The Atlantic, The elite college students who can’t read books
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
The Connecticut Mirror: This Hartford Public High School grad can’t read. Here’s how it happened.
When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.
Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.
That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.
This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.
For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.
A Stanford professor and editor of N+1, linking idiot Adam Kotsko.
My blogging is about two things: (1) the radical changes wrought by modern communication technology; and (2) the inability of the epistemic technologies of the written word to understand point (1).
I find this dialectical tension to be generative, but I can see how readers looking for answers might find it unsatisfying.
A recent paper in Nature, titled “Online images amplify gender bias,” makes the point in a more familiar format. Consider the first full clause of the first sentence of the abstract:
“Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images”
I’ve frequently claimed that the age of reading and writing are over,...
Maybe Kevin Munger should stop writing.
On the declining abilities, and general resilience, of students. repeats
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year.
The technocrats who rule our world are not going to start communicating only in memes. But the fact of fading literacy is only the problem now of how the class of designers and managers communicate with the managed. The era of "citizenship" is over.
So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses.
And Gaza, on actual politics (class and foreign relations, social in every sense), as always, useless: passive, hand wringing, willed ignorance and worse. Anglo-American left liberals are unreadable. I don't even pay attention anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with CT. If you're not following opinion outside the bubble, including the bubble of the western left, and the west itself, there's not much to say. I try. I follow what I can.
Again, the importance of Palestinian political scientists and Arab academics (writing in english) is that they exist. It's got nothing to do with any inherent value in academia.
Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.
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update
meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”
I've always said Maria Farrell was more interesting than her brother: she describes the world—her world—of experience, but it's not enough.
I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she switched, she left a line of people to wait. As I neared the front of the ordinary queue, she told a man with a wheelie case that he’d have to pay extra as his bag was too big. He objected and put it into the measuring frame. It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this, and demanded an extra £40. The man objected again and asked why the rules weren’t being followed, but ultimately paid up as he had no choice. He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired. As he moved into the boarding area, she called after him that she could have him taken off the plane, but it was very full and noisy, and he either ignored this or didn’t hear it and took a seat near the door. Both lines were now even longer, and she was dealing with the 200-odd passengers alone.
While dealing with the next passenger, and then me and the two women behind me, she began to cry. She carried on working but must have pressed a button for help, because a few minutes later, several security guards arrived. Within minutes, five or six security men arrived. The woman pointed to the passenger who had upset her, but there were too many people in between for her to directly identify him. Later still, another employee arrived to relieve her and check the rest of the passengers through. The two women and I who had witnessed the incident all sat on a window sill near the check-through desk the security guards were now clustered at, as we were worried the man would be wrongly denied boarding. When we heard the guards say they would go and find the man, we approached them to say we had seen the incident from the front of the queue and that it may have been different from what they’d been told.
We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops who now outnumbered the passport and ticket-checker by a ratio of five or six to one. The main guard thanked us but didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and we stayed nearby, implicitly ready to intervene. In the noisy disarray of the boarding area, the passenger managed to be one of the first onto the plane. As we boarded, a couple more security guards had joined the initial cluster and moved onto the tarmac, so there were now seven or eight. Walking past, we heard them say the man was already on the plane. They seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to have him taken off. As I climbed the steps of the plane, it was striking just how many security guards were now milling aimlessly around, compared to the lone and stressed out employee who’d summoned them in the first place.
Schiesser's response, playing her brother's role this time, relating description of experience to a speculative fiction. The world of ideas is utopian by definition.
[I] He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired….
[II] We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops
In both passages, Farrell shows us how much emotional self-regulation we do in public, and also how gendered these norms are. In our contemporary culture we learn to suppress the expression of emotions especially in contexts of escalation of conflict. (Ecotopia is the polar opposite.) I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops (but I am happy to be corrected otherwise), but she clearly knows that being emotionally expressive will reduce her credibility and status in the potentially stressful interaction with them.
As I noted, Callenbach’s Ecotopia is full of vignettes that explore the impact of the absence of such extreme emotional self-regulation of the sort our society requires from its members routinely. That’s compatible with there being very different gendered and racial sanctions for violation of such norms in different local and national contexts (with the use alcohol or drugs being supplementary mechanisms regulating this).
He should read Goffman. He'd find it revelatory . "I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops" She was intimidated. But that intimidation is also a function of desire, especially for the conservative model of femininity in which she's been socialized (see above). Farrell is married to a career soldier. Her description of him and their courtship makes him out to fit the model of the perfect gentleman—who knows how he behaved in Afghanistan. She prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's to the manor born, and lived a sheltered life, even as a technocrat.
See also Daniela Gabor's definition of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism sucks because it opposes the state! Neoliberalism's bad-bad-bad because it's statist!
Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload.
This has turned into a run of three posts, connected and rambling. The second post is the last link below.
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Farrell, June 1st
Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily?
Farrell, June 8th
Cognitive dissonance. Years of libertarianism sympathy and always a Weberian.
The Intercept article is still up. It shouldn’t be. It isn’t just that the article is demonstrably and terribly wrong. It is that it is demonstrably causing genuine and continued harm and distress to people whose lives have been turned upside down. I’ve seen Twitter fights where Fang in particular tried to defend the piece (mostly through tu quoque rather than actually engaging with criticisms). I haven’t seen any sign that the editors of the Intercept have addressed the pushback to the piece (perhaps I’ve missed it). If I were to guess, I’d suspect that people at the Intercept know that the piece stinks, but feel that it’s awkward to confront it. The Intercept has been a notoriously fractious organization, with people leaving in angry huffs, being forced to leave, newsroom leaks and the like. I can understand why they don’t want more drama. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s an article whose fundamental flaws have caused specific hurt and had wide repercussions for American media and politics. Fixing fuck-ups like this is Journalism Ethics 101.
