Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu

I just read Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. It's an admirably compact read, taking only as many pages as it actually needs in order to make its case: The Professional-Managerial Class is full of neuroticism, insecurity, and hypocrisy. She focuses on three examples: Attitudes towards child-rearing (everything ever done by neurotic parents looking to get their kids into Ivies), books (a less convincing chapter), and sex (not gonna touch that). Her bigger point is that the PMC has largely tried to identify itself as being more virtuous than the lower economic classes so that they can justify having more. They want to justify it to everyone: Themselves (all that insecurity), the more affluent people for whom they work (again, they feel insecure), and those with less (to try to get the poor to strive rather than revolt).

Liu is far-left on economics, more lefty than I'll ever be, but you don't need to be lefty to (1) agree with her cultural critiques of the PMC and (2) think that actual material living conditions should be a bigger concern than whether somebody spoke about a social issue in precisely the right language. One could support reforms from any number of angles, left, right, or otherwise, and think that those reforms should concentrate on tangible economic issues instead of culture.

My most important takeaway from her book is from the intro: The contrast between the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th and the PMC of today. Educated professionals were prominent in that progressive movement as they are among today's self-styled progressives. However, the progressives of the earlier era were often in sympathy with the working classes, while today's PMC finds the working class appalling.

I'm not convinced her history is strong there. I'm hardly an expert on this, but labor movements were generally aligned with the Democrats, at least by the time of FDR, while many (not all) progressives were identified with the Republicans. Yes, FDR came after the days of the capital-P Progressives, and I'm no expert on that history, but it seems clear that the story was probably a bit more complicated than hinted at in Liu's intro. (I'm quite certain that historians will always agree with the statement "[Insert movement here] was more complicated than a short summary.")

Still, to the extent that she might be capturing some truth, it's worth noting (as Liu does) that the educated professionals of the PMC are largely salaried people working for bigger organizations. They don't own the means of their production (her wording, she's very proudly leftist) the way that many small-town professionals did a century ago. Hofstadter noted that the progressive movement of a century ago had plenty of professionals and businessmen (not normally a leftist bunch) who felt threatened by corporations. They had enough ownership of their jobs to feel threatened AND enough ownership to have some ability to push back. Today the educated professionals mostly work for someone else, not themselves.

I'm also reminded of Claudia Goldin's observations about how working for corporations closed gaps between male and female pharmacists. On one level this is unambiguously good: Of course we want to see men and women enjoy the same opportunities. And it is obviously something that the PMC would and should celebrate, both because of the wider gender implications and because it is in their self-interest. However, Liu would note that the victory doesn't necessarily trickle down to women working in other jobs (e.g. the low-paid cashiers in those pharmacies). A segment of the PMC gained equity in the sense of fairness by giving up their equity in the sense of ownership. Maybe it's a very good thing from many angles. Maybe it's better for patients, especially certain kinds of patients. If I traveled a lot I'd probably want to be able to go to any CVS in the country and get my prescription refill.

On the other hand, I know from family experience that certain specialty services seem to be easier to get at independent pharmacies.

But whatever the bigger-picture pros and cons of corporate vs independent pharmacies, the main point is that the PMC prioritizes certain social goals and has partly achieved some of those goals...at least for themselves...by accepting the economic power of larger entities. And so we can't really stand up to larger entities. I'm just a guy with an inconsequential blog. If I actually caused real trouble for a big entity I'd lose my job and health insurance. We all know this.

I think this is Liu's best point, separate from her critiques of various books and sexual politics.

American Idyll, Chapter 1: Meritocracy

 Chapter 1 is written as a summary of history and thinkers. She covers a lot of things I've heard before, including standardized tests and Hofstadter's critiques of anti-intellectualism. I could summarize everything she's said, but that would be a lot of space (she packs a lot in) and frankly I don't take issue with much. The meta issue is that she is critiquing meritocracy as a technocratic hierarchy. I have more than enough issues with that, so I don't disagree. But meritocracy is an idea with two very different usages, subject to two different critiques. Besides an overall societal hierarchy based on technocracy, "meritocracy" also refers to hiring workers or selecting students based on qualifications for the particular position in question. Merit for the job is narrower than merit to run society. Being qualified to study a particular subject at a particular level is different from being qualified to enter the leadership class.

Liu critiques standardized tests alongside efforts to make education more "relevant" that Hofstadter critiqued. I'm not sure that the two things really belong together for critique. Sure, testing can be combined with tracking to give some people a less "academic" and more vocational education, while others get more traditional liberal arts or whatever. Whatever the advantages or disadvantages of such tracking, when you DON'T track you wind up having to dumb things down. (Ask me how I know.) Testing and tracking is the best hope for offering rigorous education at all. Otherwise we have to go to the lowest common denominator.

