felt by certain classes is reminiscent of the forces that Hofstadter identified as giving rise to the Progressive Era.  It might also explain why a physics professor has felt the need to spend more than a year blogging about the curiously low respect for expert voices in our current culture...

(Incidentally, many of my economic sympathies are somewhat conservative/free market.  One might wonder why I care about economic inequality.  My answer is that in competitive markets competition tends to reduce the returns to all sellers, to the benefit of buyers.  It is therefore strange that the sellers of certain categories of labor are making more and more money in an allegedly competitive era.  There is something amiss in our society and economy, but it is not something that higher education can fix. This is outside our bailiwick, not the least because we are in the business of naming things after the fantastically wealthy. Also, parents are better predictors of academic success than anything that professors might do.)

So much for the latest panacea

In a recent interview, psychologist Carol Dweck reminds everyone that "growth mindset", while a valid and important concept, is not the be-all-and-end-all of success, and is hardly a panacea.  I mention this because I've heard quite a few progressive-minded people tell me that "growth mindset" is what REALLY matters for success, more than anything else.  I'm glad that she's adding some nuance.  It seems to be the destiny of every Great Big Educational Theory to go through a cycle of discovery, promotion, hype that exceeds the original intent of the founder, and an eventual disclaimer by the founder.  This pattern goes back at least as far as Dewey, according to Hofstadter, and is probably even older than that.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

I had no idea that Eric Hoffer spent time watching education reformers

Between the Devil and the Dragon, page 70:

Total innovation is the refuge of the untalented and the innately clumsy.  It offers them a situation where their ineptness is acceptable and natural.  For we are all apprentices when we tackle the wholly new, and we expect the new to show the apprentice's hand--to be clumsy and ill-shapen. 

Yet, however untalented and clumsy, the innovators have a vital role to play.  For it is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.  The avant-garde counteracts this deadening influence, and fulfills the vital role of keeping the gates open for the real talents who will eventually sweep away the inanities of the experimenters and build the new with a sure hand.

Yes, that is the dilemma of innovation:  There are real innovations and there are frauds and cheap imitations and minor tweaks that get over-sold.  There are truly creative types and real talents and then there are the dilettantes.  The problem is that the dilettantes can easily become the enforcers of orthodoxy if they are welcomed into the temple, but they can just as easily keep some space open on the fringes.  It's a tough balance.

Hoffer's point about orthodoxy also reminds me of how Hofstadter closed his chapter on Dewey:  "And so the quest for a method of institutionalizing the proper anti-institutional methods goes on."

The low-information style in Hofstadter commentary

Since I dislike the intellectual poses of the Right-Thinking sorts, I have a natural sympathy for much of this essay on liberal smugness by Emmett Rensin.  Not all liberals are smug (and I don't disagree with all liberals) but I hate the happy-shiny smug liberal cool kids.  So I was primed to like this essay, and there's a lot to like.  For instance, this, on the denial that value judgments are real:

The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style's first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from "imposing their morals" like the bad guys do.

Since "is/ought" has been a recent interest of this blog, I approve!

Then they had to go and put this in:

The smug style has always existed in American liberalism, but it wasn't always so totalizing. Lionel Trilling claimed, as far back as 1950, that liberalism "is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition," that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse ... do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

Richard Hofstadter, the historian whose most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this essay exists in some obvious reference to, advanced a similar line in writing not so well-remembered today. His then-influential history writing drips with disdain for rubes who regard themselves as victimized by economics and history, who have failed to maintain correct political attitudes.

Hofstadter's writing does contain considerable disdain for right-wing populism of many sorts.  If the only thing you've ever read by Hofstadter is The Paranoid Style in American Politics then it would be easy to read him as being part of the smug left.  However, if you read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life you'll see that he aimed far more fire at progressive educational ideas (most of them coming from lefty egalitarian impulses) than he ever aimed at conservatives and rubes.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a leftist who's more favorable toward the religion of the Puritans.

It is a hallmark of the Right-Thinking smug types (whom Rensin rightly derides) that they've all read exactly one work by Hofstadter, and it's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.  Unfortunately, Rensin has also read only one work by Hofstadter.  If you read a wider swath of his work you'll see that he's hardly convinced of the rightness of one "side" in our culture war.

Next Book: American Higher Education--A Documentary History by Richard Hofstadter

I liked Anti-Intellectualism in American Life so much that I figured I should read some more Hofstadter, so I will. I'm going to plunge into his two-volume American Higher Education--A Documentary History. I have only flipped through the pages so far, but it appears to be a lot of very short, largely self-contained chapters.  This will be interesting.

EDIT:  Oh, I see.  It's an edited collection of primary documents.  So far I'm reading documents from Harvard in the 1600's.  The ideal of higher education promoting virtue is definitely in there. Hofstadter takes pains to point out that the Puritans did want an educated clergy but they didn't only want an educated clergy.  They wanted well-read leaders in society, intellectually-grounded professionals.