And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better.
Commenter TM: "I have one question: what is 'democratic disinformation'?"
But really what it means to not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, while this is somewhat debated on the details, but if you are leaving up anti teen anorexia videos then you have to also leave up the pro teen anorexia videos.... If you're leaving up the claims that the Holocaust is real you also leave up the claims that the Holocaust is not real, so there's just this very grim array of consequences from that rule requiring viewpoint neutrality.
"The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms."
The Atlantic: "Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but many users still believe it happens. The result is a lack of trust in the internet."
Zuckerberg on policy: "This process for adjusting this curve is similar to what I described above for proactively identifying harmful content, but is now focused on identifying borderline content instead. We train AI systems to detect borderline content so we can distribute that content less."
The law banning US government propaganda within the US was repealed in 2013.
Twitter said 100 accounts with Russian ties were removed for amplifying narratives that undermined faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.
In my experience, everyone supports the right to freedom of speech, as long as it’s their own speech or the speech of people they agree with. But most speech falls outside that category. Most people would ask: why support the right of people to say things you hate, or fear or that you regard as dangerous?...
In 1968, when the racist George Wallace, a Democratic governor of Alabama, was running as a third-party candidate for president of the United States, I defended his right to speak at a stadium owned by New York City, after the then mayor had banned him from using that platform. There was, at that time, no one whose speech I despised more than Wallace’s. I considered him, and his candidacy, a credible danger to the fundamental rights I was spending my life trying to protect. Nor was that a unique case. Many speakers whose right to speak I defended during my 34 years at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed views I disagreed with, some of which I thought were bigoted and dangerous.
For me, the answer is strategic. I can never be certain who will have political power. I can never be certain that the only people who get elected will agree with me. I know – because it has happened many times – that people will gain political power who will, if they can, act to punish me or people I agree with, because of our views. So what I need is an insurance policy. I want insurance against the probability that people in power will suppress or punish me for my views.
And the obvious, linked in the above but first here.
Most arguments against mass surveillance don't respond fully substantively to claims that you shouldn't worry if you "have nothing to hide". Defense of personal freedom isn't enough. What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords.
Slobodian recently and earlier. Variations on authoritarianism and fascist kitsch.
But if I'm disgusted by these assholes I should repeat what I wrote in the previous post about Trudeau.
Trudeau made no pretense to philosophy; he did what he thought was necessary, arguing from the specifics in a crisis, not generalizations from the library. Theory simplifies the messiness and slop of politics, and more than anything it's used as an excuse, as if it could grant permission: "I was only following orders." Trudeau's quote is famous because it was so blunt it still makes people laugh. He takes full credit, or blame, and shrugs. Schmitt was a fascist, defending violence as a general truth about the world, and taking responsibility for nothing. He was a weakling defending weakness. The passivity is the root of the sleaze. Passivity reinforces itself, and political passivity is a biggest threat to democracy. MacIntyre is a putz.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
DD
Well, I think people, people have stopped asking me what's a bailout ? You know, I keep giving them the wrong answer. Yeah, it's a bailout and bailouts are good. Bailouts are almost always the right thing to do. A bailout just means that the state steps in and provides insurance so that something economically destructive doesn't happen. And lots of people who did economics degrees start talking about moral hazard, but I noticed that there's very few people who work in the insurance business whose first concern right now is about moral hazard. I also very much doubt that anyone involved with Silicon Valley Bank, even those that are getting paid back at a hundred cents in the dollar, will look back at this last week and regard it as a case of moral hazard where they got looked after really well. In a crisis, you just need someone to stand in and show that they are managing it. And there's a lot of, to my mind, really quite silly rhetoric about bailouts because when it happens, it's kind of easy to do a political speech about how you are against bailouts and how you are in favor of saving money for the taxpayer, but it doesn't actually solve anything.
Saturday, March 04, 2023
Jack Balkin's decline and Henry Farrell's... I don't know. It's all sad.
Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism"
Algorithms—especially machine learning algorithms—have become major social institutions. To paraphrase anthropologist Mary Douglas, algorithms “do the classifying.”1 They assemble and they sort—people, events, things. They distribute material opportunities and social prestige. But do they, like all artifacts, have a particular politics?2 Technologists defend themselves against the very notion, but a lively literature in philosophy, computer science, and law belies this naive view. Arcane technical debates rage around the translation of concepts such as fairness and democracy into code. For some, it is a matter of legal exposure. For others, it is about designing regulatory rules and verifying compliance. For a third group, it is about crafting hopeful political futures.3
The questions from the social sciences are often different: How do algorithms concretely govern? How do they compare to other modes of governance, like bureaucracy or the market? How does their mediation shape moral intuitions, cultural representations, and political action? In other words, the social sciences worry not only about specific algorithmic outcomes, but also about the broad, society-wide consequences of the deployment of algorithmic regimes—systems of decision-making that rely heavily on computational processes running on large databases. These consequences are not easy to study or apprehend. This is not just because, like bureaucracies, algorithms are simultaneously rule-bound and secretive. Nor is it because, like markets, they are simultaneously empowering and manipulative. It is because they are a bit of both. Algorithms extend both the logic of hierarchy and the logic of competition. They are machines for making categories and applying them, much like traditional bureaucracy. And
Understanding this helps highlight both similarities and differences between the historical regime that political scientist James Scott calls “high modernism” and what we dub high-tech modernism.4 We show that bureaucracy, the typical high modernist institution, and machine learning algorithms, the quintessential high tech modernist one, share common roots as technologies of hierarchical classification and intervention. But whereas bureaucracy reinforces human sameness and tends toward large, monopolistic (and often state-based) organizations, algorithms encourage human competition, in a process spearheaded by large, near monopolistic (and often market-based) organizations. High-tech modernism and high modernism are born from the same impulse to exert control, but are articulated in fundamentally different ways, with quite different consequences for the construction of the social and economic order. The contradictions between these two moral economies, and their supporting institutions, generate many of the key struggles of our times.
