davidthompson

Elsewhere (3)

Keith Windshuttle on adversarial culture.   

The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures, no matter how uncomfortable we might be with their beliefs and practices. However, there is one culture conspicuous by its absence from all this. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.

Peter Risdon on the cruelty of Polly Toynbee.

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don’t feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It’s a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It’s a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It’s an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel.

Elaine McArdle on men, women and work.

An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else. One study of information technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. A certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society.

And, via Stephen Hicks, some heinous cultural imperialism. 

There are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined. 

It’s oppression, I tell you.

Mighty Works

I thought I’d post a footnote of sorts to yesterday’s item on Professor Caroline Guertin, she of the limpid prose and limitless expertise. Here are a few short extracts from Guertin’s essay, Wanderlust: The Kinesthetic Browser in Cyberfeminist Space, published in 2007 by the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology.

The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision — felt not seen — and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster’s subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder its majesty.

Nudged into motion, the meandering subject in cyberfeminist space is a comet in orbit around her own story, around her subjective experience of a text that keeps changing, spinning off into an uncharted future. According to Paul Virilio, we are no longer beings who inhabit a temporal plane. Instead, in Open Sky, he argues we have become passive agents who are acted upon like film — exposed, underexposed, overexposed — and are nakedly subject to the effects of light speed.

And,

We inhabit our bodies differently when we are out of phase, oscillating in the turbulence of dynamic space, that space where the textual body is written as contextual knot. The ways of moving in virtual space are directed and mapped by the knots that span spatio-temporal rifts. Without movement, we cannot cross the space-time divide.

Or maybe,

The textual voyage is alive and kinetic, fractal and in flux, birthed as she travels through its fullness.

I suppose one could view the extracts above, and the essay from which they’re taken, as a sort of extended Zen kōan, insofar as they defy rational understanding and all known aesthetic criteria. More sceptical souls may wonder if these passages are in fact the results of some kind of seizure or medical condition, of which we must not speak.

I should, in fairness, point out that the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology does feature more substantial aesthetic and intellectual works, including Courtney Stricklin’s Yawn, a written variation of a video piece that invites readers to record the number of times they yawn while reading it. (Stricklin has, helpfully, punctuated the text with marks indicating how many times she yawned while writing it.) Stricklin’s biography informs us,

While Courtney would never have guessed that her future would be in the arts, it came as no surprise to her highly artistic family.

No less impressive is Thrash: Physical Responses to the Bush Administration, by Andrew Simonet and Headlong Dance Theatre, a company which creates 

award winning experimental and experiential dances with/for the entire body, including the face, the voice, and the mind.

Readers will be thrilled to discover that Thrash is an ongoing project in which members of the public are welcome to participate: 

No performance experience necessary. Here’s the idea: you listen to speeches by George W. Bush. Then you move in front of a video camera for four minutes. No movement too strange, too ugly, or too crazy. Whatever comes out is part of Thrash. I edit the results into [a] short compilation, a cathartic DIY video, a belligerent home movie of an infuriating time… Don’t worry about being (1) good, (2) original, (3) interesting.

A video of the results is available here. Go on, watch it. It’s a thing of beauty.

Update:

Over at University Diaries, The Myth attempts a rather heroic translation of Guertin’s prose.

Feel free to compensate me.

The Prose, It Burns

Further to this, readers may be interested in Philosophy and Literature’s gone but not forgotten Annual Bad Writing Contest. The rules are simple enough:

The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.

The winning entries are, alas, not quite so clear. This, from 1997, is Professor Rob Wilson, writing in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, a collection of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Richard Burt:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

The publisher’s blurb informs us that the purpose of the book quoted above is to “seek a deeper understanding of what ‘censorship’, ‘criticism’ and the ‘public sphere’ really mean.”

There’s more, of course.  (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)

What Art Isn’t

Over at Carnal Reason, Pwyll has some rules of art appreciation.

I developed my first rule of art while studying a purported work of art on display at the University of South Florida. The work consisted of a beat to hell La-Z-boy style recliner. It was cloth covered, or once was. The cloth was trashed, at least one spring was sticking out. The thing was probably ugly when new, and time had not been kind to it. It looked like it must smell bad. I examined it closely, searching for some sign of deliberate modification, a hint of an artist’s hand. I saw nothing not attributable to abuse, neglect, or decay.

I was with a young lady who asked me what I thought. I proposed a thought experiment. Imagine someone died and left you an old and neglected property. You find an object in the garage. The question is whether that object is a work of art. If your first impulse is to wonder whether the county land fill will accept the object, then with high probability that object is not art.

My second rule of art was born in an art gallery in NYC. On display was a brand new galvanised steel garbage can. In it was a cinder block. A rope was tied to the block, and to a hook in the wall, in such a way that the garbage can stayed tilted, but did not fall over. My second rule of art: anything I can reproduce in under fifteen minutes with materials available at a hardware store is not art.

