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.

"Teaching with technology"

All classes are now online, obviously. Many people are talking about the allegedly unprecedented nature of such large-scale "teaching with technology." I agree that the scale of this particular pedagogical moment is unprecedented, but I disagree that "teaching with technology" is a good descriptor for it. I have been teaching with technology since the start of the semester, it's just that the technology was simulation software for doing sophisticated calculations, not web conferencing.  And I was teaching with technology in many semesters prior to this one, since I've been using Zemax, Python, and other professional computational tools in many (not all) of my classes for some time now.

In my first week of college, I was hired into a research lab, where a professor promptly commenced teaching me with technology.  That technology included CAD software, vacuum equipment, oscilloscopes, various acids, magnetic shielding materials, simulation software, and numerous other things.  In graduate school I took a class that was heavy on "teaching with technology."  That technology included a cleanroom, spin-coater, photolithography, various etches, furnaces, vacuum chamber for deposition of metals, etc. My PhD advisor taught us with technology, including lasers, computers, fume hoods, glassware for chemistry, spectrometers, microscopes, etc.

I wish they would say "teaching with communication technology", because the implication of "teaching with technology" is that those of us who don't normally make extensive use of information technology in our classes aren't making use of technology. Check out my Zemax assignments and then we'll talk about whether I've been teaching with technology.