Both bureaucracy and computation enable an important form of social pow er: the power to classify.5 Bureaucracy deploys filing cabinets and memorandums to organize the world and make it “legible,” in Scott’s terminology. Legibility is, in the first instance, a matter of classification. Scott explains how “high modernist” bureaucracies crafted categories and standardized processes, turning rich but ambiguous social relationships into thin but tractable information. The bureaucratic capacity to categorize, organize, and exploit this informa tion revolutionized the state’s ability to get things done. It also led the state to reorder society in ways that reflected its categorizations and acted them out. Social, political, and even physical geographies were simplified to make them legible to public officials. Surnames were imposed to tax individuals; the streets of Paris were redesigned to facilitate control.
Yet high modernism was not just about the state. Markets, too, were standardized, as concrete goods like grain, lumber, and meat were converted into abstract qualities to be traded at scale.6 The power to categorize made and shaped markets, allowing grain buyers, for example, to create categories that advantaged them at the expense of the farmers they bought from. Businesses created their own bureaucracies to order the world, deciding who could participate in markets and how goods ought to be categorized.
We use the term high-tech modernism to refer to the body of classifying technologies based on quantitative techniques and digitized information that partly displaces, and partly is layered over, the analog processes used by high modernist organizations. Computational algorithms–especially machine learning algorithms– perform similar functions to the bureaucratic technologies that Scott describes. Both supervised machine learning (which classifies data using a labeled training set) and unsupervised machine learning (which organizes data into self-discovered clusters) make it easier to categorize unstructured data at scale. But unlike their paper-pushing predecessors in bureaucratic institutions, the humans of high-tech modernism disappear behind an algorithmic curtain. The workings of algorithms are much less visible, even though they penetrate deeper into the social fabric than the workings of bureaucracies. The development of smart environments and the Internet of Things has made the collection and processing of information about people too comprehensive, minutely geared, inescapable, and fast-growing for considered consent and resistance.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke. The movie streaming platform Netflix will slot you into one of its two thousand–plus “microcommunities” and match you to a subset of its thousands of subgenres. Your movie choices alter your position in this scheme and might in principle even alter the classificatory grid itself, creating a new category of viewer reflecting your idiosyncratic viewing practices.
Many of the crude, broad categories of nineteenth-century bureaucracies have been replaced by new, multidimensional classifications, powered by machine learning, that are often hard for human minds to grasp.7 People can find them selves grouped around particular behaviors or experiences, sometimes ephemer al, such as followers of a particular YouTuber, subprime borrowers, or fans of ac tion movies with strong female characters. Unlike clunky high modernist categories, high-tech modernist ones can be emergent and technically dynamic, adapting to new behaviors and information as they come in. They incorporate tacit information in ways that are sometimes spookily right, and sometimes disturbing and misguided: music-producing algorithms that imitate a particular artist’s style, language models that mimic social context, or empathic AI that supposedly grasps one’s state of mind.8 Generative AI technologies can take a prompt and generate an original picture, video, poem, or essay that seems to casual observers as though it were produced by a human being.
Taken together, these changes foster a new politics. Traditional high modernism did not just rely on standard issue bureaucrats. It empowered a wide variety of experts to make decisions in the area of their particular specialist knowledge and authority. Now, many of these experts are embattled, as their authority is nibbled away by algorithms whose advocates claim are more accurate, more reliable, and less partial than their human predecessors....
At the end of the day, the relationship between high modernism and high-tech modernism is a struggle between two elites: a new elite of coders, who claim to mediate the wisdom of crowds, and an older elite who based their claims to legitimacy on specialized professional, scientific, or bureaucratic knowledge.32 Both elites draw on rhetorical resources to justify their positions; neither is disinterested.they are self-adjusting allocative machines, much like canonical markets.
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1 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 91.
4 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
5 Robyn Caplan and danah boyd, “Isomorphism through Algorithms: Institutional Dependencies in the Case of Facebook,” Big Data & Society 5 (1) (2018): 1–12.
6 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
7 Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market,” Socio-Economic Review 15 (1) (2017): 9–29.
32 William Davies, “Elite Power Under Advanced Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (5–6) (2017): 227–250; and Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade, “The Society of Algorithms,” Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021): 213–237.
Norman Geras: What is your favourite song? Henry Farrell: My Bloody Valentine, 'Soon'.
Atomization: modernist technocracy—bureaucracy not as necessary as but as utopia—dumbs down both managers and managed. Connoisseurs are replaced by experts—Healy is the author of "Fuck Nuance"—it passed review.
Everything is overlap: scroll down for James C. Scott; connoisseurship, like anarchism, is a hobby for rich tenured technocrats.
What Farrell's still too stupid to see—still too much the academic tempted by libertarianism—is that government bureaucracy is authoritarianism out of the academy, of priests and shepherds, and the bureaucracy of the market is the bureaucracy of wolves. Academic libertarianism like academic radicalism in every form, is an oxymoron: a strict hierarchic elite engaged in collaborative, soi-disant disinterested reason, calling for... something else.
In a basic sense, machine learning does not strip away nearly as much information as traditional high modernism. It potentially fits people into categories (“classifiers”) that are narrower–even bespoke.
Bespoke bread and circuses. Narcissism is bad for democracy, yes? But that was never the goal.
Further down this parenthetical
(The irony is that while high-tech modernist firms are happy to turn the market screw on everyone else, they strive to establish monopoly for themselves).22
He begins by describing the argument, adding that what he's done is "very far from doing justice to the great wealth of detailed information and of fruitful ideas assembled in this volume", and then —"Since I am not qualified to judge Panofsky's interpretation of the numerous works of art which he has occasion to discuss"—limits his criticism to a full column of corrections in translation and sourcing. And then he winds it up.