I will not recount the disgusting details of the Aliza Shvarts episode at Yale. If you have not heard about it, you can get the details straight from the source. Ms Shvarts has inspired my latest rule of art: anything which appears to be hazardous medical waste, or the product of a sewage system malfunction, is not art.

The mention of sewage naturally brings to mind the towering works of Wim Delvoye and Michelle Hines, whose names may not be familiar to newcomers. Delvoye is perhaps best known for his x-rays of blowjobs and for creating Cloaca, a machine that generates artificial shit, and which the artist describes as “a highly pungent comment on the folly of human achievement.” Ms Hines is remembered, no doubt fondly, for her apparent hands-on production of a single, continuous turd measuring some 26 feet in length. Readers with a sturdy constitution can click here to see Ms Hines in action, as it were.

Never let it be said this site neglects the finer things.

Update:

In the comments, Georges offers the following:

There are two different qualities: impact and resonance. Impact is about grabbing the audience’s attention by any means necessary. Resonance is about leaving something lingering in their consciousness afterwards.

Exactly. There’s a difference between shock and awe. And between wonderment and tedious disgust. Righteous deconstruction and ludicrous parroted theory are poor substitutes for being captivated by beauty. Another guide to art appreciation might be to ask the question: Does this object make me wish I could make something beautiful? Or: Does the world of possibility feel bigger as a result, or has it actually shrunk?

Theory is cheap, in every sense, and easy to reproduce. Talent is not.

Phantom Subtext

Zoe Williams, whose search for radicalism was mentioned yesterday, previously thrilled us with her discovery that “hoodie” is in fact a “sleight-of-hand” and a “sinister” racial code word. The list of hitherto innocuous words that now, apparently, hold terrible racist significance continues to grow. Allah (pbuh) highlights an article by David K Shipler, who, like Williams, possesses some kind of racial Spider Sense and can detect heinous racist intent where none was thought to be.

[W]hen his opponents branded [Obama] an elitist and an outsider, his race made it easier to drive a wedge between him and the white, rural voters he has courted. As an African American, he was supposedly looking down from a place he didn’t belong and looking in from a distance he could not cross. This could not happen as dramatically were it not for embedded racial attitudes. “Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.

As Allah notes,

If you take this tool seriously, there’s quite literally no good-faith way to accuse a member of a minority group of being snobbish or condescending. Every road through Shipler’s copy of Roget will lead inevitably back to “uppity,” no matter how circuitous the route may be.

It is, as ever, fascinating to watch people tilting their heads, squinting and bearing down quite hard until they can see just about everything through the unreliable lens of identity politics - a gift bestowed upon them by others, very often educators, with similar paranormal talents.

Science, Softened

Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.

Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women - but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…

[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.

Please, read it all.   

Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma - could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.

Update: Mary Jackson has more.

Artful Vacuity

Theodore Dalrymple on the mellifluous flummery of Rowan Williams.   

British intellectual life has long harbored a strain of militantly self-satisfied foolishness, and the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a perfect exemplar of the tendency. In an interview with the BBC on February 7, the archbishop said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, would be adopted in Britain: unavoidable, presumably, in the sense in which omertà seems unavoidable in the island of Sicily…

Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain. Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments. He was not speaking in newspaper headlines, nor did he expect to make any headlines with his remarks.

Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity.

Over at B&W, Ophelia Benson also trawls through the verbiage.

Having Opinions

More Dalrymple, via NER, from an interview in the American Spectator:   

Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant. My opinion of the parasitic diseases of polar bears is not worth having for the simple reason that I know nothing about them, though I have a right to an opinion in the sense that I should not receive a knock on the door from the secret police if I express such a worthless opinion. The right to an opinion is often confused (no doubt for reasons of misplaced democratic sentiment) for the validity of an opinion, just as the validity of an argument is often mistaken for the truth of a conclusion.

The “democratic sentiment” behind this flattening of truth claims is sometimes made explicit, as when Frederique Apffel Marglin railed against smallpox vaccination – and “science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge” - while romanticising the Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, as an equally valid “narrative”. Or when Madeleine Bunting sprang to the defence of Islamic theology and confidently informed her readers, “We are profoundly irrational and… rationality is a social construction.” Bunting is, it seems, happy to conflate knowledge and fairness, and can be counted on to do so on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, such pretensions are not uncommon and are typically expressed as a belief that no one epistemological position – at least not a “Western” one - can be “privileged” above another, especially one deemed more colourful and “authentic”, supposedly in the interests of resisting “cultural imperialism.” This kind of epistemic egalitarianism may seem quite thrilling to a subset of leftist ideologues, particularly those who resent the functional pre-eminence of Western societies and who feel it is somehow wrong that so-called “Western ways of knowing” are also pre-eminent in their accuracy and effectiveness.

