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.)

Plutarch's Parallel Lives: First thoughts (mostly on Lycurgus)

I didn't find much of interest in his accounts of the Athenian Theseus and Roman Romulus.  Both men are either mythic or else real but grossly exaggerated, and their detailed exploits get tedious.  On the other hand, his examination of the social policies of Lycurgus, an apparently real (if exaggerated) leader of Sparta was absolutely fascinating.

I find the translated account hard to take at face value.  Plutarch attributes to Lycurgus the wholesale transformation of Sparta into a more or less Communist society in a single generation.  Lycurgus equalized the distribution of land, abolished silver and gold coins (replacing them with bulky iron that made commerce difficult), abolished all but the most practical manual arts and trades, completely overhauled the family unit, eschewed written laws, and turned the society into a martial one totally focused on raising warrior children.

Taken at face value, I don't believe it.  Communist dictators have never had nearly as much success as hoped for in redistributing wealth and overhauling society. Say what you will about how maybe people back then were different, but Communism has failed in every society where it's been tried, Eastern or Western, imperialist or post-colonial. However, I know that Sparta did function for many generations as a bizarre military cult.  Reading between a few lines, I can not the following:

1) Plutarch notes that his reign was preceded by considerable civic strife, and generations of back-and-forth whiplash between weak and overpowering rulers.  Strongmen always have more success when bringing stability after a long period of chaos.

2) Plutarch does note a coup attempt by the wealthy, and a restoration of Lycurgus on a populist tide.  It's not like this all went off without a hitch.

3) I know too little of Spartan social structure before (and after) Lycurgus, and the lives of people who weren't in the warrior caste. I suspect that a lot of what Plutarch is remarking on is the training and social structure of a warrior class/caste, not all of society.  There may have been parts of the economic structure that were run on some basis other than a warrior cult (though no doubt they lived under the rule of the warrior cult), and thus the social "reforms" of Lycurgus may have been focused on equalizing wealth among a warrior class that would be more amenable to military discipline than the average person.  Also, as Jane Jacobs noted in Systems of Survival, bad things happen when warrior classes get too tangled up in commerce.  You either wind up with feudalism, gangsterism, or rich and corrupt generals (e.g. Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, etc.).  (And it's debatable whether those 3 situations differ all that meaningfully from each other.)

4) Plutarch was writing centuries after Lycurgus, relying on sources written by the victors.  In all likelihood the transition to a strict military cult system was not the accomplishment of a single and mostly smooth generation (aside from the revolution, coup, and restoration), but what was ultimately cemented into place traces its roots to Lycurgus. Also, there were probably antecedents to his system, e.g. the 28 men who helped him in his first revolution, and he built on those antecedents rather than imposing an alien structure from scratch.

Read this way, as a summary of a system and the man who originated it, written centuries later without details, it makes more sense.

One interesting detail is that Plutarch dismisses Aristotle's contention that Spartan women enjoyed high status because the men were usually at war so the women had to run things.  Plutarch maintains that women enjoyed high status because Lycurgus believed that women must exhibit strength and athleticism so that they could raise warrior sons.  Obviously I wasn't there, but I don't see why there couldn't be elements of truth in both.  We know that in modern history women improved their status in the Western world in part because two successive generations saw their husbands and brothers mustered for war en masse, and had to step in and do things normally done by men.  It isn't crazy to think that Spartan women enjoyed some similar benefits from similar events.

Finally, I appreciate this rhetorical gem: "These public processions of the maidens, and their appearing naked in their exercises and dancings, were incitements to marriage, operating upon the young with the rigor and certainty, as Plato says, of love, if not of mathematics."

Onward to Numa Pompilius.

The common roots of PoMo and the STEM pedestal?