The book contains many noteworthy remarks, e.g., on the importance of artistic genres (p. 56), on the effects of textual errors on artistic representations (p. 105), and on the theory and practice of perspective (pp.I22ff.). I should like to confirm the view that Italian Trecento painting partly resulted from the conflux of Byzantine and French Gothic elements (p. 137) with a parallel from the history of humanist learning, and to endorse the remark (p. 187), hardly ever encountered in the literature on Erasmus, that his Praise of Folly "ends on a very serious and essentially Neo-Platonic note." I also agree with Panofsky and Gombrich that Renaissance Platonism opened up "to secular art" (and to secular thought) "emotional spheres which had hitherto been the preserve of religious worship" (p. 188).
Panofsky rarely comes forth with aesthetic value judgments, and thus an occasional harsh remark such as the one on the Gundohinus manuscript (p. 49, note) attracts attention. Panofsky is a valiant defender of Renaissance art and of its classicism, and I tend to agree with his general attitude. Yet I am afraid that his statement that after the Renaissance "the classical element in our civilization could be opposed . . . but it could not entirely disappear again" (p. 108) sounds a bit too optimistic in view of contemporary developments. We have seen in our times many powerful forces that are more or less openly hostile to the heritage of the Renaissance, and even of classical antiquity: certain modern conceptions of "science," of "religion," and of "education" are quite incompatible with an appreciation of antiquity or of the Renaissance, and so are the antihistorical tendencies inherent in the philosophy of language, in structural linguistics, or in "new" criticism. The same is true, in an entirely different way, of existentialism and of primitivism. If an admirer of contemporary art can write that "the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome... made a violent and lamentable break with the past" (E. Langui, Fifty Years of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. II), the classical tradition in art, as in other fields, seems to be in a defensive, if not in a hopeless, position indeed. I am afraid its defenders are fighting a rear guard action, and the best they can hope for is to be the forerunners of a future Renaissance, as were the mediaeval proto-humanists.
The most impressive feature of this book is the variety of its problems which extend from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century, and from the visual arts into literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Among the historians of art, Panofsky is the most authoritative scholar who conceives of his subject as a part and facet of the broader field of intellectual and cultural history, and who thus also instructs and inspires through his work those who are interested in other aspects of cultural history. For he conceives of the visual arts as a part of a universe of culture that also comprises the sciences, the philosophical and religious thought, the literature and scholarship of the Western world in the various phases of its history. This is the kind of “true humanism” of which we are badly in need, and in spite of our present grim outlook, there is some hope for the future of our civilization as long as its cause is being upheld by scholars of Panofsky’s caliber.
The "new critics", rebelled against "history of ideas"; the "new historicists"... "You put chocolate in my peanut butter!" to 'Why not both?". Panofsky who called the new critics "harmless" at best (with discussion of Joseph Raz—everything circles around to the same issues).
This goes back the the reason the old German humanists had contempt for the hard sciences. Looking back I found this, from 2014. It has Panofsky, Grafton, behaving as I suppose he always has, and Ukraine too. On C.P. Snow and The Two Cultures, from 2013
Somewhere I've said that I had only a general idea—fully internalized—of the history of tension between humanism and the sciences, before a woman I know whose grandfather had been one of Habermas' thesis advisors referred casually "the old contempt", which explained Panofsky's reference to his sons, a physicist and an atmospheric scientist as "plumbers", and Arendt's hatred for social science, with the only religious belief required, "just that self-evident religio without which there is no desire for knowledge, not even the desire for atheism." (Hermann Broch). In the Anglosphere in the 1950s, that history was already forgotten, though perhaps there was nothing to forget. But hearing her comment everything came together, including my own parents' unresolved and unacknowledged conflicts. I've never found a discussion of the antagonism in German intellectual life in English, just as I've never read mention of the the Jewish humanists disdain for Zionism. The leftists were the Zionists: the enthusiasts. And Adorno was terrified of instrumentalism because he though somehow it was scientifically justified. And it isn't.
Humanism, in the largest sense, means that every human activity, including language and mathematics, is an aspect of "culture", so there's no conflict between writing about Mozart or Muzak, provided you accept that there's a distinction between Plato and your moralizing high school Latin teacher. A humanist who reads Plato reads Aristophanes. The conflict between sympathy and understanding is one of the burdens and pleasures of adulthood. Panofsky shrugged of the new critics, not out of a defense of history as such, but as the shallow version of a tendency towards the institutionalization of one technique over another.
Although he took a keen interest in the great British philosophers - he later discovered and edited some new letters by Hume - he shared Cassirer's dismay at the blinkered approach of the analytical philosophers who dominated the Oxford scene: ignoring the historical context of thinkers such as Leibniz, the only thing they wanted to know was whether his statements were true according to their own criteria.
Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl. They even wrote a book. Christopher Wood wrote a review of the new edition, for October/Vogue. He even refers to "Panofsky’s tragic, existential reading" of Durer's Melancholia. So much for optimism.
Back to Jäger, et al.: "causal dodge". The responses even include a recommendation of Healy's "Fuck Nuance", from a player from the Berggruen Institute. Nils Gilman himself is in the mix.
And someone found the source. It begins with Sam Haselby, and it's worth noting that the two people who push back against academic utilitarianism are an Israeli and as Arab .
I sent one of the assholes a reminder of the origins and mandate of the I.A.S. : the importance of "useless knowledge". See also Turner on Jencks and Riesman, the rise of professionalism and the "academic ethic".
Only a student of culture could describe the mix of positivism and perversity of contemporary academia.
