Posted By BillHeise on April 14, 2010

A couple weeks ago, I was talking about the difference between Neil Postman’s certain vision of the past and his uncertain vision of the future. I had noted that he was worth listening to when he was talking about the past, but when it came to his vision of the future he was worse than useless. He became paranoid about the future despite the fact that he recognized such changes had happened before and would happen again.

I had concluded with this harsh judgment on Postman and on the wider criticism that I found in academia:

…rather than bending our academic mindset and doing the hard work of expanding our minds to cover new and unpalatable evidence—as so many of the heroes of humanism have done in the past—our academic “leaders” ignore the new evidence, collapse themselves and their view of the world into a new skepticism by which they can ignore what they don’t know. In this way, while defending the history of humanistic values, they become like those enemies of humanistic learning: Church thinkers who burned Galileo’s book and Bruno at the actual stake to keep what they already knew in perfect balance.

My judgment, which will certainly be taken as an attack on the academic circles, is not meant to be taken so. I have a lot of academic friends who I respect for their knowledge. I was merely pointing out how much of the human experience they are leaving out when they decide that the Pareto model of the universe—the rule by which the 80%/20% distribution of resources was first proposed—is only appropriate to the specialized of business, but does not have any impact on the ‘natural’ balance that the humanities are pushing for in their specialized departments.

As you will recall, the Pareto Principle introduces inefficiencies into the ‘perfect’ system which the humanities students and teachers approach as the goal of human thought. But my thought about this state of affairs is that the humanities are leaving things out of their perfectly balance view of the world precisely because their view still explains the past.

Grad School, Again

When I was in grad school, I was not popular. (I know, you can’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it either, but that had no effect on my unpopularity.) A large part of my unpopularity was that I didn’t buy the standard argument about what what we are doing when we write. I eventually worked out my own system independently because I couldn’t get anyone to tell me why what I did as I wrote worked.

I use an outline when I write. I still do. But when I brought this up on the first day of graduate school one of my teachers said that I was acting like a Nazi. So I went underground and taught my students how to outline and how to use correct grammar with the warning that they were to never tell my professors that I was teaching them ‘forbidden knowledge.’ (In case you’re wondering, I dropped this because my students didn’t really care about learning ‘forbidden’ things. They were happy to be told that someone didn’t think it was all that important and they stopped paying attention right away. I don’t blame them. I would have done the same thing at their age.)

Anyway, being a Nazi didn’t sit well with me, and I thought for two years that I would show them by getting accepted to a good school and I would be accepted there and would show them. I chose to go to the University of Illinois because they had a rigorous general knowledge test which would assure that everyone had read a certain number of books before they embarked on a graduate career. I was hooked.

But then I got to grad school and found that they had dropped the test requirement. I found that people there had the same view of my work habits as they had at the lesser school (I was a still a Nazi). From this I decided that politics is corrupt and corrupting of those who engage in it.

Grad School without Politics

My solution was to fly under the radar when I was in graduate school. I soon realized that I could ignore politics if I didn’t engage in politics. I stopped speaking in class after a semester, and my teachers stopped asking me to expound my opinions, which had changed from long defenses to a simple ‘yes’ of ‘no.’ When I couldn’t get a fair hearing from my professors in Champaign, I took my act of the road. I gave several papers on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Piers Plowman to Chaucer to a postmodern conference (I wrote a parody of this conference in my latest book, Poker Tales, due out next month).

I did not avoid all trouble in graduate school, though, but my troubles were not political. I came determined to write about the Roman de la Rose (I know, how cool am I?), but no one reads works like the Roman de la Rose. And when I handed in a long and messy paper (I do not deny it) on the subject of how we got to the Roman de la Rose, my professor (who was my advisor) assured me that I didn’t have what it took for me to complete such a rigorous program as is required for granting a PhD. I was able to take my success on the road to another professor whom I told about my post-doctoral plans to write a book about the correlation between logic and allegory in the late Middle Ages (I know, right?). She agreed to let me write it then, rather than waiting.

I’m not complaining about the treatment I received in graduate school. Much of the criticism was deserved. But in hindsight, I had decided to focus on works of literature that no one reads in the modern world but that everyone read in the medieval world. My professors thought that the modern world was more advanced than the medevil world, and therefore we do not need to old, tired works which fascinated them so much but which we in the modern world had outgrown. But this said to me (it still does) that there are gaps in the modern perspective on the world. I decided to fill in one of those gaps. It had nothing to do with politics. I was interested in tracing the role of logic in the growth and development of allegory. No one had ever correlated these things before, so I thought I was on to something.