There's a lot to unpack in this Steven Pinker essay in the Chronicle, far more than I have time to unpack.  I certainly don't agree with all of it, and I think he is placing STEM on a pedestal, a practice that I have little patience for.  However, he is placing STEM on a slightly different pedestal than the one I usually bemoan, a pedestal of Truth.  That doesn't make it wholly defensible (STEM is great for "is", not so great for "ought", another point I've long hammered on), but it is a distinction worth noting.  Also, he is tracing today's critics of science to the same roots as the post-modernists of the 90's, a conflation that I've questioned before.

Still, despite his commission of so many sins that I've lamented so often, something in his polemic stirred up some thoughts in me.  I still don't believe that today's critics of science (particularly the critics of social science and applied science) are cast from exactly the same mold as the PoMos who spent the 90's arguing that scientific facts are "just, like, your opinion, man."  But I am starting to think that maybe they have something in common with those who want us to let every idiot out there get a STEM degree:  They both want STEM to be tamed, to be civilized into a certain set of upper-class mores.

Where STEM most offends PoMos and bleeding-hearts alike is in its stubborn insistence that you have to clear some objective hurdles:  Facts are facts, numbers are numbers, you either measured something correctly or you didn't, etc.  While I have a certain sympathy for those who would use cocktail party games of rhetoric to take down STEM egos on "ought" questions, on matters of society and applications, certainly I have no use for them when they want to argue that quantum mechanics is "just, like, your opinion, man."  Cocktail party games of rhetoric are all well and good until stubborn facts get in the way.  Likewise, our inconvenient insistence on facts and objective truth is a thorn in the side of those who want to either engage in patronage (sorry, the idiot son of a donor is still an idiot, and as long as he can't do math he can't do science) or largess (sorry, the idiot son of a pauper is still an idiot, as is the pauper's idiot daughter, and if they can't do math they can't do science).  The elites see largess as one of the things that legitimizes their status, per the observations of Jane Jacobs in Systems of Survival, but it's hard to justify dispensing that largess in the form of a physics degree for somebody who can't do algebra.

Needless to say, the people in my job who are most eager to give physics degrees to idiots who can't do math are always the children of the upper classes, and they always defend their project with bleeding-heart pleas for sympathy, i.e. invocations of largess.  But math is indifferent to both privilege and poverty, being cold and logical.  It cannot be twisted into the service of an educational agenda.  Science is nearly as inflexible, at least in its pure form.  The fruits of science can be pressed into the service of all sorts of agendas, some of them horrifying and others honorable, but scientific knowledge can only be mastered by walking inflexible paths, paths that bend neither for the high-born nor for the recipients of their largess.

This is anathema to the high-born, so they go after the culture of science from many angles.  These days they are less interested in arguing that quantum mechanics is "just, like, your opinion, man" and more interested in arguing that an insistence on the importance of mastering it is "just, like, your privileged, western, patriarchal, heteronormative opinion, man."

So while I still don't think the PoMos were the progenitors of the kool-aid drinkers who besiege STEM departments these days, I am now beginning to think that those two groups have a common ancestry.  (And, sadly, that ancestry comes with a silver spoon...)

Moral Syndromes and the Two Cultures

Although it's not possible to map perfectly from the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow to the Two Syndromes of Jane Jacobs (if it were then Jacobs' book would have a lower Kolmogorov Complexity, being equivalent to a couple essays by C.P. Snow), I think there are a lot of parallels.  In particular, I am inclined to say that just as the STEM culture maps roughly to the Commercial Syndrome (a point I argued yesterday), the arts and humanities map more or less to the Guardian Syndrome.

At first glance that may seem absurd:  Artists are often great critics of political power, and are often pacifist critics of Guardian activities like war.  Moreover, artists love to defy tradition.  Besides, isn't art often put to Commercial ends, and without the corruption that we see when Guardian and Commercial activities are blended?