The Middle Ages accepted and developed rather than studied and restored the heritage of the past. They copied classical works of art and used Aristotle and Ovid much as they copied and used the works of contemporaries. They made no attempt to interpret them from an archaeological, philological or "critical" in short, from an historical, point of view. For, if human existence could be thought of as a means rather than an end, how much less could the records of human activity be considered as values in themselves.
In mediaeval scholasticism there is, therefore, no basic distinction between natural science and what we call the humanities, studia humaniora, to quote again an Erasmian phrase.
And Henry Farrell will never change. Liam Kofi Bright and Osita Nwanevu are the new gen Matthew Yglesias, pundits of neoliberal happytalk. Blacks are the new Jews in American culture.
enough for now. I'm avoiding other things. But sloppy or not, this helps me think.
Monday, September 05, 2022
How far we've come
I know it's un-Twitter-like to ask a genuine Q, not try to score points, but a Q. I understand how a court can enjoin further execution of a warrant. But does a federal court have authority to enjoin executive branch "use" of seized materials for "investigative purposes"?
Orin – as Belle suggests in the post I linked, one can create a hypothetical in which the sound utilitarian thing to do is to torture an innocent three year old to death. Does this tell us anything useful about whether it is right or wrong to torture three year olds to death? Are we merely negotiating over the circumstances under which torturing three year olds is OK and not OK, as per the Churchill quote?
Spent the day following the mutual appreciation of the young intellectual left and right each basking in the new, to them, awareness of their commonalities, and, prodded by a reference, remembering my reaction to Hirschman, like my reaction years before to Goffman: Didn't we used to know all this already? Isn't this where where serious thought begins?
By demonstrating that each of the reactionary arguments has one or more progressive counterparts, I generated contrasting pairs of reactionary and progressive statements about social action. To recall some of them:
Reactionary: The contemplated action will bring disastrous consequences.
Progressive: Not to take the contemplated action will bring disastrous consequences.
Reactionary: The new reform will jeopardize the older one.
Progressive: The new and the old reforms will mutually reinforce each other.
Reactionary: The contemplated action attempts to change permanent structural characteristics (“laws”) of the social order; it is therefore bound to be wholly ineffective, futile.
Progressive: The contemplated action is backed up by powerful historical forces that are already “on the march”; opposing them would be utterly futile.
Once the existence of these pairs of argumcnts is demonstrated. the reactionary theses are downgraded, as it were: they. along with their progressive counterparts, become simply extreme statements in a series of imaginary, highly polarized debates. In this manner they stand effectively exposed as limiting cases, badly in need, under most circumstances, of being qualified, mitigated, or otherwise amended.
It's left to older students to face the hard questions: how self-described moderates can be war criminals and their victims' cries reduced, in the liberal imagination, to nothing more than passionate expressions of rage.
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Banging my fucking head against the wall. I thought Streeck was smarter.
In the order that seems to be emerging, social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation, making communities appear as voluntary associations from which one can resign if they require excessive self-denial, rather than as ‘communities of fate’ with which one either rises or goes under. The new social media that have fast become almost indispensable tools of human sociability enable people to connect and associate with like-minded others on the most esoteric ‘subjective’ matters. As cyberspace trumps geography, the connection, elementary for traditional political mobilization, between shared interests and personal relations arising from physical vicinity is broken. One consequence is that social control among ‘network members’ is minimized; dropping out is easy, especially when people use pseudonyms—another facet of the new voluntarism of social relationships. Browsing the boundless supply of causes, tastes and lifestyles made available by the internet, one can freely decide to ‘like’ whatever one wishes; in contrast to old-school political parties, there is no pressure for ideological consistency or for adherence to a common programme.
"In the order that seems to be emerging..." As if he were writing in 1905.
It’s the public proclamation of loyalty to a subculture; documenting the need to belong; atomization and the rise of pathologically over-determined imagined communities etc. etc. etc. It’s the sociality of baroque individualism.
We now have food geeks as well as science geeks, all with the moral philosophy of Asperger’s patients: so fixated on their mania for [tube amps/Pouilly-Fuissé/Ducati two-stroke engines] that you’d be a fool not to hire them for your [high-end audio store/restaurant/Soho motorcycle salon]. Why be a well rounded adult when you can be an eternal [pre]adolescent and expert, and a happy cog and servant?
Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload.
Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay.
Because politics is a choice, not a necessity, at its worst a fantasy, a speculative fiction.
"Isaac Asimov’sFoundation series is perhaps the definitive expression of mid-century American liberalism."
"The nerdy classic is quite possibly the definitive statement of 20th Century American liberal thought."
Sci-fi was very much a young man's game, and its tropes -- rockets, extraterrestrials, etc. -- were interpreted by thinking adults as inherently juvenile indulgences. Sci-fi publications marketed themselves almost exclusively to adolescent boys, and the leading practitioners were only slightly more mature than their audience.
Zachary D. Carter, the author of a biography of Keynes, follows Krugman as a TV critic.
"Science Fiction was created by men trying to get away from the alien environment populated by their wives."
The rise of a self-conscious geek culture, the proud celebration of the preadolescent imagination in adulthood, came in earnest ten years after the publication of One-Dimensional Man and the release of Dr. Strangelove, the title character an amalgam of Werner von Braun and the ur-geek von Neumann. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
On that note, Henry seems to have dumped Tyler Cowen for Noah Smith.
But Henry is using the same Calvino quote he used 12 years ago, so I'll repeat the comments I made there at the time, repeating arguments I made 30 years before that.
And they're still "struggling to come to terms with the obvious".
Comments on "literary fiction" at Language Log; deleted ones—I always save a copy—here.
If the video dies. Imagining the Future: Science Fiction and Social Science, with Farrell, Ada Palmer, Smith, Jo Walton.
