Synthesizing knowledge

Re: Synthesizing knowledge


Thought you might find this interesting, Coberst. It's a review from the Philadelphia Inquirer of the same book whose New York Times promo you touted in an earlier thread.




America anti-intellectual? Now, let's think this out
By Carlin Romano

Is the United States an anti-intellectual country?

Many think so. The notion probably unites people who worry about such things in friendly places like Italy, Britain and Germany, in nations that routinely oppose American interests, such as China and Russia, and in outright enemy territory, such as Iran.

Add the vote of American intellectuals such as Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, and arguably that of the great historian Richard Hofstadter in his far subtler classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), and you might wonder how anyone, anywhere, could disagree.

But one could. Where might the hunt for counterevidence begin?

Perhaps among all those international elites who send their children to U.S. universities because they view our academic institutions as the best in the world.

Or with those foreign publishers who compete each year to grab rights to American books, knowing their own readers prefer work produced here to anything besides that of native writers. A third stop might be to members of Nobel Prize committees, who award more big checks to Americans than to any other nationality.

The issue, in short, is complicated. And the greatest flaw of The Age of American Unreason, a spirited, provocative polemic by a veteran freelance journalist and author who writes books on weighty subjects usually handled by professors (e.g., justice, the history of secularism), is that it feeds the notion of American anti-intellectualism as a no-brainer truth.

"During the past four decades," Jacoby asserts in her introduction, "America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.

"This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation's heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics."

Enter Jacoby as Paul Revere. She regards herself as a "cultural conservationist, committed, in the strict dictionary sense, to the preservation of culture."

Jacoby's examples of "junk thought" or "junk culture" encompass an enormous range: religious fundamentalism (her chief bete noire), intelligent-design theory, video and digital culture, iPod cocooning, celebrity infotainment, local control of education, book packaging, innumeracy, youth culture, expert-bashing, the Baby Einstein videos, Social Darwinism, the anti-vaccination movement.

Yet if Jacoby were a more nuanced thinker, she'd be less abusive and more explanatory. Many secular thinkers, after all, grasp that religious thought persists not because believers are stupid or can't reason, but because concepts like God, faith and design possess logical peculiarities that make it impossible to disprove religious beliefs without prior agreement on how one defines terms.

Jacoby, however, instead of viewing the rich debate between American secularists and believers as proof of our intellectual vibrancy, sees a dumbed-down culture in which rationalists fail to silence believers with muzzles authorized by the Enlightenment.

That perspective unfortunately indicates Jacoby's general bent. Her specific likes and dislikes emerge not from the solid reasoning she advocates, but from a mishmash of name-calling, confusion between intellectual activity and America's "genteel tradition," and unconvincing links between modern communication technologies and "unreason."

Her style of argument often amounts to hitting the clip file or Google, piling up thrice-told tales of putatively vulgarized culture, then sarcastically inviting the reader's repelled reaction without examining whether the examples she lays out prove her point. Anti-rationalism, she argues, is not understanding the difference between factual evidence and opinion, but Jacoby's own judgment about which evidence counts for which assertions is often unconvincing.

For example, she angrily contrasts the use by today's politicians of the word folks with the "dignified, if not necessarily erudite, speech" of older statesmen such as FDR. "To keep telling Americans that they are folks," Jacoby writes, "is to expect nothing special - a ratification and exaltation of the quotidian that is one of the distinguishing marks of anti-intellectualism in any era."

But is folks really debased language? Leaving aside Jacoby's own violations of purist usage, she appears oblivious to how her linguistic snobbery clashes with the pragmatism she reveres in bygone thinkers such as John Dewey and William James. If Jacoby delved deeper into their work, she'd find that they considered focus on "the quotidian" a fine description of a philosopher's first duty before moving on to reform whatever's wrong with the quotidian.

Jacoby's exaggerated claim that modern American culture "leaves no room for contemplation or logic" reflects her rhetorical instinct to leap beyond careful reasoning while not catching defects in her own approach. Her book's overall argument underwhelms because she stacks the deck. She takes the forums of cultural life she disdains - dopey TV reality shows, formulaic drive-time radio, fragmented Internet discourse, and newspapers that pander to lowest-common-denominator tastes - as the markers of American intellectual life. She simply won't accept that, for American intellectuals, life is elsewhere.