The Intrusion of Politics

Every once in a while I and my colleagues would be called to meeting to discuss urgent department business. One of these meetings had to do with the notion of political correctness. (I went to school in the age when political correctness was raging in academia; I’m told that things have settled down since.) I got drunk with a friend of mine and showed up at the meeting prepared to say nothing. That’s what I did.

The meeting was a of people who knew that they were politically correct but who didn’t know how to justify their political correctness. A man who was a department favorite because he was openly gay stood up and pronounced his Marxist legacy with pride (I paraphrase): “I first learned about Marx when I was 15. And from then on I knew what it meant to be on the side of right.”

[Note to my conservative readers, if there are any. I do not think there is anything wrong with being gay. And I don’t really buy the ‘we’re-Americans-and-Marx-is-wrong-on-principle’ arguments. Marx is not wrong on principle. That is an argument from ends. Such arguments rely on the notion that because the end point is undesirable that we don’t need to actually read Marx to find out what drove him to say what he said about the bourgeois West. I don’t believe in arguments from ends. If Marx is wrong, he’s to be engaged on his arguments, which are quite compelling at points. As for being gay, my policy is and always has been ‘to each his own.’]

My focus in graduate school was on logic, not politics. My problem with the meeting was that we had been called together to discuss our a priori agreement that we were politically correct—it was not true of me, but I was not invited to speak—and we were going to search for a posteriori reasons why we should be allowed to continue to be politically correct in a world where so many conservatives were objecting to our position. Knowing our premises, what we needed to do was to support our premises with valid reasons to believe in them.

This is not, I think, how we are supposed to be acting in a graduate program. Instead, I believe we were supposed to be weighing the evidence before we came to our conclusions. Thus the meeting struck me (and it still does) as an inversion of our scholarly obligations. Now in real life, I despaired and I left school for a job as a temp secretary. There I learned a different (and far more satisfying) model of human behavior than I had found when I was in graduate school.

My case suggests to me that if you’re not with the program that you will be thrown out, as I almost was. My own salvation came because I never put much faith in politics, but if I had I would have accepted the judgment of my betters that I was an unlikely candidate for a PhD. My point is not to attack my scholarly colleagues for not recognizing my vastly superior talents (I say this with a grin that would tell you that I am mocking myself). My point is to point out to my humanities colleagues how much of life they are missing by hanging on to the well-balanced position that they have been trained up in.

‘Liberalism’ in Education

The ‘Liberalism’ in education has to do with the training that academics receive. The liberal bent in education can be traced back to thinkers like Karl Marx. Marx was a man who was attempting to reconcile the imbalances of capitalist life. He could look at the Middle Ages as an era in which men were serfs, but at least they had control of the means of production. In the capitalist era, Marx said with some justification, control of the means of production had been taken out of the hands of workers and thrown into the hands of capitalist exploiters of workers. Children worked in mines, while the capitalist few lived on the shoulders of the workers. Property was theft. The worker was being exploited.

Marx was not alone. Hegel had made the state the principle of order in his Philosophy of Right (Amazon link). Nietzsche had displaced the center of order from the center of the world (the world occupied by the sheep; the bourgeoisie; or the Last Men, as Fukuyama would say, quoting Nietzsche) to the few, brave men who were willing to travel to the margins of the world, as the aristocratic heroes of old had done.

All of these efforts were looking to ‘balance’ a world which they felt had gone astray.

Rousseau and Shelley

I’ve talked about Rousseau before, and I don’t want to bore you with repletion of details already covered, but I think that Rousseau gives us the ironic picture of civilization as opposed to nature. We are supposed to be ‘natural’ men, but civilization has risen up to block our natural inclinations. This is why intellectuals have to tear down society, why they are constantly at war with society. Society stands in the way of our natural behavior.

Human beings, Rousseau says, build societies in our effort to keep nature at bay. The Social Contract on which we erect our civilization actually robs us of or natural inheritance, driving us into ‘constructed’ power relations in which we are trying to dominate other men, rather than ‘natural’ relations in which man helps other men.

Romanticism is the process by which we opt out of corrupt and corrupting civilization for our ‘natural’ intelligence. Percy Shelley (one of my favorite Romantic poets) decides that by opting out of so-called ‘civilization’ based on the law of man that he can find a new and deeper ‘law,’ based in nature. He discusses this in his Defense of Poetry. In his configuration of mind in relation to nature, he becomes the ‘unacknowledged legislator’ of mankind (nice work if you can get it).

