The "selfishness" of virtue

In Chapter 8 of Part 2 of Volume 2, de Tocqueville notes that Americans of that time were quite adamant that ethical behavior was in their self-interest.  To a large extent that is obviously true.  A reputation for honesty, for instance, can serve one well in the long-term.  However, when we go beyond mere honesty to benevolence, I'm not convinced that virtuous behavior will always overlap self interest.  To be fair, de Tocqueville doesn't make such an assertion, he merely remarks that Americans were public and vocal in their insistence that virtue served self-interest rather than being a thing that is good in its own right despite the cost.

I think of this in debates over what academic merit and accomplishment really mean.  We know that measures of academic accomplishment track with measures of advantage in life, and to the extent that academic accomplishment is the path to many opportunities for advancement this is a self-sharpening effect of advantage or disadvantage.  One remedy embraced by some is to question how much academic accomplishment, by whatever measure, really matters.  If the question is whether a particular measure is flawed or inadequate, I'm inclined to say that the answer may often be "yes."  If the question is whether academic accomplishment is of huge importance in non-academic pursuits, I think the answer is obviously "Often not."  But if the question is whether a track record of academic accomplishment is of any relevance for success in further academic endeavors, well, would you hire a sales manager who's never sold anything?  One needn't think that academic accomplishment is the only thing that matters in academic endeavors in order to agree that it is at least a significant thing.

However, if we were to say that academic accomplishment does matter but we are nonetheless extending people an opportunity because they accomplished less but they accomplished it under trying circumstances, we would be saying that we are acting out of benevolence rather than self-interest.  There is certainly a way in which openly proclaimed benevolence can be obnoxious, but one could make a simple statement of values and leave it at that, and be honest without blowing trumpets over their benevolence.  However, many academics don't want to do that.  They don't want to admit that they compromised for benevolence, so they instead claim that their stance is both self-interested and enlightened, and then proceed to pat themselves on the back for it.

I will show you fear in a handful of books

In Chapter 15 of Part 1 of Volume 2, de Tocqueville takes on a surprisingly elitist tone.  It's a short chapter, just a couple pages on why the classics are so important to read (mostly because democracies aren't producing anything of equal worth, in his view), and near the end he writes something that evinces a surprising fear of over-educating the masses:

A persistent education in the classics alone, in a society where everyone was always struggling to increase or preserve their wealth, would produce very sophisticated but very dangerous citizens; for their needs would be prompted every day by their social and political state, which their education would never satisfy, and they would disrupt the state in the name of the Greeks and Romans, instead of enriching it with their industriousness. 

It is clear that in democratic times, individual interest, as well as the security of the state, insists that the education of the masses should be scientific, commercial, and industrial rather than literary.

Greek and Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those destined by natural endowment or wealth to cultivate or appreciate literature should find schools where they can achieve complete proficiency in classical literature and deeply imbibe its spirit.  A few first-rate universities would be more effective in reaching this goal than numerous poor colleges where badly taught and superfluous studies obstruct the establishment of necessary ones.

I find it interesting that he thinks a liberal arts education would produce a class of unproductive agitators.  I could make a number of jokes about activists at this point, but they are a very distinct minority of the liberally educated, and many of them come from classes that would probably get a liberal arts education regardless of how public policy structured the education system.  From the standpoint of protecting the system from its discontents, I do NOT see a liberal arts education as a threat to public order.  If anything, when I look at mobs flocking to dangerous populists I kind of wish somebody would hand them a book.  For that matter, when I look at academic scientists buying into the latest fads and Right-Think, I wish that they too would pick up a book published more than a few years ago and actually read the whole thing, not just the excerpt published at Salon or Huffington Post or Slate or some other site frequented by Right-Thinking People.  (Notice how in one paragraph I managed to take swipes at the kids supporting Bernie Sanders, the Respectable Liberals supporting Hillary Clinton, and the yahoos supporting Donald Trump. My disdain for people is nothing if not universal.)