In a nation that boasts more educated people, college graduates, books sold and general literacy than ever before, intellectually oriented people patronize institutions that pay attention to sophisticated print culture - universities, colleges, Web sites, publications, radio shows - and dump those that aim at bottom-level taste. It's telling that Jacoby piles on The Da Vinci Code and The O'Reilly Factor while ignoring NPR and BOOK-TV. The latter play the same role in the "edifice of middlebrow culture" as many of the media for which she's nostalgic (e.g., Saturday Review), but because she insists that edifice has "collapsed," they don't exist in her inventory.

"It is possible that nothing will help," Jacoby writes ruefully in her last chapter. "The nation's memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived. . . . "

On the contrary. Jacoby needs to get out of her apartment, stop seething about "junk," and parlay her books into a professorship. That might introduce her to students - a species with whom she seems unacquainted - who reject her senior-citizen notion that "reading for pleasure . . . is in certain respects antithetical to the whole experience of reading on computers and portable digital devices."

American intellectuals don't waste their time reading about junk, and neither should Jacoby. Ensconced at a first-class university or college, she's likely to find that her "Age of American Unreason" never happened.

Of course America is an anti-intellectual country.

What country could survive intellectualism?

Why do you think intellectuals are despised so much?

Sheesh!!!

All thought is saturated with egocentric and sociocentric presuppositions. That is, all thought contains highly motivating bias centered in the self or in ideologies such as political, religious, and economic theories. Some individuals are conscious of these internal forces but most people are not.

Those individuals who are conscious of these biases within their thinking can try to rid their judgments of that influence. Those who are not conscious, or little conscious of such bias, are bound to display a significant degree of irrational tendencies in their judgments.

"Can the intellectual, who is supposed to have a special and perhaps professional concern with truth, escape from or rise above the partiality and distortions of ideology?"

Our culture has tended to channel intellectuals, or perhaps more properly those who function as intellectuals, into academic professions. Gramsci makes the accurate distinction that all men and women "are intellectuals…but all do not have the function of intellectuals in society".

An intellectual might be properly defined as those who are primarily or professionally concerned with matters of the mind and the imagination but who are socially non-attached. "The intellectual is thought of not as someone who displays great mental or imaginative ability but as someone who applies those abilities in more general areas such as religion, philosophy and social and political issues. It is the involvement in general and controversy outside of a specialization that is considered as the hallmark of an intellectual; it is a matter of choice of self definition, choice is supreme here."

Even anti-ideological is ideological. If partisanship can be defended servility cannot; many have allowed themselves to become the tools of others.

We have moved into an age when the university is no longer an ivory tower and knowledge is king but knowledge has become a commodity and educators have become instruments of power; the university has become a privately owned think-tank. Brzerzinsky recognizes that

"A profound change in the intellectual community itself is inherent in this development. The largely humanist-oriented, occasionally ideological minded intellectual dissenter , who saw his role largely in terms of proffering social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts and specialist, who become involved in special government undertakings, or by generalist-integrators, who become house-ideologues for those in power, providing overall intellectual integration for disparate actions."

There are two separate things going on with American intellectual well being . The first is that the idea that we are not all intellectually equally became an affront to our democratic ideals. I first became aware of the by way of Allen Bloom's "the closing of the American mind" of 1987. This idea was put into better focus with William Henry's "in defense of elitism" of 1995. I highly recommend both books. America was never that focused on intellectual skill, but it was deemed necessary to develop at least a small class of intelligentsia, and we always believed that America needed to be a meritocracy. Both ideas were flattened by the mutation of the concept of democracy that developed. The PC culture is closely related, as it was deemed to be an affront to democracy to talk about ideas or conditions which did not support the illusion that we are all equal. As Henry points out, almost no where in nature will you find the slightest support for the argument that life is fair, that individuals are equal, and yet we try to do what ever we can to allow ourselves to believe that humans are equal. The American Founding concept of "all created equal" had to to with the absolute, we forgot that and applied to to the relative, to our detriment.

The second thing that has happened is the well has run dry on the project to disassemble and categorize the parts, and as our human apparatus has gotten more complex the increasing specialization of knowledge into increasingly minuscule specs of the pool of knowledge. We do not encourage or reward big picture thinkers, therefor they are very rare. This problem is correcting with the influence of the Eastern Way, we are now beginning to understand the value of what we currently call the holistic approach to health.

