Higher Superstition, first two chapters

The first chapter is an introduction to the general controversy that they're addressing.  I already outlined that in the previous post.  The second chapter is mostly a historical survey of politics and ideas relevant to their concerns.  I will not recap the whole thing.  Instead, I will just highlight a few particularly interesting tidbits from these chapters:

On page 3 they clarify that the "Academic Left", as they use the term, is not merely a group of people who happen to have day jobs in academia and happen to support policies pursued by the more liberal members of the Democratic Party.  Rather it is a collection of people pursuing a particular vision of cultural transformation, the overthrow of old categories and labels.  This is certainly in keeping with the diversity vision of today's STEM reformers; one could say that the critique shifted from scientific knowledge to scientists.

On page 4 they mention scientists having encounters with "literary critics waxing sentatious over the uncertainty principle or Godel's theorem."  It's almost as though they witnessed my freshman year of college!

On page 7 they issue a too-optimistic prophecy concerning education:

"We expect little early change in the teaching and learning of science on the basis of these politicized critiques (although proposals in that direction, including some from people who should know better, pop up now with regularity)."

Indeed.  Transformation of STEM education is now front-and-center in the agenda of technocrats, and they speak endlessly of identity issues when they promote their agenda.  It's rarely as simple as "This group learns this way, that group learns that way"; they are mostly too smart to say something that explicitly bigoted and factually incorrect.  But there is much "Your students are different from you, demographics are changing, science is more diverse, we must teach differently."  Certain links are never made explicit (since stating such things explicitly would be both unpopular and factually wrong, a rare instance of a grossly false idea being unpopular).  But diversity and identity are certainly close to everyone's minds, and are invoked to push people in warmer-and-fuzzier directions.

On page 19, they make the interesting observation that the Enlightenment is the ancestor both of free market ideas and Communist ones.  Though Communism obviously failed very badly at liberating or enlightening people, it came from a rejection of traditional authority, including feudalism.  Market capitalism has similar elements in common.  I note this not to make any sort of special plea for communism, but simply to note that the Enlightenment was prodigious with offspring.

On page 20 they attribute the rise of Romanticism to, among other things, the horrific failures of the French Revolution.  Romanticism, in my primitive understanding (supplemented with what little Gross and Levitt have to say), is an idea of things beyond reason mattering in human affairs, or even superseding reason in praiseworthy ways.  Truthfully, I'm not wholly unsympathetic, having remarked many times on the impossibility of deriving "ought" from "is."  Liberal technocrats always want to elide that point.  I don't know that it's a terribly Romantic point, since it doesn't celebrate any particular alternative to empiricism, nor does it even reject reason.  One could draw some "ought" postulates from non-empirical sources but then use those postulates, in combination with empirical evidence, to reason logically, e.g. "When spending money as the fiduciary of another person's interests I ought to spend thriftily, and Acme makes the cheapest widgets, therefore I will buy Acme widgets in this role."  So one can be suspicious of those who are excessive in their pretenses to logic and empiricism (because they never make their arbitrary "ought" postulates transparent) but still support logic and empiricism.

So I guess that one of my favorite topics here is hardly "Romantic."

On page 23 they note that while many illiberal ideas sprang up under the guise of science (e.g. social Darwinism, racial ideologies), the scientific notions that have stood the tests of time and experimentation have fortuitously been mostly friendly to egalitarian and emancipatory projects.

On page 24 they note that science has remained congenial to the project of scholarship as a liberating force because science pushes back on superstition, which I take to mean religion.  However, the study of humanities, which prepares one to interrogate texts in context, seems a more powerful force for inducing skepticism of the Bible than science class.  Miracles aren't the main point of the Bible.  Moral codes binding communities and bringing meaning to life are the main point of the Bible.  The study of humanities will prompt much more searching questions about that than anything a physics professor might say.

On page 25 they say that American academic leftists rebeled against science to signal rejection of the Enlightenment and its failure to make further progress on racism, poverty, etc.  They judge that it comes from restlessness and discontent with modern society.  I find it interesting that modern academic leftists share the same restlessness, but approach it with a renewed faith in technocracy.  "Studies have shown" that we are biased, irrational, etc., so if people can be persuaded of these points and induced to accept remedies then they will become more rational and (presumably) more supportive of projects for the liberation and betterment of humanity.

Or at least that seems to be the theory.

Finally, on page 33, we get to something that has most definitely carried forward:  The idea that the oppressed have unique epistemological standing, access to more knowledge than the advantaged.  However, whereas that was used to argue for rejecting the science espoused by the dominant power structures back in the "Science Wars", nowadays we have people seeking to do social science about microaggressions, biases clouding the minds of the privileged, etc.  Whether or not one has a favorable judgment of the soundness of such research, it is indisputably an attempt to use social science to prove the epistemological limitations of the privileged and epistemological standing of the under-privileged.  There is no romanticism here, it is thoroughly technocratic and accepting of science.  The scientific validity of these research programs can only be evaluated through empirical work, but from a cultural perspective it is clear that it is not an anti-science program.