I'm not sure that I'm seeing how Liu will tie these things into anti-elitism. Testing is elitism.

Now, Liu does note that if we make teachers accountable for test scores then we can wind up stripping the richness from education and make it into desperate attempts to boost scores. That ultimately weakens intellectualism and is a form of anti-elitism. But testing is also one of the few tools we have to actually preserve some truly academic education. Educators who know their students are ready can demand more than educators who fear that their students aren't ready. (Ask me how I know.)

Now, Liu does make the point that one of the early goals of testing was to smash a hereditary elite by opening it to smart kids of every background, e.g. Columbia opening up to children of immigrants instead of traditional WASPs. That's a type of anti-elitism, but also a new type of elitism.

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.

An article on ass-essment

 I don't have time for an in-depth review of this article on assessment, but I do enjoy it. I never thought I'd read an article that approvingly quotes both Dewey and Hofstadter. 

I want to quote two things. First:

As Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady point out in their 2014 article “A Radical Critique of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Movement,” learning outcomes is only a different term for lesson plans or course content. 

Yep. It's about asking us to restate something we already know (we'd better show up to class with an idea of what we're doing) with a word that they control, because they can always accuse us of not understanding their buzzword well enough.

Second, there are many great points about the pointlessness of "learning goals" but I will quote this one:

Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith, in their 2008 article “Learning Outcomes,” distinguish between and among learning goals written for a lesson, for a course, and for a program, and the authors point out that the more remote the learning goals are from the classroom itself, the more irrelevant learning outcomes become. Robert Shireman, in his 2016 op-ed “SLO Madness,” amusingly labels student learning outcomes as “gibberish,” capturing Dewey’s point that for a learning goal to be an intellectual one it has to arise from the intelligence and experience of the teacher; otherwise it is meaningless. Similarly, one cannot function as a true scholar or an intellectual while being told what to do. Moreover, the sheer number of classes that need to be certified necessitates that learning goals be written in categories that may or may not be relevant to the material taught. For example, in the general education category at San José State University (SJSU), where I teach, a single learning goal can apply to ten to twenty different disciplines.

This machine-like nature stands in stark contrast to the ass-essment movement's commitment to "innovation." If I'm constantly doing new things then the goals will inevitably be shifting, at least in part. Yes, at the end of the day I still want them to learn optics or mechanics or whatever, but if I try new assignments then the details change, and the details of the assignment matter! The details of the project matter! Two classes can cover the same basic idea in such different ways that all you can really say is "Well, both classes talked about lenses."

Hidden Figures: Excellence rather floundering

I finished the book. It's a good book. I learned a lot of history that I didn't know before, and not just about the specific women profiled in there. I learned more about the origins of NASA and some of the backstory to how decisions were made early in manned spaceflight. For instance, the process for validating space flight trajectories in an era when electronic computers were not yet considered more trustworthy than human calculations.

But it's not really a NASA history. It's a history of black women in STEM. So let's talk about diversity in STEM. What strikes me most is the contrast between the celebration of excellence in this book and the daily conversation on deficits in a modern third-tier university. There's nary a word about failure in this book, but many mentions of women who skipped grades and aced every math class in college. This is not solely a contrast of past and present: The book was written in the 2010's and published in 2016. Notably, the author is not in academia, and so she doesn't feel the same obligations that professors feel. In academia today, we have endless conversations about fail rates in core classes and the implications for diversity. The feeling is that the only way to get diversity is to somehow redeem large numbers of students who are currently floundering.

Now, if the question is whether we should give second chances as a matter of human decency, the answer is of course. If the question is whether some people might even surprise us on a third, fourth, or fifth chance, the answer is that this world is full of surprises. But if the question is whether such surprises are not only be good for the individuals involved but sufficient in number to actually transform the demographics of STEM, the answer is assuredly no.  Remember, the floundering students who might surprise us are not exclusively "diverse." I've seen plenty of white boys flounder and fumble even on fourth chances, and if there's a trove of fifth-chance redemptions in the offing then surely there will be more than a few white boys in the "Fifth Time's The Charm" club. Good for them, but it also means that fifth chances or whatever won't move the ratios in ways that people hope.

I have no easy answers for transforming ratios so we finally get enough diversity in STEM--if I did, I would be able to save the world. To the extent that I can guess at answers, they surely involve starting well before kids reach college. And they surely involve fewer desperate attempts to redeem some D students and more cultivation of actual excellence wherever we find it.

The women in this book were not floundering students. They surely had some ups and downs like anyone else, but they were successful anytime they were given a chance. And by "a chance" I don't mean somebody saying "Well, she got a D, but maybe if we offer more encouragement and follow Equitable Best Practices in the remedial algebra course..." I mean that people looked at these women and said "Wow, they do quite well in math. Maybe we should hire them to do math instead of discriminating." If that isn't the essence of much-maligned meritocracy I don't know what is. These women had been succeeding since early in their educations, when they were skipping grades in k-12. They distinguished themselves in college and grad school (if they went to grad school). They earned respect in whatever jobs they held before joining the Langley facility to work on aircraft and later spacecraft. They were meritocratic hires, and in the many cases where the system deviated from meritocracy it worked to their detriment, not to their benefit.