The cancerous concept of democracy will in time correct as well. There were several thoughtful pieces last week inspired by the financial melt -down. The gist of it was "when did America become so incompetent" on things that were supposed to be our best things....management, economic controls, building new things that work. We could also add world political affairs as well but i don't remember anyone including that (Heck, we could write a ten volume set on incompetence in Iraq). American incompetence was a long time in the making, and it will take maybe even longer to rid America of the illness, but the first step is admitting that you are sick. We might be almost there.

Veblen explained it all 100 years ago in The Higher Learning in America.

Someone tries to keep our souls locked down, but living is only material things, think about it.

Noone will ever "synthesize" all the fragments of Man's "knowledge". Perhaps a monstrous computer may do so some day, but the product will most likely be equally monstrous and inelegant, lacking in useful insights, just Frankensteinian couplings.
Human synthesizers, as I see them, provide us with less than omni-competent generalizations that coordinate conclusions and insights from specific disciplines, e.g., history and psychology or technology and economics.
I'm not familiar with any contemporary attempts to employ an Aristotelian scope vis-a-vis all the major academic disciplines. Most attempts I've seen in Academia to bridge the findings of different disciplines, the so-called "schools" of interdisiplinary studies have suffered paradigmatic and terminological conflicts.
But a reason we cannot definitely synthesize all "knowledge" is that it, even when uncontroversial, is provisional and changing.

The above was not an attempt to depreciate broad perspectives. I consider them to be inherently "good", whereas the narrow perspectives of sub-sub-sub disciplines to be inherently "bad" regarding their INTELLECTUAL value. My wife went recently to a doctor regarding blood in her eye. He referred her to a medical specialist, an opthamalogist, who, in turn, sent her to a retinologist, a sub-specialist who, in turn, called in a retinal surgeon, a sub-sub specialist for a more specific approach to the problem.
Thank God the discipline of medicine had specialized so far. But this is not so for intellectual issues. I want sages rather than technicians to help me with life's philosophical problems.

This was a repeat of the above.

Technical society requires technocrats to run it, where as wisdom as always requires the broad view. Most smart people become technocrats because the pay is much much better, and as a result we have information overload but wisdom starvation.

Yes indeed.

TED | Talks | Roy Gould, Curtis Wong: WorldWide Telescope (video)[/QUOTE]

This is a great video. It is an example of a synthesis of cosmology; it will provide an example of what I mean by a synthesis of knowledge. If only we had such ability in the matter of knowledge I think we could be a much better world. It seems we have a great ability with technology but little ability in matters that are related to morality, i.e. living together.

Here's another review of Jacoby's book, courtesy of The American Spectator.



I'm OK -- You're a Half-Wit
By CHRISTOPHER ORLET

Reasonable men may debate whether we need another book testifying to the dumbing down of America. On my bookshelf I find several titles addressing the topic from both sides of the aisle: Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect, Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the more recent Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Their lure is strong and undeniable.

As is the promise of discovering some new evidence of or insights into our culture's alleged hostility toward intellectual pursuits. Just don't expect to find any in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.

"American is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism," Ms. Jacoby asserts. I'll go along with that, though it's not like this strain is a new discovery.

Ralph W. Emerson remarked upon it in 1837, when, in "The American Scholar" he observed that, "The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." In his study of Celtic folkways in the Old South, Grady McWhiney tells how northern and European visitors to the southern states were amazed at that culture's disdain of Victorian morality, the WASP work ethic, and, especially, book learning.

Arguably the cultural battle between elite, lettered Yankees and rowdy southern crackers commenced when Andrew Jackson challenged John Quincy Adams for the presidency in 1828 and won.

As Michael Graham notes in Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, despite temporary setbacks in the War of Northern Aggression and Civil Rights Movement, the hillbillies have been winning ever since.

JACOBY'S TESTIMONY that Americans are hostile to intellectual pursuits includes their denial of global warming (I mean global "climate change"), the teaching of intelligent design, the prosecution of the Iraq War, (though not the Afghanistan War) and a general disdain for the word "intellectual."

You see the thread here. These are items long atop the conservative agenda. That's because for Jacoby anti-intellectualism in American Life is synonymous not with -- as McWhiney or Hofstadter would have it -- the southern cracker culture, but with conservatism.