The answer to all of those questions is "Of course."  You can't fit all of life into a single, simple framework.  At best, a framework can generate insights to place alongside other analyses.  And though artists are often critics of the establishment, the arts are heavily reliant on patronage.  That needn't be seen as a flaw or indicator of hypocrisy; dissent can be a constructive element of a society, even while existing within it.  Moreover, while an artist of today may break from tradition in many ways, when a person in the future wishes to study that artist it will be necessary to look at the context of this time, to see the artist in the context of the society that he/she was breaking from or critiquing.  The study of the arts and humanities can illuminate the present but it also requires a look backward.  That is not a bad thing, it is actually a source of strength.  The study of arts and humanities is an attempt to learn from tradition, even while challenging it.  If one wishes to learn from the Greeks and Romans one can and should draw on contemporary sources, but one cannot escape the need for primary sources.  That need for connection with the past is a mark of how the arts and humanities fit more closely with the Guardian Syndrome than with the Commercial Syndrome.

At this point some ardent defender of the liberal arts will probably feel a need to say that many people study humanities in college but go on to have great careers in the private sector.  Indeed.  All of teaching, even in STEM, is a heavily Guardian-based activity.  And even armies rely on commercial products.  Identifying a field of study with one Syndrome does not mean that the rest of society must look askance at it.  A healthy society draws heavily upon the best of both Syndromes, and even individuals may have experience in both types of activities.  Simultaneous mixing of activities in one organization is different from partaking of both in the course of a well-lived life.

Now, one big difference between Two Cultures and Two Syndromes is that mixing two Syndromes in areas with very tangible stakes for money and power can result in monstrosities (e.g. Marxism and the Mafia).  Mixing Two Cultures in academia, if done properly, can be quite positive.  I respect historians of science, scientists using their tools to help archaeologists or art historians, computational methods applied to linguistics, etc.  Of course, it can also be done to dangerous effect, either through "interdisciplinary" work that lacks a rigorous foundation on either side or through the false ecumenicalism of STEAM.   But then again, academia is (properly) different from the rest of the world, which is not the same as saying that we're completely immune to problems that could plague the rest of the world.

Systems of Survival, mid-way thoughts

I'm half-way through Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.  She divides many activities into "Commercial" and "Guardian" activities, and the associated value systems into "Commercial" and "Guardian" moral syndromes.  (The word "syndrome" simply means "things that go together", not necessarily "illness.")  Commercial activities are fairly self-explanatory.  "Guardian" activities are not just the military and police actions of government, but many things in government, and many things reliant on patronage or largesse.  The arts and sports fall largely under "Guardian" values because traditionally they have enjoyed substantial patronage. Also, athletic competition was historically an activity of warrior castes biding time between wars. Yes, art has been made for commercial purposes, and yes, sports are an entertainment business, but the local Little League team usually relies on sponsorship from the community, and the revenue-generating college football teams subsidize the track team.

Now, Jacobs also notes that when people try to blend the syndromes bad things occur.  You get corruption when government and business mingle, you get inefficiency when government planners try to provide goods that the market could handle better, and you get the mafia when a family uses bonds of loyalty and threats of violence (Guardian traits) to take control of neighborhood businesses.  Interestingly, the mafia loves its ceremonies and symbolism as much as royalty does, and as much as armies love their dress uniforms and parades, while businesses tend to pay less attention to aesthetics (except in advertising and branding, or in response to specific consumer demands).  Moreover, the Mafia dispenses largesse to the poor and the Church, to bolster their image and command loyalty, just as governments do.

The problems of mixing Guardian and Commercial activities help us understand why sports teams (traditionally Guardian, though now Commercial) pressure city governments (Guardians) to build stadiums.  They help us understand why there's so much corruption in revenue-generating college sports.  Yes, yes, I'm sure that somewhere out there a Division III College Athletics Director is dealing with a pole-vault scandal, but it pales in comparison with the corruption in Division I football and basketball.  It also helps us understand why agricultural policy is always and everywhere a quagmire:  Agriculture is most efficient as a commercial enterprise but because it relies on control of land (historically a government activity) it is always entwined with politics in ways that go beyond ordinary corruption or misguided regulatory zeal:  The value and use of land goes to deep values of what it means to be a state.