Moderator, Krugman. Introduction, Karen Sander. At the CUNY Gradate Center, on Zoom. 11/10/21
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Leiter: "Callard v. Paul on reasoning about transformative decisions"
The host, Fred Lawrence, "Secretary and CEO" of Phi Beta Kappa, and a lawyer.
Those of us who have children have the experience pretty early on after your children are born, that you immediately regret any advice you gave your friends before you had children... 'Cause you realize you had no idea what you you were talking about. Imagining the parent I was going to be —Agnes I guess I'm coming back to you now—it does feel beyond reach... I mean it's it's speculative... it's interesting... it might even be aspirational... but is it really reasoning.
When I read fiction, it’s mostly either the 19th century classics or speculative fiction – what was and what might be, as opposed to what is. I live in the present, and spend most of my waking hours analysing the economy and society of today, along with the recent past and near future. In doing that, I am, for the most part, in agreement with Mr Gradgrind – what I want is facts, nothing but facts.
But in relation to the future (and, in many ways, the past) we don’t have facts, only possibilities. And, unlike the present, we don’t have lived experience to help us understand those possibilities. Speculative fiction, at its best, extends our thinking to encompass possibilities we wouldn’t otherwise consider, and to imagine ways of life no one has actually experienced.
"what I want is facts, nothing but facts." Gradgrind and Jack Webb (most recently here)
But in relation to the future (and, in many ways, the past) we don’t have facts, only possibilities. And, unlike the present, we don’t have lived experience to help us understand those possibilities.
Quiggin: There are no historical facts—the mirror image of originalism—collapsing the future and the past as "possibilities" and foregrounding the present."History is bunk"; I know what I know. Referring to "lived experience" while denying that we lie to ourselves is denying experience itself. Experience is animal: subjective. He wants truth.
The women are quibbling over the definition of reason, looking forward and back. Like Henry and his sister and Waring; the women are at least less brittle.
I remember in China watching the bicycles, men with the their feet centered on the pedals–safe but so awkward and inefficient it felt like a symptom of depression–while the women much more often kept the pedals under the balls of their feet.
Monday, February 22, 2021
A lot to unpack. Europeans are socialist in the same sense the Spanish are Catholic: ironic worship or indifferent profession in the theater of social democracy.
I used to drink coffee with a man who sewed $100,000 furs for Dennis Basso. "Americans aren't social!" Still the best description.
Friday, February 05, 2021
I had some exchanges with Duss on Twitter years ago. He's an earnest Zionist. Malley's not good enough. But progress is progress.
Everything good about this country is good about every other democracy. Everything great is tied to what others hate and fear. Taibbi writes about Americans for Americans. So does Konczal. Farrell says "This could be seen as a reflection of the American parochialism that Konczal mentions in passing, but it is, I think, a deliberate political move." Cooper says Taibbi "used to be really good", linking to Delong. But Taibbi is still covering YouTube's censorship. Still the closest word for it. [They reversed course]
Everything good that's been happening recently in American politics is the drift of mediocrity towards something more humane. I said the same thing 20 years ago. But I still can't have a good conversation with an American.
A friend of mine had it on vinyl, or maybe on a tape. I remember him translating it for me, laughing.
"Everything is going according to plan." The line gave me a flashback from 20 years ago.
I didn't know about the Adam Curtis Massive Attack collaboration.
Curtis is a political romantic who uses irony only to put himself beyond irony. He refers to desperation and nihilism to indulge without admitting the indulgence, and the denial magnifies it. If art is reification, it describes the maker's desires as the desires of a person, not absolutely as the state of the world. Art is response; it's not the world. The little space between the two is irony. Curtis collapses that space. What's left is simple determinism.
Curtis is the Chris Marker of the BBC, a romantic reporter of fact. Marker by comparison is just a man observing and responding to what he sees, while admitting that what exists may be something else entirely.
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Better to say Curtis is cross between Marker and Errol Morris. Curtis annoys me. Morris disgusts me.
Mirowski, "Hell is Truth Seen Too Late"
Recall that neoliberalism predicates itself on the observation that most humans are one or two bottles shy of a six-pack when it comes to rational thought. Hence, anyone who had read Hayek, such as Cass Sunstein, long ago projected that the internet would promote the isolation of people within their own filter bubbles and that this might have implications for the way politics would play out in the future (Sunstein 2007). Sunstein’s reading of the situation was characteristically superficial, leading to his own prescription that people might be “nudged” toward certain political activities without realizing that they were being manipulated by their political over-lords. Others, starting from the same premise, took the position that the internet just naturally tended to degenerate into dreck, especially because so much of it came to depend on “user generated content [UCG]” (Feldman 2016). Neoliberals do not mind blaming any debilitating epistemic fallout on the agents themselves because it reinforces the message that the market just gives the masses whatever they want. Here, however, is where some on the left attempt to push back. Evgeny Morozov, for one, insists that the onus rests solidly on the economic organization of the platforms that structure internet activity (2013). While this points us in a promising direction to understand the neoliberal character of fake news, the indictment may still be misleading: Is the dumbing down of the populace a mere unintended natural consequence of the pursuit of profit, an unfortunate by-product of progress, or is it something else?
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has long been warning us that something much larger and more pervasive has been going on well before the contemporary moment of frenzy over posttruth. As he puts it, “We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can’t counter it with a coherent narrative of their own.”27 Curtis finds one incisive theoretical discussion of the new regime in the work of the Russian Vladimir Surkov:
[The pervasive] defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control—and to understand how this is hap- pening you have to look to Russia and to a man called Vladislav Surkov who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisors and has helped him maintain his power for fifteen years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career say that what Surkov has done is import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics.
His aim is to undermine people’s perception of the world so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly-changing piece of theatre: he sponsored all kinds of groups, from Neo-Nazi skin-heads to liberal human rights groups, he even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake.