Outside of the highest tiers, American educators are an anti-excellence bunch. Always have been, as Hofstadter showed. We don't know how to handle students who don't need coddling, especially if they come from groups that we frame as victims. We want to be saviors to the wretched of the earth rather than launch crews supporting astronauts on their way to the farthest stars. (Unless we can get photographed alongside the astronaut, and use that photo to get our grant renewed.) We were founded by farmers, who fare best on level ground, not by city-dwellers whose greatest pride has always been towers.

A careful reader of the book might fault me for neglecting the part where the women did receive additional training to fill gaps. However, these "gaps" sprang not from weakness but specialization. They majored in math and then joined engineering teams. They worked on aircraft engineering teams before transitioning to spacecraft. Their additional training was not remediation but professional development. It's utterly normal for professionals to pursue continuing education as they specialize and move into new areas, and it's utterly different from remediation.

I don't know how to produce more Katherine Johnsons and Dorothy Vaughans. If I did I could boost our economy, solve our most pressing technological, medical, and environmental needs, and end racial inequity. Alas, I don't. But I do know that the shift in educational discourse from "Katherine meets and exceeds every challenge, hire her!" to "Well, maybe if we are more progressive and less selective we could promote success..." mirrors the collapse of Dunbar High School. No good will come of it.

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.

Privilege, class, and diversity

I like this essay from the Hedgehog Review.  The three final paragraphs are the best:

 The concept of diversity first germinated in the corporate world, and was quickly seized upon by academia in the 1990s. It arrived just in the nick of time. The previous two decades had seen the traditional mission of the university undermined, if not abandoned, under pressure from a highly politicized turn in the humanities that made its case in epistemic terms, essentially debunking the very idea of knowledge. The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial.

The institutional desideratum—the political antipode to hated “privilege”—is no longer equality, but diversity. This greatly eases the contradiction Furet identified, shielding the system from democratic pressure. It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity. Under this dispensation, the figure of the “straight white male” (abstracted from class distinctions) has been made to do a lot of symbolic work, the heavy lifting of legitimation (in his own hapless way, as sacrificial goat). We eventually reached a point where this was more weight than our electoral system could take, as the election of 2016 revealed. Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger. We’ll see how that goes. 

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

It's all about legitimizing the status quo while dismissing class.  An upper class can be diverse in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., but by definition it cannot be diverse in terms of class, nor can it be equal to other classes. (And if you're confused about why I would separately list sex, sexuality, and gender in the previous sentence, that just points to another shibboleth that you can't pronounce, you heretic.)

I think it's particularly interesting how diversity is now the concept placed in tension with privilege, instead of equality.  When I was a kid, the privileged kids had affluent parents.  Now the white lower-middle class is deemed privileged, and the men of that class especially so.  That's quite a rhetorical trick.  Equality (whether economic, or of opportunity, or whatever) got pushed aside somewhere along the line, replacing solidarity with celebration of difference.  I'm not a Marxist, but on this one I see their point.  Yes, there are very valid points about the differences in the life experiences of men and women, or white people and people of color, but it's quite remarkable that the word we used to use for rich kids got co-opted to frame those very valid points.  The word may have a new denotation, but it still carries old connotations that sit uneasily with the new usage.

Also, I think there's a very important point in there about the difference between a managerial economy and an entrepreneurial one.  Founders/owners of privately-held businesses (or even businesses that have gone public but still have a very strong Founder presence) are often quite different from people who climbed corporate ladders.  They aren't always self-made people who rose from nothing (Trump built his empire on inherited wealth) but they are people who spent most of their careers making their own decisions (sometimes appropriately bold decisions, sometimes risky follies) rather than answering to a boss.

Corporate managers aren't fans of the regulatory state, but they can often make compromises (even lucrative compromises) with the regulatory state more easily than an entrepreneur can.  A corporate manager has spent his career answering to people, and following rules written by higher-ups who may be several time zones away.  This leads to a different demeanor and ideology than men who didn't have bosses.  And while privately-held companies typically face most of the same PR and HR issues as corporations of similar size, the quirks of founders play can play more of a role in how they respond to those issues (though more on that below), so they may have more room for managerial liberals (with all of their diversity talk) than a company still dominated by an entrepreneur.

