Defending Higher Education

I'm not very good at debating politics, or more accurately, policies. When I look back on these conversations, I realise that the problem was setting the stage at the very start. It's so easy to be trapped into arguing expediency and incrementalism within a system when it's actually the system itself that needs change. What I need to learn to do is frame the argument around the principles that are worth fighting for. If we're not fighting for principles then what are we doing anyway?

It seems like the debate over higher education is stuck in a similar kind of rut. Universities have plenty of defenders, but they all seem to be making broadly the same points as the attackers. There's a vital principle that they seem to have conceded, and that's to do with the purpose of university: essentially, there's a consensus that the whole point is the pursuit of economic growth. So the debate hinges on an apparently technical question, does higher education promote growth, and if so how can it do so more effectively?

Of course the answers are generally ideological: if you support universities you'll say that expanding education creates more highly skilled workforces and boosts the economy; you might even say that higher education is "the powerhouse for economic growth." You might also find yourself in a debate about which subjects are best at promoting growth. It creates (for government-funded higher ed systems like ours) what libertarians will tell you is a classic central planning problem: how do you work out what you're going to need? If you're on the other side of the issue, you'll say:

"What's the point, you end up with a lot of debt and you may not get a job out of it anyway - what good is university?" (@ 23.38)

When we're trying to answer that question - what good is university - we shouldn't let ourselves be trapped into all these arguments about jobs and skills. Because we all know it: if that's really the point of university, then what we have is a monumentally wasteful and inefficient system. After all, they weren't thinking much about economic growth when they started founding universities in the middle ages. That was never what they were for. We need to start making that point again. Our answer should have no dollar value attached. It should start with something like this (from the same radio debate linked above):

"The purpose of university is to encourage students to think, to be critical, to be informed."

What Twitter Isn't Good For

Different forms of social reproduction have different strengths and weaknesses; what matters isn't just their intellectual, social, and cultural content, but also their form and structure. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (via Marginal Revolution) on online social media:

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Federalists and Stability

I've suggested that the post-war period in the American Revolution was a time of chaos and change, intellectually as well as in any number of other ways. It would seem likely that forces standing for stability, tradition, and conservative values should gain strength in proportion to disorder. Most historians put Federalists in this role, in a way that makes their thought synonymous with such values. Other strands of politics and thought in the 1780s therefore take the role of revolutionary, radical, progressive, and so on. This dualism has distorted their view of both Federalists and their future opponents.

In fact the most visible alternative to the Federalist persuasion was itself conservative in a far deeper sense: this was the agrarian republican tradition. Inspired by ancient Rome and certain English writers from the century before, this position was essentially based on a property model of citizenship. Land ownership was the sine qua non of civic involvement; each citizen, lord of his (and I do mean only his) personal manor, should be as free as possible from any outside influence; his duty in return was to defend the property rights of his fellow citizens from upheaval and war. Small, local, government; a citizen militia; agricultural autarky; these were the ideals of agrarian republicans.

Because this is a 'utopian' vision, and not a reflection of the status quo, we can call this view radical. But whereas Federalists had in mind a world that was constantly changing and becoming more complex, agrarian republicans desired a world that would change only by the clearance of new land for future generations of land-holding citizens. If Federalist political thought was mainly concerned with processes and mechanisms that could be applied to an uncertain future; agrarian republicans had an ideal world in mind. They had no programme to implement it, but meant only to defend the aspects of it that they felt already existed. It was this attitude, far more than any more radical tendency, that animated opposition to the Federalists and the Constitution.