The problem that Shelley had was that he had decided that hope was not available to most men (only the rare poet) and that Keats had actually attained the complete picture of life. But poets like his friend Keats had already died young and he had risen to the perspective from which life made sense. The end of Adonais is worth reading in full (it’s only three stanzas). After he has proclaimed his elegy of Keats under the name Adonais (he got the name from Bion’s lament for Adonais), he draws back.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is pass’d from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
‘Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invok’d in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

In other words, the poetic joining that he is after—a poetry which makes the soft sky smile and the wind whisper near—is available to Keats. But Keats is dead, and he concludes that Life divides what Death can join together. He wants to join stuff together just like dead guys do. That’s a great idea, but doesn’t that mean that the only good poet is a dead poet? No, Shelley answers. Shelley doesn’t have it in him to follow Keats where he has gone. So he eulogizes Keats and remains a living exemplar of a philosophy on earth. With that move, he becomes the living exemplar of things that only the dead knew before.

Conservative Critics of Academic ‘Liberalism’

This is a large strain in the criticism of ‘liberalism’ in education. Educators are trying to ‘balance’ an imperfect civilization. Their Romanticism has meant that they have displaced their critique of civilization from the world of beast to a world of law. When that doesn’t solve all the problems that it creates, they move from a world of law to a higher law, just like Shelley does.

Conservative critics feel they are left out of the humanities. They are right. The question is whether or not the balancing act of the humanities is an act of ‘natural’ justice derived from the reliance on deeper natural law. This natural law was not eternal, as people like Shelley think. It was derived from Grotius and his followers. Otto Gierke in his masterful work on Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800, declares that natural law was the reason that the medieval world of serfs and serfdom fell apart. How ironic, then, that thinkers like Marx want to back to the ‘natural’ world, based in ‘natural’ law which leaves serfs happy in their captivity.

If you ask an academic, they will emphasize the balance in Marx which is completely missing in the world of a neoconservative like Rush Limbaugh. But the liberal position itself leaves out the imbalance of supporting the feudal practice of slavery as a remedy for capitalism. [This reminds me of reading Jefferson Davis' defenses of state's rights as defender of liberty in a history of the Civil War. "No one wants to be a slave, do they?" I noted with a heap of irony at the notion of Jefferson Davis arguing about freedom to have slaves.]

But the point is that academics want balance based on what they perceive as the ‘natural’ order. They are perfectly willing to throw Marx’s praise for serfdom out of their calculations, just as they are willing to overlook Nietzsche’s praise for the old aristocratic order.

The intellectual class is captivated by ideas developed in Europe for a generation of cultural snobs who feared the coming of a new class (the bourgeoisie) that had no place in the medieval universe. This is America, and in America educators are looking for equal opportunity. They have stripped out the aristocratic elements but have kept to the backward-looking ways developed in the 19th century.

And conservative critics like Rush Limbaugh may howl about being left out of the ‘humanities.’ And they may have spawned an insular revolution to combat Illiberal Education.

But the problem with the Rush Limbaugh’s, the David Horowitz’s, the Dinesh D’Sousa’s, the E. D. Hirch’s, the Milt Rosenbergs, and the Bill Bennett’s is that they are from a movement spawned in the 1960s of people who had gotten worried about the socialist and communist elements in the liberal movement. They decided to refound their movement on ‘nature.’

They have not gotten sufficient distance away from the bases of liberalism. Rush thinks it is enough to put forward the free individual against social collectivism. He doesn’t fully deal with the notion that I outlined last year on this website that people who are oppressed think freedom is the answer (see my essays on Nina Hagen) but when they find themselves free they are soon in a hurry to attach themselves to something larger. Rush attaches himself to the Word of God as guarantor of freedom. This is in line with Jefferson’s founding document of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence (which borrows from Locke—another social contract thinker) which guarantees rights on the basis of God.

Religion in America

There are two schools of thought in America on the question of religion. There are those who want to do away with religion on the basis that it’s a vestige of superstitious infâme which the knowing have learned to écrasez.

The other is to embrace religion as the end of the quest for metaphysical certainty. Academics are of the first camp; people like Rush are of the second camp. They talk at cross purposes, but neither (apparently) realizes that their thought, too, is subject to deconstruction. They have reached the end of inquiry before they have a right to declare their quest at an end. That doesn’t stop wither camp from declaring victory, of course. They know they are right; it’s the other guy who has left something out of their equation.