One interesting exception to this dichotomy is Silicon Valley.  Large tech companies are mostly young (at least in comparison with other corporations of similar size, though Google just entered its third decade), but they are, for the most part, very socially liberal.  Mind you, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Google and Facebook managers who hate taxes and regulations, but the prevailing cultures of those places are famously liberal (at least on social issues) and unabashedly pro-diversity (unlike most of the right-wing billionaires who rose to power in the pre-internet era).  This has helped them make peace with the same cultural and regulatory issues as older corporations.

So, Trump is, on the one hand, a rich guy who has ripped off many ordinary people, and treated many workers like shit.  On the other hand, in this economy dominated by corporate managerial types (often liberal, at least in their acceptance of rules and certain PR and HR imperatives) rather than entrepreneurial types (who are often right-wing), Trump is an exception, a rich man who doesn't talk like a corporate manager.  That helps me to understand why he has appeal among some (not all) middle class white voters.  It's not the only factor, of course, but it's among them, and helps to make sense of why they see him as different from the other rich guys.

Finally, let's return to this line:

It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity.

This helps me understand why so many academic administrators honestly see themselves as "change agents", even while repeating the same slogans and buzzwords as every other administrator out there, and diligently following in the templates taught to them at workshops.  It explains to me why academic administrators from families of administrators see themselves and their advancement as bold and progressive rather than the fulfillment of a status quo destiny laid upon them when sperm met egg.  It helps explain why I, from a family that has grown more educated with each generation, a family that still circulates stories of immigrant roots, feel old-fashioned and traditional rather than progressive in academia:  Because the born insiders are all proclaiming their progressivity, leaving tradition as the only refuge of the outsider.

My only dissent from the above-quoted observation is that I don't see this as a uniquely contemporary thing, an artifact of a new liberalism that replaces economic class solidarity with diversity.  Hofstadter noted that Dewey's disciples, all managerial types, were desperate to find a way to institutionalize anti-institutional ideology.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

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.

Recent reading: Richard Hofstadter, An Intellectual Biography

I recently read Richard Hofstadter--An Intellectual Biography by David Brown.  For some reason I didn't feel like blogging it.  But a few takeaway observations:

1. A few months ago I was aghast that anybody would call Hofstadter a smug liberal.  In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life he displayed nothing but contempt for a certain type of progressive posing!  However, after reading more about his views, writings, and political activity (such as it was) in the 50's and 60's I now admit that he was a creature of a certain liberal consensus, and while he had no use for fluffy progressives (including student protesters) he clearly had a disdainful attitude toward conservative detractors from a centre-left consenus.
2. Perhaps Hofstadter's worst transgression was to see the defeat of Adlai Stevenson by Dwight Eisenhower as the triumph of Mencken's "booboisie."  Whatever might be said in favor of Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower was a highly accomplished man who had commanded millions of people in one of the most logistically complicated acts ever undertaken by the US government.  If that isn't a plausible resume for a Presidential contender, what is?
3. Hofstadter started college a year early, married the daughter of a doctor, and loved doing impressions.  JUST LIKE ME!!!11!!!! 
4. The author's description of his undergraduate college (University of Buffalo, now SUNY Buffalo) is absolutely fascinating.  The university started as a med school, added an undergraduate college of arts and sciences much later, and then (according to the author) was pushed to become a place of serious theoretical study as the children of immigrants started to pour in.  I cannot imagine a university today saying "We are getting more immigrants so we are going to up our academic game."  Even though that would actually be the right course of action when serving the disadvantaged, the Academy of today would go full-on bleeding heart, necessitating intervention from the heart surgeons of the med school.  
5. Hofstadter had no patience for hypotheses of America's authentic past being rooted in the now-closed frontier (e.g. Turner).  To Hofstadter, the true present, future, and character of America was in the diverse cities of the east coast.  Being a descendant of people who came here to farm (in some branches of my family) and also people who came here to work in cities (other branches) I don't see it as an either/or.  I think it's a mistake to dismiss the impact of a few centuries of expansion on the national character; we need a historical narrative that balances the many different reasons that people came here.  OTOH, I fully endorse the idea of America as a melting pot, and I reject the notion that small towns are the "Real America."

All in all, I found reading about my idol to be a bit less inspirational than I thought it would be.

Metzger, chapter 9: Universities and Big Business

In this chapter he focuses on big business's relationship with universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  He notes that whereas in the first half of the 19th century college presidents had sought donations based on their own assessments of institutional need, subsequently men of wealth decided what they wanted to support and offered those funds on their terms (a pattern that continues to this day).  Interestingly, he ties this with the concentration of wealth in the late 19th century and the unease that it inspired (as documented by Hofstadter in The Age of Reform). The plutocrats were not unaware of the unease, and they shared with many of the professors that quintessentially American optimism that an equal and democratic society can be sustained, that the masses can be lifted, and that all of this can be done without sacrifice of self-interest by finding a win-win solution through the application of science.  I'm reminded of the Gates Foundation.