As I wrote in one of my first posts,

Cultural equivalence underlies the current fashion for religious protectionism, whereby reason and scientific methodology are depicted as equivalent to faith and merely a matter of lifestyle choice, as if logical enquiry had no attributes that set it apart from religious ideology and a priori belief. But to equate these very different phenomena requires one to flatten values and empty the mind in the ostensible interest of ‘fairness’ - perhaps to spare the blushes of the less capable among us.

In one recent discussion I was told that, “science is based on assumptions; an assumption is essentially a belief, so science is based on belief.” But the scientific method is based on the testing of formal hypotheses, as opposed to beliefs, which are not the same thing at all. Strictly speaking, a scientific hypothesis must be self-consistent, must explain existing observations and must predict new ones. These formal obligations and restraints are not comparable with the unquestioning acceptance of unverifiable assumptions as a priori truth, which is the signature of religion. There is a profound epistemological difference.

The scientific method is one of the best practical lessons in intellectual humility and one can only wish a few clerics - and a few Guardian columnists - would avail themselves of this tool. As the mathematician Ian Stewart pointed out: “Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.” And the willingness to defer to evidence – as opposed to one’s own wishes and beliefs – is the antithesis of fundamentalism…

Curiously, the person who so adamantly equated science with belief also maintained that the theories of relativity (the details of which escaped him) are “beliefs” and thus in no way “vulnerable to the scientific method.” When I drew attention to evidence to the contrary, the subject was swiftly changed and other things were asserted with even greater adamance. This is one of the incidental rewards of cultural equivalence; it blunts the critical senses and levels all values until people who know nothing about any given subject feel entitled to assert things about that subject with great confidence and a whiff of righteousness. One can, as Ian Stewart warned, believe whatever one wants.

Classroom Politics

Further to comments on the ideological shaping of young minds, Newsweek’s European economics editor, Stefan Theil, casts an eye over some of France’s remarkably loaded school textbooks.

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to… prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills... The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization… The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected… And just in case they missed it in history class, students are reminded that “cultural globalization” leads to violence and armed resistance, ultimately necessitating a new system of global governance.

French students… do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today’s French schools.

The whole thing.

If, as Theil suggests, students are being steered towards an absurdly loaded outlook and zero-sum thinking, one has to wonder what impact this may have, not only on the individuals concerned, but on the economic performance of the country more generally. Teaching teenagers that capitalism causes cardiovascular disease and “according to some, even the development of cancer” hardly seems a recipe for inspiring the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, or for instilling rationality and a sense of proportion.

Feel My Rebellion

Following recent posts on academic groupthink and campus indoctrination, this may be of interest. Mark Bauerlein ponders oppositional narcissism and the rebel professor: 

The Adversarial Campus Argument… says that the campus must contest the mainstream, that higher education must critique U.S. culture and society because they have drifted rightward… Several points against the Adversarial Campus Argument spring to mind, but a single question explodes it. If Democrats won the White House in ‘08 and enlarged their majorities in Congress, and if a liberal replaced Scalia on the Supreme Court, would adversarial professors adjust their turf accordingly? Would Hillary in the White House bring Bill Kristol a professorship or Larry Summers a presidency again?

Hardly, and it goes to show that the Adversarial Campus Argument isn’t really an argument. It’s an attitude. And attitudes aren’t overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they’re marginal, but that’s because they impart threatening ideas.

The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionary role-play. Take, for instance, Dr Caprice Hollins, a speaker on “multicultural issues” and currently the Director of Equity, Race and Learning for Seattle’s public schools. Hollins has famously criticised individualism, long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) and the speaking of grammatical English as “white values.” The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.” When not denouncing punctuality and the ability to communicate, Dr Hollins finds time to deconstruct the “myth” of Thanksgiving as “a happy time.” Speaking of her appointment in 2004, Hollins announced,

“Now I’ll be part of a system that some people see as an oppressive system. So it’s kind of this dual role - on one hand I’m part of the system and on the other, I have the role of dismantling that institutional racism… They wouldn't have hired me if there wasn't a need. I just need to find out what that need is.”

Some three years later, Hollins admitted to the Seattle Times that she had, in fact, managed to find no evidence of institutional racism in Seattle’s public schools. Dr Hollins is, of course, still employed and still claiming her $86,000 salary. Without a flicker of irony or concession, Hollins has subsequently extended her mission beyond the school gates. In order to find unspeakable wickedness “within the school system”, she is now reduced to turning over stones in children’s summer holidays, which, she claims, constitute “an example of systemic problems.” Dr Hollins is, alas, one of many Witchfinders General, whose sensitivity to oppression is apparently paranormal and whose mission to purge improper thought is unimpeded by reality.

And here’s the thing. Adversarial role-play of this kind has very little to do with how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of oppression have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untrained eye. The rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Fund my bourgeois conformity. I have people to oppress.