Anyway, let's take this to the things that I care about: Science and academia.

Jacobs argues that science is largely in sync with the values of the Commercial Syndrome:  Honesty is the best policy (unlike the deception and secrecy required for many security functions, whether espionage or sting operations), innovation is more valuable than tradition, collaboration with outsiders is to be welcomed (scientists collaborate internationally, just as merchants have always done business across borders), at the same time competition is to be encouraged (hence we look for replication processes to weed out error), etc.  I agree with these points, but at first I disssented because basic science is so heavily subsidized.

However, I think I can nonetheless endorse her equating of science with the Commercial Syndrome for three reasons:
1) No analogy is perfect.  Yes, the funding source is more than just a tiny flaw in the analogy, but we shouldn't just ignore the fact that in a great many ways the values of science fall much better under the Commercial Syndrome than the Guardian Syndrome.

2) Plenty of science happens outside of state-subsidized labs.  To the extent that science happens under state subsidy the rationale is generally some mix of long-term benefits (states can afford risk-reward ratios that competitive businesses can't), the value of knowledge and education (Guardian-provided activities) or national security (Guardian activity).  This doesn't change the fact that most science graduates go out and work in the Commercial realm.

3) Education fads, which drive me up the wall, have been pushed into the scientific community in large part through the efforts of the National Science Foundation and its "Broader Impact" criterion for grants.  The purpose of Broader Impact is service to the wider society, not the efficient advancement of the specific project in play.  It is the yoking of a community adhering (mostly) to Commercial values into Guardian endeavors.  And it sucks, just as the mixing of the two Syndromes so often sucks.

Yes, yes, edufads get some scientific respectability lacquered onto them, but it's mostly BS.  Education, with its focus on tradition and respect for the authority figure, is Guardian all the way.  Universities have always been subsidized by largesse.  Education is as Guardian as it gets. It's practically a priesthood, and it's about inculcation of social values as much as the sharing of knowledge.  And that's great, within its proper scope and place.  The practice of science should be Commercial and the education of people should be Guardian.  Hence we make teaching and research separate criteria for performance evaluation, and hence we have separate physical space, separate funds, etc. for those activities.  Indeed, graduate school is about transitioning from one to the other.  To the extent that it's inefficient, well, what did you expect when you transition between realms?

And the priorities and motives driving edufads and Broader Impact are all about national competitiveness and the moral legitimacy of the social order.  That is a thoroughly Guardian pair of priorities.  Eminently defensible priorities, but a poor match for Commercial activity.

Academic scientists are not the only people who have to straddle worlds, and to the extent that we are attempting a hybrid activity we should expect scandal and inefficiency.  But not all Syndrome-straddling activities are like the Mafia.  Jacobs notes that lawyers have to straddle the Syndromes, working in private firms and generally in support of commercial interests (law is far more about property and contracts than it is about criminal trials) but interacting with the government.  To the extent that they do it well it is by clearly understanding which duties apply to which parts of the job and to what types of activities.  We would do well in academia to think about which duties apply to which parts of the job.

Next book: Systems of Survival

I couldn't bring myself to finish Hayek's Counter-Revolution in Science.  I got his point dozens pages ago, and he mostly went into tedious intellectual history after that.  Mind you, intellectual history can be fun, but he was zeroing in on individuals without saying anything terribly interesting or revealing.

After that I read some fiction and wrote some fiction.  Some of the fiction writing is still ongoing, but one story was submitted.  We'll see what happens.

The next non-fiction book that I'll blog here is Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.  I actually read it several years ago, but it's worth re-reading.  She wrote it as a dialogue between several characters discussing the ethical ideas underpinning societal structures.  She contrasts commercial endeavors with "Guardian" institutions.  Obviously police and the military are guardian institutions, but so are all other government offices, as well as educational and artistic institutions dependent on patronage.  The concept of duty comes up a lot, and since I believe that a dilution of the concept of duty is one of the problems with American higher education, I think this book is worth re-reading.