On the other hand, I've said many times that making it an imperative to hand diplomas to more people is a dire threat to the academy.  We will be destroyed not by the uncredentialed but by the uneducated. If people are not in a condition to be educated in the liberal arts and sciences or the advanced technical fields then a more pedestrian vocational track would be more advantageous for  them and for the academy.  The academy would be freed of the burden of trying to credential the unteachable and they would be able to go forth and get gainfully employed sooner rather than later.

More importantly, while my take on things may seem very elitist, a more robust foundation for an egalitarian society would be built in several layers over multiple generations.  Move people from low-skilled service jobs to higher-skilled service jobs that they can obtain with a year or two of post-secondary education, and let them save enough to get mortgages, so that the family builds up some assets.  Then focus on moving some portion of the next generation to four-year degrees, and some fraction of the generation after that to professional and graduate degrees.  That's not to say that an individual should be restrained from jumping ahead of that gradual curve, but public policy should focus on gradual progress so that there are multi-generational foundations.  My great-grandfather came here on a boat from southern Italy*, my grandfather was the exception who got a college degree while his siblings ranged from high school drop-outs (not a badge of shame back then, and not a barrier to middle class comfort and respectability), my mother also got a college degree, and I got a graduate degree.

My take on all of this is that it's probably in the material interests of most people to encourage a vocational path, but liberal education is NOT a threat to public order.  de Tocqueville over-states his case.

*The very fact that my family is considered "white" these days is a fascinating window into American cultural evolution.  Poor, dark-skinned Catholics speaking a Latinate tongue and adhering to a macho Mediterranean culture were not always considered "white."  It is rather bizarre that my family is considered respectably white while the people crossing our southern border are considered something else, despite their remarkable similarities to southern Italians.

de Tocqueville on questions of science, science and progress

Chapters 10 and 15 in Part 1 of Vol. 2 of Democracy in America have some points that I find particularly worthy of using as a lens for modern academia.

In Chapter 10 de Tocqueville argues that a more egalitarian society will be a more economically competitive one (on this point I completely agree with him) and thus people have less of the leisure time that is so necessary for intellectual contemplation, insight, and advancement.  He thus argues that democratic societies will make most of their advances in the applied sciences rather than the basic sciences.

I partly dissent, and not because the second half of the 20th century saw such great scientific advancement in the US in spite of being a time of comparative economic equality and rising racial equality.  The middle of the 20th century was something of an anomaly in US history, with great prosperity enabled by the fact that the US had better infrastructure than anyone else in the post-WWII era.  That fact alone means that de Tocqueville's analysis of economic competition in egalitarian societies does not really apply to the 20th century US; we were very far from the sort of equilibrium that he was envisioning.  In fact, it would seem to support his case, precisely because it was an exception to his economic assumptions and a counter-example to his assumptions about scientific progress.  Instead, I partly dissent because he gives short shrift to the relationship of the pure and applied sciences.  Advances in the applied sciences make advances in the pure sciences cheaper.  Imagine studying pure questions in turbulence without the insights enabled by modern computing power or high-speed cameras.  Imagine doing the purest work in cell biology without bioinformatics infrastructure built on our computing industry, the vast infrastructure of lab equipment suppliers who have made things cheaper and faster to compete for the budgets of labs and companies doing applied research, or the tools of modern microscopy and lasers.  How many people realize that the multi-photon microscope, a beautiful tool of neuroscience, would not be possible without the advances in pulsed laser technology enabled by the telecommunications industry?