Pareto in Education

The Pareto Principle doesn’t fit with the universe that both sides of the political debate are arguing over. In a Pareto universe, the ‘natural’ configuration of the world is one in which ‘nature’ gives some people more than others. A Pareto-built universe is one in which the America ideal of equality itself is threatened. Some get rich, while others remain relatively poor. Liberal introduce old, 19th century ideals such as Marx to deal with the resulting inequalities. Conservatives rely on thinkers like Hayak, who thought that the liberal revolution was cracking under the weight of too much rationalized bureaucracy.

The result is that the education world has ignored the Pareto Principle as the province of business specialists. They are searching for a more whole, complete version of the human being. And because Pareto’s observation doesn’t fit what they a expecting, they simply ignore what doesn’t fit with their a priori assumptions about what they should find. But, after my radical deconstruction of the general knowledge on which both parties rely, there’s not much left of the general knowledge perspective. See my essay on the individual perspective that remains after Warhol’s taking out the philosophical perspective on which New Critics (and many others) relied.

The conservative adherents of ‘liberal’ positions ultimately still rely on a ‘natural’ basis for the final say on their thought. They make up for the ultimate lack of coherence for their position based in ‘nature’ and ‘truth’ by attacking the position of their enemies as ‘lies’ built to deceive for the impure and cynical motive of mere political gain.

The same thing holds true on the other side. The problem with liberals is that they, too, hold on to a ‘truth’ based in ‘nature.’ They, too, decide that the principles held by ‘the other side’ are motivated by menacing charismatic characters like Limbaugh who are motivated by a cynical quest for audience in quest for money. And what is most disappointing about liberals is their ignorance about the role of money in our society. They think, like Shelley, that they can attain a Platonic vision of the truth if the denounce money. Money is pursued by ‘them,’ but ‘we’ are free of money except to meet our basic needs. But the other side (you know, the ‘thems’), the work for nothing but money. And this is a betrayal of every principle that a good idealist holds dear.

It also bespeaks a woeful ignorance on their part of the role of money in society. See my essay on Why Fido Can’t Drive in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing for my explanation of the true role of money in the economy of mind.

This is not to say that conservatives and liberals don’t have real insights into the universe on which their minds operate. But the fact is that that each camp’s concentration on ends founded in ‘nature’ interferes with seeing the role of each in perpetuating the unvirtuous cycle. The liberal left is poised to throw bombs at the conservative right. The conservative right is poised to throw bombs at the liberal left.

My problem with conservatives is that they don’t realize how much of their ‘natural’ policies result in ‘natural’ results. They are not willing to admit that their policies perpetuate the fundamental inequity that is at odds with the American ideal. Limbaugh is still telling the country that his is ‘equal time’ to the liberal bent of the media. Fox News, too, has said that they are ‘fair and balanced,’ and that ‘we report, you decide.’ Their solution appeals to people who are already focused on the ends of their arguments before they start watching television. That may be good business. It may be the way the world is going. It may be a reflection of what the world is thinking. But it is at odds with the methods I learned about after I got out of school.

My problem with liberals is that, despite their much deeper intellect, they have decided, like Shelley, to forgo the laws of man for much deeper universal laws available to the few. But in the course of two centuries of questing for a solid foundation for those ideals, they have not been able to find the bottom of their quest for an end in ‘nature.’ To their credit they acknowledge this. But rather than reassessing nature, which they associate with equity, they have cut out an enormous amount of available information about the inequity of nature. As a result, they continue to throw bombs at conservatives while traveling their own path down a road that ends up in a dead end.

This means that they can look backwards in history with an enormous amount of precision but that they lack even fundamental knowledge about the way that a small business person looks at the world. This is my chief complaint about the Obama administration. Obama has stepped back from the stock chart (see my section on My Lecture to my 12 Year Old Son here) to the point from which he can assure us that the American economy has always been stable and will continue to be stable in the long run.

That may be true (though I myself doubt it), but it reflects the ‘long view’ which is inappropriate for the shot-term business thinker. Such thinkers are dismissed as ‘short term’ thinkers who lack the capacity to take the ‘long view.’ That is only true if the ‘long view’ is the only valid position. But it is not the only valid position. As one of my favorite authors says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

We need a new philosophy which includes the instability introduced into our thoughts on nature by Pareto, rather leaving out inconvenient truths that do not accord with our deepest cultural values (the ones about freedom, the objectivity of the press, and so forth) and traveling over dead roads towards ends that never come.

Categories: Economics, Philosophy
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