Federalism and the Military

What does a mechanism of social reproduction look like? Here's an example:

Federalist adoption of the Continental Army viewpoint on defense matters was not at all coincidental. Seeded throughout the Continental Army officer corps... were many of the future leaders of the Federalist party... Young at the beginning of the war, for many of these men service in the Continental Army provided the first real taste of public life. Significantly enough, the experience was at the national level, fighting for the whole country, serving in the first large organization which threw citizens from different states together... At a formative stage in their lives they were exposed to military values; they learned the strength of executive leadership in contrast to the weakness of Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Some came of age in the Continental Army; others formed friendships and made contacts that meant much in later years; still others formed judgements about politics that would last a lifetime. [p.10]

Richard Kohn, Eagle and Sword: the Federalists and the creation of the military establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York, 1975)

Identifying Value Networks

[Part two of a series; part one here.]

How can we study the relationships between values? One approach might be to study individuals, through their expressions of thought, and then move on to the relationships between individuals, in other words their social networks. In this context, a drawback of this method is that it treats mentality as insular and individual, subordinating value connections to personal ones. An alternative may be to treat means of social reproduction as nodes that link individuals and values. For instance, a text may link the values of love and charity, and also link people who are influenced by it (even if they have no personal connection).

Language is a fundamental means of social reproduction, whether it comes as text or speech; other forms include art, architecture, institutions, and social structures themselves: anything that has the capability of influencing thought. How do these different elements relate to one another in specific contexts? Clearly, some texts will disagree. Likewise, some institutional structures, or buildings, convey different values than others. Rather than study individuals directly, will it be possible to study means of social reproduction themselves, to identify their intellectual content, and to map the interactions between them over time? Then we may be able to construct the framework of a Federalist persuasion, not just a network of Federalists.

Value Network Analysis

Theories of hegemony imply that in stable political societies ideas will also be more stable, because the mechanisms of social reproduction are under control. One consequence of revolution will be intellectual disruption and dislocation. Different values and concepts, deriving from both the old and new orders, float around chaotically, occassionally clashing or fusing in strange ways, before a new hegemony resolves itself. This process is related to, but not controlled by, re-alignments among social and economic groups; means of social reproduction are the linking factor.

The Federalist persuasion or mentality in revolutionary America cannot be a static mental or ideological structure. Rather, it is a particular part of that process of redefinition of networks of values, without either an end or a beginning. The moment of political division in 1788 when Americans had to identify themselves as for or against the Constitution - that is, as Federalists or Anti-Federalists - may be a helpful test, but its binary nature is misleading. My project is to map the intellectual connections that gave shape, if only vaguely and transiently, to the Federalist movement in 1787-9. How did the patterns of American thought shift in the 1780s, and what might the implications of those shifts be for post-Constitutional thought?

Reading and Memory

"We possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them... What, then, is a memory which we do not recall?" - Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

From the New York Times:

The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass...

“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Two Points on Universities

There's going to be a new 'School of Government' at Oxford funded by a big donation. They had someone on the radio this morning as a cheerleader, and she was asked what exactly this school is going to do to teach people how to be global leaders. What makes it better than the other courses, especially PPE, that are already offered? It was a classic John Humphys interview; Professor Woods did not by any means have a satisfactory answer. It seems the clearest case yet where status signalling is the real function of the contemporary university.

* * *

An absolutely spot-on statement of the purpose of university, near to the end (about 23m38s) of a programme about Hasidic Jews:

"What's the point, you end up with a lot of debt and you may not get a job out of it anyway - what good is university?"

"The purpose of university is to encourage students to think, to be critical, to be informed. That's the purpose of university education and to deprive children of that opportunity, I think is a scandal."

Name-drop-kick

Here is the penultimate paragraph from the current draft on my paper, 'Founding Mythologies: Historiography and the U.S. Constitution,' for a conference in two weeks' time. I feel it may signify that the paper went a little off the rails towards the end there... but, clearly, I have affection enough for it that I want to post it here.