On the other hand, it is definitely true that a leisured class, whether born into leisure or elevated to it through the academic system, is an invaluable element of a basic research apparatus.  In that regard, it is interesting to look at the structure of the modern academy.  It has become more and more unequal, with a class divide between high-status researchers (who do have a certain amount of time for contemplation) and low-status adjunct instructors, and a shrinking middle class that try to bridge teaching and research.  This certainly seems to mirror the aristocratic arrangement that de Tocqueville regarded as necessary for basic research.  However, even (especially?) the biggest of the bigshots seem to spend more time working on funding proposals than contemplating science.  The system has the superficial appearance of an aristocracy of philosopher-kings, but the reality is much less romantic.  OK, if there's one major theme of this blog it's that the past was never all that romantic compared to the present, but at the very least the current system demonstrates that pure research isn't really a product of leisure.

A more interesting place to look is at graduate study.  The best part of graduate school is that after a few hurdles it is largely unstructured.  I think every PhD looks back on graduate school and thinks "Man, if I'd known then what I know now I would have made better use of that unstructured time!"  The purpose of that unstructured time is to let the embryonic scientist enjoy an interlude of leisure (albeit impoverished leisure) so that they might focus on learning.  It is thus interesting to note that the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program is putting more and more burdens on graduate students.  When I applied in 1998 they basically wanted to fund smart and motivated students, and the applications were almost trivial.  Nowadays they want research plans and outreach plans ("Broader Impact").  Honestly, since leisure is wasted on the young I sort of get why they want to give bright young minds more structure.  I still think it's a mistake, but I get why they do it.

Now, if we look at graduate research fellowships through the lens provided by de Tocqueville, we must note that there is no organization more openly devoted to a semblance of democratic spirit and social equality in science than the National Science Foundation.  Their Broader Impact Criterion is, for good or ill, all about that.  Making graduate students engage in Broader Impact projects is not only in keeping with the social goals of the NSF, but it also keeps graduate students in a state of hustle and multi-tasking.  They can't just focus on their subject, they must also show people their public impact.  You can like it or dislike it, and it's not the same as the commercial competition that de Tocqueville considered, but it's clearly different from a vision of graduate study as sheltered time.

I can't say that anybody consciously decided that graduate study should be a time of greater structure for the sake of democracy, but it is interesting to see this pattern noted by de Tocqueville in one context show up in another, and via the intervention of an organization whose mission and viewpoint match the democratic spirit that he described.

de Tocqueville on the American approach to intellectual questions

Volume 2 is all about American culture.  I expect to be blogging far more about Volume 2 than I did about Volume 1.  Indeed, Part 1 of the volume is titled "The influence of democracy upon the intellectual movement in the United States."  Chapter 1 is titled "The Americans' philosophic method".

de Tocqueville's basic point is that we are an unlettered and practical people, so the average American will approach an intellectual question based only on his own ideas and intuitions, rather than in reference to intellectual schools of thought.  An educated American will not say "Well, if we approach this question in the manner of [insert name here]..." but will simply give his own thoughts.  Obviously this is less true today than it was in the 1830's, especially due to the rise of great universities in America.  And obviously this is more true in the natural sciences than in the humanities or social sciences.

I don't think that I can fairly speak to a line of causation from the state of 1830's America to the modern academic zeitgeist that I so often lament on this blog. There are far too many widely-read scholars today for me to attempt a serious argument that American academia remains a refuge for the unlettered. What I can note, however, is a set of analogies between the things that de Tocqueville noted in the wider society and the problems that I see today in the zeitgeist of academic scientists in America.

For starters, when I read science education research written by natural scientists the trail of citations is often (but not always) very modern and technocratic, and focused on writings from and about the natural sciences, rather than a wider context of social science and culture.  I notice less of that in psychology papers.  Science education research in America seems to be stuck in a mode described on page 494 of Democracy in America:

Amid the continuous shifts which prevail in the heart of a democratic society, the bond which unites generations to each other becomes slack or breaks down; each person easily loses the trail of ideas coming from his forbears or hardly bothers himself about it.