Jacoby complains that conservatives "have turned the word intellectual into a dirty word," particularly conservative intellectuals like Tom Wolfe who once quipped that "an intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others," or Richard Posner who said that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot."

Of course, the word is good enough in and of itself. It is rather the clowns who masquerade as public intellectuals -- the Chomskys, the Naomi Kleins, the Gore Vidals -- who have dragged a perfectly fine word through the muck.

A video-playing teenager educated at a locally controlled public school (another bane to Jacoby's existence) could easily refute her thesis. And that is the problem with the book. For a supposedly serious study, the thing has no balance. No symmetry.

Thus the task happily falls to her book's many critics. As the reviewer Carlin Romano has pointed out, it is to America where the world's smartest and wealthiest send their students. America receives the lion's share of Nobel Prizes. New York, not London, Paris or Cairo, is the literary, cultural as well as financial capital of the world.

Not only are there more television channels appearing each year, but the number of new books published in the U.S. increases annually. There were 291,920 new titles and editions published in 2006.

AS THE AFOREMENTIONED titles by Barzun and Bloom indicate, cultural conservatives too have genuine concerns about the state of American culture. But while some may fret about video games and girls going wild, they are likely to blame liberal social engineering failures and abandonment of traditional mores for our cultural ills.

Jacoby (author of a history of atheism) pins the blame chiefly on fundamentalist religion and resurgent anti-rationalism. Resurgent, because in the '50s -- that decade that is usually demonized and vilified for its bland, mindless conformity -- was on the contrary, the golden age of middlebrow culture, before rock and roll usurped jazz, before TV went brain dead, and millions of bourgeois Americans read the Book of the Month.

According to the author, it wasn't the rise of the '60s and '70s counter-culture, but the Reagan Revolution and its evangelical allies that are to blame for this latest round of anti-intellectualism.

Jacoby, not surprisingly, is unable to see the contradictions in her own deeply held convictions. Here is an elitist who envisions an egalitarian society. She longs for a more democratic, Jacksonian nation, but she also expects it to be peopled not by the rednecks who voted for Jackson, but the enlightened litterateurs who voted for John Quincy Adams (and lost).

Like all liberal snobs, Jacoby dutifully admires the poor and the working man, but cannot abide their colossal ignorance, their petty superstitions, their techno-savvy, their bigotry, and worse, their anti-intellectualism. Ultimately, one leaves this book with the suspicion that the only "folks" -- to use a word the author rails against ad nauseum -- the author can stomach are folks like herself, e.g., Upper Middle Class Overly Educated Atheists.

Jacoby claims she started out to write part two of Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Instead of a scholarly study of American culture she produced this bitter 356-page rant.

Now turn off your computer and go pick up a book, you big dummy.

These two sentences contradict each other.





Which universities do you have in mind, Coberst? You might get a more productive discussion going if you give specific examples of particular institutions and what, exactly, they're doing to make you think they they have compromised their status as places of disinterested education.




A token example of selective reporting and confirmation bias. You may be correct that private industry is providing more funds to institutions now than in the past (though you have not provided evidence of this), but you have conveniently refrained from reporting that funds are also coming from individual donors and non-corporate entities, some of whom have explicitly not directed their contributions to any specific project or field. In the last six months alone, several institutions (including Harvard University, Brown University, and Bowdoin College) have announced contributions and endowments that have allowed them to replace student loans with grants and fellowships in an effort to widen, not isolate, higher education. Almost a decade ago, the Yale School of Music (which, I would think, represents exactly the kind of "disinterested" intellectual endeavor that you applaud and find sorely undervalued in American society) received an endowment large enough to waive tuition for all students entirely.

In other words, the picture might not be as bleak as you persistently make it if you reported all the evidence rather than just the negative stuff, Coberst.

Shapeless, was your description of Jacoby as "overly educated" just a careless usage, or do you really believe a person can have too much education?

It's not my description, JLN. I should have provided the link to make it clear that I was cutting and pasting the review from the American Spectator.

Personally, no, I don't think there's such thing as an excessive education, though there is sometimes such thing as a misused one.

Agreed. And there can be mis-education, such as that provided at Bob Jones and Oral Roberts Universities.