As Gordon Wood has written, following in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Quentin Skinner’s footsteps, ‘we can do only what we can conceive of.’ In this sense history in our time serves the same goal as it did in Plutarch’s, or Machiavelli’s: encouragement by example. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the idea of a world without Big Brother was erased by the party’s control of information and therefore of history. ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’ Similarly, it was once suggested that the fall of the USSR and the apparent triumph of American liberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century signified ‘the end of history,’ the end of substantial political change. A world with history, conversely, is a world replete with knowledge of the possibility of change, and of alternatives to what currently exists.

History is past Politics and Politics present History

History seminar room, Johns Hopkins University, 1887

History is not election results, or laws, or wars, but a lot of history was once based on those things and not much else. Historians are now concerned with more or less everything about the past that we can possibly find evidence for, from people's deep beliefs to their daily routines. Hence the motto, 'history is past politics and politics present history' (with that dignified, archaic ellipsis of the second 'is') that once adorned the wall of the room where the first professional graduate course in history was taught, has been somewhat unfashionable in the last half-century.

But if our definition of what history is changed over that period, our definition of what politics has also been changing for nearly as long. Somehow, I think, things have come back around. For just as history encompasses almost all human activty, the truth is so does politics. In every action or thought or relationship there are structures, echoes, lines, shadows of power. And politics is the negotiation and arrangement of power. Pick any novel, and read how the subtle lines of power connect individuals and animate their lives. Can works of history exist that do not do the same?

Sophistication

From The New Republic:

Sherwood Anderson’s understanding of sophistication was nothing like our own. Like many habitudes in the past hundred years, this one has grown complicated and thin. Our sophistication bears no resemblance to wisdom and no sadness attaches to it. Our sophistication is merely a skill for many surfaces. It is anything but a consciousness of ultimate questions; it is, in fact, a flight from such a consciousness. Its objective is breadth, not depth. It is the talent for speaking confidently on subjects about which one knows very little, on subjects about which one has only heard—a social skill, an exhibition of virtuosity to others—the intellectual aspiration of a dinner guest.

The Pleasure of Agency

This morning I completed a relatively complex task relatively efficiently; I was pleased with myself. But I was actually doing the task for someone else, as part of my research assistance duties for a Fellow at another college. Sure, I'd spent two hours on it, so I'd earned a certain amount of money, but there was a sense of achievement too. In fact, quite possibly a stronger sense of satisfaction than if I had been doing a similar task for myself.

I suppose it's pretty obvious. Doing something for someone else, we don't have to worry if it's really the right thing to do, or if it's a waste of time, or how it will affect the broader project. Or rather, we do think about those things, but we don't have ultimate responsibility for them: we are only agents. The pleasure of agency is the pleasure of surrendering one's will while remaining active in the world. It's not the same as giving up on life and staying in bed, but it does have similar roots.

There are many relationships that confer this pleasure of agency, active subordination to another's will: the army, or employment in any other hierarchical organisation, but also things like activism in a movement, and perhaps in a quite different way, love. Religious faith is another ('Islam', I remember from school, means 'surrender'); granted there's a difficulty in receiving clear instructions from the higher will, but that is also - by degrees - true for the other things too.

We seem to be wired to take pleasure in our own will: independence, the ability to set our own goals. Nobody wants to be told what to do all the time. But it seems equally true that we can have great pleasure in surrender, in performing tasks and aiming for goals set by others. What are the moral and political implications? Maybe Randian libertarians think that the pleasure of agency is a form of moral weakness; on the other hand Christians (and Buddhists) think we should entirely surrender personal will.

On a simple level it seems to me that a human nature which combines a critical will, capable of independent thought, with an inbuilt desire to serve the will of others, is a human nature we can build something on.

Meta-Mentalities

One objection, which is not infrequently heard in Britain, ought not to be taken too seriously; it is that the French treat mentalities as impersonal forces. In Britain it is obvious that there are no such forces, but only men thinking, as Herbert Butterfield put it. Or as Vivian Galbraith used to say, with provocative sexism, in his Oxford lectures in the 1950s, 'History is just chaps.' To the French, however (if I dare attempt an act of empathy with them), it is equally obvious that the term mentalité is not being used to describe a thing or a force, but rather to characterize the relation between beliefs, which is what makes them into a system. The beliefs are 'collective' only in the sense of being shared by individuals, not in the sense of standing outside them. The contrast between the British intellectual tradition of methodological individualism and the French tradition of holism is so strong, and goes back such a long way, that one is tempted to call the difference itself one between two different mentalities.