A tempting response would be that science education research in the United States is a young field, but that seems inaccurate to me.  Perhaps the current approach to science education research in America is rather new, but the choices of questions and methods are inevitably informed by a cultural backdrop.  (Indeed, is that not the essence of the modern zeitgeist among the educated classes?)  American attitudes toward science and science education emerge from centuries-old cultural attitudes concerning "practical education", and assumptions about our "STEM Workforce" needs are fundamental assumptions about labor markets.  It just so happens that economists have been studying labor markets for longer than physicists have been administering the Force Concepts Inventory, and that government agencies have been making projections about our nation's "STEM Workforce" needs since at least Sputnik, if not earlier.  (If I ever get through the thick pile of books on my dining room table, I will add to my blogging projects Michael Teitelbaum's Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.  In the meantime, here's a good essay that he wrote on the matter.)

Also, much of the conversation about science education in the US is really a conversation about inequality (often explicitly so).  It is relevant that de Tocqueville wrote (again on page 494):

As for the effect which one man's intelligence can have upon another's, it is of necessity much curtailed in a country where  its citizens, having become almost like each other, scrutinize each other carefully and, perceiving in not a single person in their midst any signs of undeniable greatness or superiority, constantly return to their own rationality as to the most obvious and immediate source of truth.

Those of us who question the prevailing zeitgeist are often accused of being the ones who fall into that folly of privileging their own reason above the findings of others.  After all, the zeitgeist is supported by data!  Well, yes, by some data, but data rarely tells you as much as it would like you to, so it can only be interpreted in light of assumptions.   The person acting only on their own reasoning faculties suffers the disadvantage of being unrooted from the past (though they rarely perceive it as disadvantage) but suffers the advantage of not being sucked into the mistaken assumptions of their peers.

de Tocqueville's commentary about how little Americans know about the writers of the past is particularly interesting if read alongside Keynes' famous remark about ideology:

 “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

American intellectuals may style themselves to be people who simply follow the best evidence rather than people proceeding on the basis of assumptions and culture (even while simultaneously embracing a postmodern zeitgeist about how culturally biased we all are), but their lack of grounding in the writings of the past only makes it easier for them to sit in thrall to older currents.  I can't say that I'm free of influence from the past, but my reading projects of the past year (detailed on this blog) have made it somewhat easier for me to identify and articulate the influences that drive me and the influences that I recoil from.  The fact that I can identify both Catholic and Puritan influences on my mindset does not make me any less influenced by them, but at least it helps me explore ideas more carefully.

Finally, related to the issue of whether people who eschew the zeitgeist are eschewing evidence, something making the rounds right now is a statistical critique of "stereotype threat" research by Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim, whose book was previously blogged about here. Stereotype threat research is often cited as a key factor underpinning persistent inequality, and a reason why biases and stereotypes are so pervasive and overpowering. I lack the context and background to decide if Jussim's critique of that research is satisfactory or deficient, but I think it's compelling enough that one should not make that line of research an overly prominent piece of their world-view.

de Tocqueville on education in America

Most of what he has to say about education will come in the second volume, but in Vol. I, Part 2, Chapter 9 ("Causes which tend to maintain a democratic republic") de Tocqueville has a section on "How the education, habits, and practical experience of Americans contribute to the success of democratic institutions."  (Pages 352-357 in the Penguin Classics edition that I'm reading.)

He was writing in a time when America was an intellectual backwater (unlike now, when our intellectual heights are very high, even if our lows are very low and our average is disappointing).  He praised the way in which virtually every common man in New England was literate and at least modestly educated, and even in the south and west the average level of education was better than much of Europe.  In his opinion, our ancestors were an unintellectual people who were determined to hang on to what they did know.  I think it's a bit more complicated than that, but he was speaking of the snapshot of America that he saw in the 1830's.