Next book: Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt

My next reading is Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, a 1994 book by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt.  Their book was a response to the "Science Wars" of the 80's and 90's, when the zeitgeist of certain people in humanities (and to a lesser extent social science) was "Science is just, like, a Western patriarchal heteronormative yadda yadda construct of the people at the top of the power structure."  And, to be clear, their claim wasn't merely that the culture of researchers in the natural sciences was "just, like, a Western yadda yadda construct"; that claim is not entirely wrong, though surely the many non-Westerners who contribute quitie productively to the advancement of modern science would have a thing or two to say in response, as Arun Bala noted.  Some went further and claimed that the body of scientific knowledge is somehow a subjective thing that arises more from our own cultural biases than any sort of meaningful, objective engagement with something that has a reality independent of our understanding of it.

With the benefit of 23 years of hindsight, as well as two and a half years of reading and blogging about cultural factors that affect the modern academy, this book feels like it missed the point.  As I've said before, the modern academic left mostly does not question science.  Yeah, there are a few weirdos talking about "natural" medicine, and a lot of liberal academics deny research on the predictive validity of standardized tests, but those cases are remarkable for being unusual.  Most liberals, academic or otherwise, strongly support science.  They might not understand it as well as they think they do, and it's possible that if they understood certain results better they would reject them, but the "Science March" was very much a thing of the left.  Oh, there was probably some conservative somewhere in the audience, but it was understood as being primarily about liberal stances on environmental issues, health issues, etc., as well as opposition to the superstitions of religious conservatives (who are currently rallying around a twice-divorced casino owner and confessed sexual harasser or worse...).  So, outside the academy, science is widely regarded as a thing of the left.  This is probably to our detriment (I'd rather that my professional and intellectual passion be respected across the spectrum), but it is most definitely NOT what Gross and Levitt feared might come to pass.  The "post-modernist" critics of science did NOT win over the non-academic left to their cause.

On campus, I'm sure somebody somewhere is still banging on about Newtonian mechanics being an artefact of white male culture, but hardly anyone pays attention to them.  Administrators say "STEM!  STEM!  STEM!" all day long.  There are certainly some people in the humanities and social sciences who grumble about this STEM obsession, but they are, at worst, expressing a bit of (understandable)  jealousy, and more often are engaging in sincere defenses of things that are worth preserving.  They aren't questioning our knowledge claims.

What has happened is an obsession with inclusion in STEM, because STEM is on the pedestal, and some of this comes with demands to change the culture of how STEM professionals work, but not with insistence that our knowledge is some subjective product of an arbitrary and weird culture.  Nonetheless, some of the more damaging aspects of the push to transform STEM (mainly a demand that we reject meritocratic elitism in favor of getting every available warm body into The Pipeline) share roots with the Science Warriors of the 80's and 90's.  So it is worth studying this phenomenon of the past, in part to understand those roots, and in part to understand how those predictions failed. We can learn a lot about how we got to where we are if we understand how old predictions went astray.

A final note, before we get going:  As far as I can tell from examining the first two chapters and the index, Levitt and Gross missed/ignored the more technocratic rumblings of STEM reformers in the 90's.  Sheila Tobias wasn't in the index, though she wrote They're Not Dumb, They're Different in 1990.  I looked for some prominent education researchers but did not find them in the index.  The National Science Foundation is not mentioned.  This book really does seem to be focused, which is not a bad thing (all good books have a chosen scope) but does point to how they missed what actually happened.  Ultimately, I think they spent too much time thinking that the crazier ideas espoused by humanities professors would be able to take root in the wider public, and in exactly the form in which they were originally espoused.  But ideas don't work that way.

OK, let's go.

Some of this has happened before but will not happen again

A few months ago in a used book store I came across a copy of Max Planck's textbook on thermodynamics.  I am amused by this description on the inside cover:

"...meeting the needs of both students and research workers..."

The text is dense, terse, and requires effort of the reader.  I neither agree nor disagree with the idea that it can meet the needs of students, because the concept of a student's "needs" must be unpacked.  What are those "needs"?  By what criteria do we distinguish between what we might properly call a "need" and what might be better framed as a student's mere "desire" or "wish"?  Which wishes are reasonable for a textbook author to comply with?  And who are the students that we have in mind?

While I offer no firm conclusion on whether this textbook meets the needs of students as I might wish to frame the concept, I can say with great confidence that most of my colleagues would denounce this book as inappropriate for the needs of the modern student.  And so we see how the world has changed.

The Sacred Scrolls are not inerrant.  While some of the the textbooks of the past are similar to the present, it's clear that Planck's idea of appropriate pedagogy is not a good match to the modern understanding.  But don't worry:  While we might not uphold Planck's intellectual standards, we do allow trash TV stars to become President, and we do everything in our power to make college degrees more attainable.

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.

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.

Yep.

I don't have much to say about it, but this post from education policy blogger Robert Kelchen is well worth reading.  As long as education policy discussions are dominated by people who treat college as a given and state flagships as "backup" schools, we're doomed to insanity.