Peter Burke, "Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities," in Varieties of Cultural History (Oxford, 1997), p.170.

The Pleasure of Biography

A..S. Byatt's Possession is a novel about research. It is a mystery story that starts with a serendipidous and tantalising clue, and leads its characters on a dramatic chase after the truth. Her protagonists are literary scholars each concerned with one particular figure. There are a couple of passages early on where these characters wonder about their own personalities, their own lives, being so completely submerged in the personality and life's work of another person. And although they are, as I said, ostensibly literary scholars, interested in their subject's writing (and the hero makes that point explicitly), it is quite certain that the interest of the writing is the revelation of the life.

One aspect of the book's irony is that of course the subjects only have their life in the fragments of their own writing - letters, diaries, and poems - that are offered in the pages of the book. Except in Possession that is not quite true, for near the end are a few passages that narrate part of their lives directly. In these passages, we readers see what the protagonists cannot, the lives that were behind the paper. It is a curious manouevre. Is it to be taken as an admission that a novel's potential for completeness - there is no life that fails to find the page, there is as Derrida would say 'nothing outside the text' - makes it a superior form to the irretrievably incomplete biography of a real person?

A novel Byatt wrote ten years later, The Biographer's Tale, is a starker picture of the frustration of research: the fragmentation and the fading of truth. There is here far less contact with the putative biography's subject, and there is no trail of clues that leads to revelation, only broken lines that force us back in on ourselves. If this later work is more honest, or more pessimistic, about the task of biography, perhaps it says the same thing about novels too. There can be only that life which is born onto the page, all frail and thin: nothing beside remains. However many worlds within worlds we create, however we rebuild past lives and past civilisations in books, there are still only words and this world, here.

Pegs and Tightropes

The metaphor of an ideological continuum seems to help deconstruct dichotomies between simple extremes. But when it comes to describing the intellectual world of a person or group, we usually look for a point where our subject stands: the continuum is only a tool for comparison with other subjects, or perhaps with other moments in the subject's life. There is one extreme end there, another over there, and we are interested in this particular point here between them.

How accurate is this metaphor for the description of thought? It seems faulty to me. For one thing, it offers no way of accommodating or accounting for a shift in thought, a movement between the extremes. For another, although we never succeed in really specifically placing someone on our line of continuum, the metaphor creates the illusion of specificity: think of the grid on Political Compass for example (a two-dimensional continuum there).

These illusions of immobility and specificity create a third illusion, of stability. On one hand, no intellectual description or history can proceed unless there can be some assumption of stability in thought. But it seems equally true to me that we cannot proceed if thought is assumed to be in general completely stable (even if subject to specific shifts). How fixed are our ideas at any moment, especially our underlying, unexamined beliefs? The very stuff of thought is to be able to hold contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. We are mobile enough, at least, to do that.

Minds cannot be pinpointed on a grid. They are unbalanced acrobats on tightropes, whose feet may step one way or the other at each moment. Ideas, beliefs, opinions exist only on the line of tension between one point and another, they rely on pegs - extremes - to hold the rope taught, even when they're standing in the middle. Describing thought is more about which ropes are tied to which pegs than where exactly the tightrope-walker stands between them.

Starting Blocks

So I gave my paper on wheat. It didn't feel very successful at the time, but I've had some kind words about it since, which is nice. Still, it's led me to start formulating a clearer conception of my project for the next three years. One of the problems with the wheat hypothesis is that it is an answer to the question, 'why did the Federalists think what they thought?' That question skips a step: 'what did Federalists think?'