This is in some ways a contrast with the present, where we emphasize inequality, but there are two lines of continuity with the past:
1) I've noted repeatedly that much of the anti-intellectual ethos in the modern progressive academy is motivated (at least in part) by an egalitarian hope.  The egalitarianism noted by de Tocqueville, where we were proud that even the common man knew something despite the lack of European-class intellectuals, carries through in progressive educators to this day.
2) de Tocqueville restricted his attention primarily to white men, not to all of America.  This is an unpardonable crime today, but he was not merely "a man of his time"; his goal was to understand our democratic system, so he surveyed the educational state of those who were participants in it.  He analyzed the system on its own terms, which can be appropriate if your goal is simply to comprehend the workings of a system (though it is obviously inappropriate for those who participate in a system and have a moral duty to improve it).  If we were to look at the full population of America in the time of de Tocqueville, we would see quite substantial inequality, as now.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

de Tocqueville, pages 229-230

Most of what I've read so far has been de Tocqueville's attempt to explain our system of government.  There has been a bit of cultural commentary, but the cultural commentary most relevant to my concerns on this blog is all delayed until the second half.  In the meantime, enjoy this gem from pages 229-230.  I have broken it up into numbered pieces, while keeping the author's paragraph break in place, so that I can dissect it according to my own division of the ideas.

[1] Whatever one does, it is impossible to raise the intelligence of a nation above a certain level.  It will be quite useless to ease the access to human knowledge, improve teaching methods, or reduce the cost of education, for men will never become educated nor develop their intelligence without devoting time to the matter.

Therefore the inevitable limitations upon a nation's intellectual progress are governed by how great or small is the ease with which it can live without working.  This limitation is further off in certain countries and nearer in others; for it not to exist at all, however, the people would need to be free of the physical cares of life.  It would have to cease to be the people. [2] This it is as difficult to imagine a society where all men are enlightened as a state where all the citizens are wealthy; those are two related difficulties.  I willingly accept that the bulk of the population very sincerely supports the welfare of the country; [3] I might go even further to state that in general the lower social classes seem to be less likely to confuse their personal interests with this support than the upper classes. [4] But what they always lack, more or less, is the skill to judge the means to achieve this sincerely desired end.  A long study and many different ideas indeed are needed to reach a precise picture of the character of one single individual!  Would the masses succeed where the greatest geniuses go astray?  The people never find the time or the means to devote to this work. [5] They have always to come to hasty judgments and to latch on to the most obvious of features.  As a result, charlatans of all kinds know full well the secret of pleasing the people whereas more often than not their real friends fail to do so.

The first and longest part is a statement about the price of knowledge.  I endorse it whole-heartedly, despite the fact that I am endorsing an unabashedly elitist statement.

The second part is a statement that a French nobleman accepts more easily than I might, but I regretfully concede the heavy truth in it.

The third part is an important insight.  My own journey in the educated classes convinces me of its truth.

The fourth is not entirely right and not entirely wrong.  A system that ignores the voices of the masses is not a healthy one, but it is certainly true that the popularity of an idea is hardly an infallible measure of merit.  We're left with the usual "Worst possible system...except for all the other ones" critique of democracy.

On the fifth point, my sojourn among the educated elites convinces me that they are as guilty of this as the masses are.  Educated people love nothing more than a good clickbait article that can flatter their sensibilities.

My conclusion is this:  de Tocqueville accurately understands the price of wisdom and knowledge, accurately diagnoses the weaknesses in the masses, but does not fully appreciate that the elites can be just as hasty and superficial as the masses.  I think he's hinting at it when he speaks of charlatans, but it isn't clear whether he thinks of the charlatans as coming from the upper classes.  Believe me, there are plenty of charlatans among the educated elites.

And behold! On this day, in the twilight days of the year of our Lord 2015, the NYT dared print something truthful about education!

Once per month the NYT dares to print something insightful about education, something that doesn't flatter centrist sensibilities.  This month the NYT dares to notice that producing more high school graduates is not the same thing as producing more college-ready graduates.  One might dare to hope that next month the NYT will notice that simply following "best practices" is insufficient to guarantee that they will succeed in college.