As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable,” which is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion as the war began Surkov published a short story about something he called Non-Linear War, a war where you never know what the enemy are really up to or even who they are. The underlying aim Surkov says is not to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.
Here Curtis suggests the approach derives from the traditions of 1980s conceptual art, but in his earlier films, he sought the inspirations in political developments of neoliberalism. While one sector of recent punditry (at least in the United States in 2017) seeks to pin the practice of “fake news” on the Russians, in a manner similar to Curtis, it may be more pre- cise and more comprehensive to regard its advent as a distinctly global phenomenon, with earlier roots. Of course, falsehoods, propaganda, and misinformation have been with us since time immemorial, but what Curtis and others point toward is something far more insidious than George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Once the neoliberal image of the market as both means of conveyance and validation of ideas took hold, then it consequently shaped and informed changes in the very means and conduct of argumentation in general. Befuddlement became an active political strategy very different from the top-down broadcast model of early twentieth-century “propaganda.” The recent fondness for Orwell’s 1984 as master narrative turns out to be another red herring. Now, disinformation rests on the creation of a fog of confusion and disillusion, and less directly on straightforward media manipulation (the bugaboo of the nostalgic Left) than the harvesting through social media of the inchoate folderol of the general populace, subsequently feeding it back to the masses through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and new model “journalism.” Dissimulation rechanneled becomes its own special “spontaneous disorder.”
Surkov saw the chaos and fragmentation in the politics in western consumer societies and sped up the process. He studied theater just like David Bowie and Richard Spencer, but he's the manager. He "discovers" people. Curtis on Russian despair, punks, Letov and Limonov. I hate fans, and especially fans of the avant-garde in 2021.
In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg, aptly titled Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of left-wing high seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that.
Mannerism is the continuing defense of old beliefs revealed as empty. They're all you have, and if they're empty you are too, so you embrace the morbid symptoms. The love of knowledge devolves to the love of bureaucracy and filing systems. The love of art becomes the love of style.
Curtis' films are documentaries about heroin with a cast of pixellated fashion models and a humming soundtrack. They work in a narcotic flow. They're made for fans of Gerhard Richter who can't admit to sharing his nihilist passivity. After all the films are merely "documentaries".
Moralizing poets are read in the long run because they describe their failure honestly. Dishonest journalists evade responsibility by living vicariously through their subjects, and as fans they're voyeurs. But a suicidal fascist is no less a fascist because he's suicidal, and the adoration of a fascist is still the adoration of a fascist. See also Jon Ronson.
"Fake news." Before there was Murdoch there was Hearst.
Mirowski isn't defending democracy; he's defending one institutional elite against another, both equally sure of their own status.
Friedman, as usual, dumbed down the Hayekian message for those with limited attention spans: “Businessmen, who may be bankrupted if they refuse to face facts, are one of the few groups that develop the habit of doing so. That is why, I have discovered repeatedly, the successful businessman is more open to new ideas . . . than the academic intellectual who prides himself on his alleged independence of thought”
Merchants vs priests, academics, and "scientists". Disinterested reason defends either unbridled self-interest or itself. Either way "truth" is key. And the choices for the majority are few.
STS and Democracy. When political theorists are called scientists, and are horrified that awards granted for theology are given to "charlatans", it's no wonder people are suspicious. But no one demands a democratic vote on how to install their kitchen sink.
Hippie drug dealers didn't start out reading Hayek; they discovered him after the fact. Neoliberalism wasn't invented in a lab. The Lippmann Colloquium wasn't a cause; it was an effect. "By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."
Quinn Slobodian and Mirowski were two of the editors of Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. Slobidian blocked me on twitter for reminding him that intellectual history is not synonymous with history. The French, most of them, have a sense of irony that American academics will never get. It's good that Americans are reading Piketty now and not Bourdieu.
But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text. That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.
The best defense of democracy is pessimistic. Neoliberalism, vanguardism, radicalism, are all modern forms of inflexible elitism. A program of broad-based public education is a guard against the rise of a ruling class in all its forms: of wealth or expertise.
Friday, January 08, 2021
Henry Farrell, self-exiled Irishman who abandoned one church for another –Catholic for Rational Action– spouts Orwell.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to … exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
As far as ideas go, twentieth-century Britain imported them largely from Central European Jewish émigrés like Hobsbawm himself. Wittgenstein, Namier, Eysenck, Popper, Melanie Klein, Isaac Deutscher, Isaiah Berlin: One can imagine the Neanderthal condition of modern English culture without these brilliant blow-ins and carpetbaggers. Much the same happened in the literary arena, as the heights of "English" literature were effortlessly monopolized by a Pole (Joseph Conrad), three Americans (Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and five Irishmen (Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett). The Irish were expected to write most of England’s literature for it, such being the burdens of empire, as well as supplying them over the years with rents, cattle and cannon-fodder.
Farrell's responding to the fascist Hawley, who's been dumped by Bertelsmann. Hawley calls it "Orwellian", being thrown over by globalists. He can publish with Regnery. But I'm sure Farrell is happy Trump's been thrown offline and his supporters even more underground.
12 years ago Farrell was happy to entertain arguments for social Darwinism by economic policy, and his favorite literary critic ranks Shaw over Shakespeare. Henry loves Truth. He lies to himself before the rest of us.
Moralists hate ambiguity; they refuse to learn how to read it, or they're incapable, and need the rest of us to be as purblind as they are. They don't defend free speech; they defend the power of the sovereign, and the authoritarianism of fiduciaries.
I'm done with links. Farrell has a tag.
Friday, September 25, 2020
Our era is drenched in narrative. From the beguiling flame spiral of neoliberalism’s end of ‘grand narratives’, to Trump’s three and four word (lock her up / maga) ultra-short stories of destruction, to our helpless fascination with the far right’s ability to govern by unverified sound-bite, to the fact that every shitty little marketer on the Internet now calls themselves a ‘storyteller’; story has eaten the world.