It's not as clear-cut as that makes it sound. Sometimes (always?) the way we come to think things is part of the thought itself. Our stimuli are just as much part of our mental world as our own words and acts; hence all the interest in what people had in their libraries. Yet to ask the second question first can only deepen the methodological problem. And to answer it in terms of one phenomenon which can account for only a small part of the whole answer deepens it further. Historiography in common cause works not by building tiny bricks of knowledge that we fit together, but by starting with the whole map and then zooming in. You have to avoid zooming too far before you know what the surroundings look like.

Apology and Rhetoric

A friend was working a few months ago on a study of 'the apologetic tradition' in French literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. When I was reading Envisioning Real Utopias last week, I was reminded of that work, and the idea of apology as a literary form. Although we don't use the term any more (except perhaps in the case of Christian apologetics), I think a lot of non-fiction writing, perhaps of any time, shares the salient features of apology.

One of those features is the assumption of an argument or conversation. Significant energy, or even the main part of the work, will be devoted to (implicitly or explicitly) countering the arguments - or potential arguments - of others. That seems to be what academic writing mainly does.

The second, and I think related feature is detachment from the objects of the argument itself. In Early Modern apologia, writers usually took pseudonyms; they might even then write an apology for themselves (or their own work) from the perspective of this ostensible third party. Similarly contemporary non-fiction often has a quality of writing on behalf of a position, rather than from a position. In an extreme but quite common form, this is done by directing the writer's thought through the interpretation of other writings (or even events).

Such a masking technique displaces the conversation into a third, maybe neutral, space. It creates a recursive style of argument where the protagonists are indistinct hybrids: both the subject of interpretation and the interpretor. Is it in this kind of literary defence-mechanism that we should look for the origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical 'objectivity'?

Help Me Doug Adams

From Dissent:

Pragmatists argue that political rights and freedoms are founded on community traditions and shared history. Rights are not “natural,” but they are still meaningful and extremely important. The pragmatists recognized that rights mean different things in different historical contexts. The meanings of “freedom of speech,” “citizenship,” the “right to vote,” and “property” have changed over time in the United States because of important shifts in public understanding.

Thus, for most progressives, rights represent a wager we have made as a political community, a wager with our fellow citizens as to the sort of life we aim to live...

From Overcoming Bias:

...what exactly do most people mean by “the meaning of life?” [...] It seems what people want is a satisfying story about their place in the universe. Since characters are the most important elements of a story, the main “place” that matters to people is their social place – who they relate to and how. People feel they understand their place when they have a story saying how they can relate well to important social entities.

Conor Williams in Dissent is right to characterise progressive pragmatism as a wager (something like a contract, something like a promise, something like a dare). The crucial factor in a bet is a lack of information: it's not a bet if you already know your horse will win. Most folks don't like not knowing. They want to ask, what is it really that makes rights right? Pragmatism relies on not asking that question, saying it cannot be answered.

When it comes to the meaning of life, if Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias is right, most people are pragmatists. We are capable of being satisfied by answers situated in a social and historical context: our place in a world that is already given. The question not asked is, 'why is that context there at all?' I have a feeling that's not really the case (for me anyway). Am I insufficiently pragmatic?

Wheat and the Federalists

At the start of my masters course, striking around for ideas to investigate around the topic of the Federalist party, I adopted a hypothesis: that the shift from tobacco to wheat farming in the revolutionary Chesapeake was a factor in the national integrationist ideas of Washington and Madison, as well presumably as other Virginia and Chesapeake Federalists. Quite early in the investigation I abandoned the idea of proving this hypothesis by matching wheat-growing areas in Virginia to districts that voted Federalist in 1788: back in 1978, Norman Risjord had already tried it, and provided a helpful if discouraging footnote in his opus, Chesapeake Politics 1781-1800:

... the hypothesis does not stand up under close scrutiny, however. The upper bay-Susquehanna region produced as much wheat and flour as the Potomac, yet it voted Antifederalist. The Patuxent Valley, which grew the finest tobacco in Maryland, was staunchly Federalist. Most farmers in Maryland seem to have raised both tobacco and cereal grains, often side by side. [p283 note]

Still, I changed tack only slightly. Rather than defining voting patterns, which is after all a strong test, perhaps wheat could have nonetheless been influential on the way people saw the world, and on the ideas of Federalist leaders. Wheat trade meant closer contact between Virginians and men (merchants) from other states. It also meant that Virginia's interests as a wheat-growing state were aligned with those of other wheat-growing states to the north. Indeed, seen in the long perspective, where the pattern of Virginia agriculture swings from tobacco to wheat to cotton, it appears to take on a particular importance to the north-south divide.

These observations are all valid, I think, and they remain part of my work. But there are two things: first, the correlations are pretty weak (Madison for one remained far more concerned with tobacco than wheat), not to mention confined to the northern Chesapeake, and the hypothesis itself now seems flatly materialist; second, I'm bored of this topic now. As grateful as I was to use it in my applications, I don't actually see it as the core of my project. So, my question is, is this a symptom of flightiness that bodes ill for the long and painful task of doctoral research, or does it demonstrate a useful ability to recognise the limitations of one's pet ideas?

On Friday I will give my first ever conference paper, to the British Group of Early American Historians, and it will be all about wheat and the Federalists. When I've finished, it will close a chapter of my student life.

Social Reproduction in the Critical Period

Social reproduction is what keeps things the same as time passes, reproducing the same social conditions each instant and for each person. It is both passive - in other words, inertia - and active - dominant forces interested in the status quo have methods of maintaining it. People seeking social transformation, of whatever kind, must be to break down the process of social reproduction: which, in simple terms, is what anarchists want to do when they 'smash the state.'

I was reading this stuff in a book today, and wondering how it might apply to Federalists is 1780s America. The first question is, were they changing or maintaining the existing social conditions? Not easy to answer. It appears to me that historians aren't so much divided from each other on this question, but contradictory within themselves: to take Gordon Wood for example, his thesis in Creation seems to be both that the social structure of America was truly transformed in 1776 and that the Federalists were defending their elite position in 1787. In other words the situation is one of counter-revolution.

There is probably a theoretical literature on social reproduction during the process of revolution; here is my guess what it says: before the revolution has been fully accomplished, some elements of the machinery of social reproduction remain in the hands of the enemy (perhaps indeed the definition of full accomplishment would be full control of these mechanisms), so there are countervailing forces at work. Society is in flux. Now the American Revolution is complex because there are different, competing elites: the British, for one, and then the competing American elites. Therefore, a question for research: which mechanisms of social reproduction were controlled by which groups, and at which times? How, if at all, did they change hands?

Relevant Scholarship

In the late 1960s New Left academics in America disagreed with each other over the question of relevance: should socially responsible scholars consciously seek to address topics that are relevant to the contemporary moment, or should they use other criteria to find topics for research? This question is as relevant now as it ever was!

If as I have written already, university should be a social movement aimed toward identifying and achieving beneficial changes in the world, doesn't that mean that much of the work that goes on is irrelevant and pointless? But I'm not sure that's the case. Clearly, figuring out what the world is really like, and what it should be like, and how to move from one to the other, is a big and complicated task. Who can tell how many little bits of knowledge, theory, and insight we might need to accomplish it? And who knows where those are to come from?

The New Left's calls for relevant scholarship were misplaced, because the only relevance we can judge is fleeting and superficial, whereas our goal is long-term and fundamental. It's not that I think every dissertation is a brick in the wall of knowledge, which will one day be complete. More that understanding springs from unexpected places; and if there is one thing we should expect, it's that asking everyone to think about the same things will drastically limit the potential for generating new understanding.