Dreams are stories. Stories are enchantments. Historians tell stories. Max Weber told stories. Statisticians tell stories. The history of dreams of an eternal present is comedy and tragedy.
The powerful tell stories to a large audience. The powerless tell stories to each other.
Chomsky on the Harper's letter about free speech and "cancel culture"...
...which he of course signed, but which has been controversial with the wokerati. From the interview:
The letter is anodyne. It's a simple statement that it's worth being careful to preserve freedom of speech. The main attack on freedom of speech was not discussed there. It's the mainstream establishment, which for years has been engaged in massive cancel culture.
A university must tolerate, and even welcome, those who follow evidence and argument to conclusions that are false or unpalatable; but it may reject those who seek a platform for hatred or deception. That is why it counts counts against Middlebury College when its shouts down Charles Murray but it counts in favour of Berkeley when it excludes Milos Yannopoulos [sic].
Universities would deserve criticism for rejecting a presentation by the authors of the Nuremberg Laws, but would be right in rejecting a speech by a rabble-rousing journalist who promotes them.
Similar from Farrell
The way that the Kennedy School used to think about fellowships, as Elmendorf describes it – which I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about them – is as no more and no less than a way to facilitate debate and conversation. This is one of the things that universities are supposed to do – bring a diverse group of people into debate, reflecting a broad set of constituencies. That Chelsea Manning is anathema to other fellows like Morell should be neither here or there – the job of the university is to provide opportunities for both people like Manning and people like Morell to participate in public debate, without necessarily feeling the need to pronounce on the merits of either.
Chomsky has the habit of answering email and I wrote him one. He might recognize the name. Family connections.
The authors of the letter you signed defend their own right to cancel speech they don't approve of.
None of this is about free speech; it’s about acceptable speech. Limits on acceptable speech are a fact of life. That's why outsiders get on soap boxes. Normative assumption is a powerful thing. And editors are called editors because they have the power to choose what they print. But the NYT Op-Ed didn’t go through standard channels. It wasn’t edited or reviewed. It didn’t follow even their own formal process. And it included falsehoods that staff saw as blatant.
I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish an op-ed that didn’t fit their narrative. That’s why monopolies are bad and free speech is important.
I defend the rights of Nazis, but I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish Hitler without comment. And it didn’t. But the people behind the Harper’s letter think arguments for a one sate solution in Palestine are beyond the pale altogether, with no place in "civil discourse” or blablabla.
You’re allowing yourself to be used as cover for their hypocrisy.
He wrote back and we danced. Four notes back and fourth. The last:
-We’re done.You’ve never understood politics for the same reason you’ve never understood language. It’s not mathematics.
I’d like to reproduce our exchange but I won’t do it without your permission.
-You don’t have my permission. But I agree that we’re done.
I'll break my word, but only brief quotes.
He defends signing the Harper's letter regardless of the fact that the people behind it and many of the cosigners are hypocrites. I told him he could make the effort to defend the principle and separate himself from those who don't follow through, but he can't see the authority behind his name absent the fact of the words he signed. He can't or refuses to see language as a tool beyond its logical function. The false humility of denying he's Noam Chomsky. Of course within linguistics he's famous for his arrogance. He said no one denies that the editors at the NYT have the right to refuse to publish an op-ed. He seemed unaware of Tom Cotton's piece and James Bennett's resignation, referred to in the Harper's letter without naming the participants. After I described the events at the Times he still denied there's any relation. On acceptable speech he responded as if I were making a moral argument and not describing a sociological fact. He said we might disagree about what's unacceptable, which for him meant calls to bomb Iran "now instead of waiting". He doesn't read; he argues from assumption, but now we know he thinks Iran's a threat. Iran is not a threat, but Chomsky's still a Zionist. Anti-Zionism still isn't acceptable, but it's closer than it used to be. You don't read op-eds defending it in the Times, but you will. Change takes time. Chomsky prefers the timeless; he imagines an ideal transparency in language and then in politics, both held in check only by malign forces.
I've said it dozens of times: post-war rationalism is a disaster. Chicago school economics, Quine, Chomsky, von Neumann and Clem Greenberg. Varieties of the gothic. And Chomsky began his career arguing that linguistics could be modeled on physics.
The other charge against Weiss — her support last year for a Stanford law student who denounced a campus event with left-wing Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley and assailed Valley as a trafficker in anti-Jewish hate — raises equally thorny issues. Valley’s work frequently uses nasty Jewish stereotypes and Nazi parallels to skewer pro-Israel American Jews as well as Israeli politicians. (In fact, he’s been praised by David Duke.) If people objected to a campus event with a black far-right troll who used blatantly racist tropes to mock black Democrats, I don’t think Weiss or most other signers of The Letter would see that as an outrageous attack on free speech.
Valley's book has a forward by Peter Beinart.
Chomsky now has a tag. It reminded me that Zizek already had one. And we had a more interesting conversation. Z's a bit of a fool, but he plays the role. Chomsky's a pedant and an ass. My mother called him humorless and a dry stick.
Chomsky: "It’s a truism that a statement is evaluated by its contents." It's neither a truism nor is it the case.
Serendipity (the ghost of Panofsky) and (comedians).
One of my favorite linguistics lessons to teach students is on prosody, which is about how intonation, stress, tone, loudness, and other elements do a lot of work to communicate meaning in speech. This Erica Ash video on the versatility of the word “bitch” shows it beautifully. pic.twitter.com/Ws2eexeZTW
More than ten years ago an experimental psychologist described to me her experience and others', dealing with and navigating around Chomskians. At this point it's devolved into a cult.
