How Democracy Dies

[Oexmelin]

I've said it before, but the main damage the "ivory tower" academics in the humanities have done to our society, is that they have undermined the notion that objective truth is a worthwhile thing that can change minds, or is even possible to seek; everything becomes a matter of perspective, everyone is biased. This leaves us desperately vulnerable to people who care nothing for objective truth.

How many people attended advanced classes that dealt with this (sloppy version of) constructivism in college? Or has it impacted the other classes that did not dealt with this topic?

How has it impacted the tens of thousands of people who come out of business school, or engineering school, or science major?

[The Minsky Moment]

I've said it before, but the main damage the "ivory tower" academics in the humanities have done to our society, is that they have undermined the notion that objective truth is a worthwhile thing that can change minds, or is even possible to seek; everything becomes a matter of perspective, everyone is biased. This leaves us desperately vulnerable to people who care nothing for objective truth.

If everything is just a clash of values, then there is nothing to stop a guy like Trump from supporting his abhorrent values, other than the power to do so.

This situation also gives force to twitter mobs, left or right; if enough people are outraged, their outrage equals truth. What's to stop that, if everything is just a clash of values? The twitter mob is just a lot of people expressing some values.

To be clear, I don't blame the "ivory tower" for creating guys like Trump or twitter mobs. I blame them for failing to arm people with the intellectual tools to fight guys like Trump, or twitter mobs.

This vastly overrates the cultural influence and effect of the academics - particularly on the sorts of people who support Donald Trump; it also overrates the influence of postmodernist thought in world of academia.

Critical thought - to the extent it focuses on how ideological cultures create their own realities and facts - has some use in examining our present day world.  Simply telling people "The Facts' or deploying scientific evidence has been spectacularly ineffective in the political sphere. And the people who are not being persuaded are not holding out because of an intellectual commitment that there is no objective truth; rather, they are completely convinced that their "alternative facts" are the objective and higher truths.

[Malthus]

I've said it before, but the main damage the "ivory tower" academics in the humanities have done to our society, is that they have undermined the notion that objective truth is a worthwhile thing that can change minds, or is even possible to seek; everything becomes a matter of perspective, everyone is biased. This leaves us desperately vulnerable to people who care nothing for objective truth.

How many people attended advanced classes that dealt with this (sloppy version of) constructivism in college? Or has it impacted the other classes that did not dealt with this topic?

How has it impacted the tens of thousands of people who come out of business school, or engineering school, or science major?

The point is that the humanities ought to act as the place people look to for rational thought. Not that it is supposed to train everyone individually and universally.

Though even those who come out of business school or engineering ought, in a perfect world, to have at least some inkling of the humanities. Isn't their job to create well-rounded thinking individuals?

As it stands, it is no wonder people have become so compartmentalized. Why bother with a field filled with impenetrable jargon, that makes no pretence at arming people to actually sift facts for objective truth. 

[Malthus]

This vastly overrates the cultural influence and effect of the academics - particularly on the sorts of people who support Donald Trump; it also overrates the influence of postmodernist thought in world of academia.

Critical thought - to the extent it focuses on how ideological cultures create their own realities and facts - has some use in examining our present day world.  Simply telling people "The Facts' or deploying scientific evidence has been spectacularly ineffective in the political sphere. And the people who are not being persuaded are not holding out because of an intellectual commitment that there is no objective truth; rather, they are completely convinced that their "alternative facts" are the objective and higher truths.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand: I'm not claiming the humanities had any influence on the people who support Trump.

I'm claiming this trend in the humanities has undermined those who would attack people like Trump. It has rusted the intellectual tools of Trump's enemies.

[grumbler]

I think that a good university undergraduate program challenges its students' beliefs and makes them rethink what they believe, and why.   I'm not sure that this is the way American university education approaches beliefs anymore.  It's great to have students realize that "history is written by the winners" and that the received wisdom they have grown up with isn't the whole story.  It's better to expand that to "before you tell anyone to 'check their privilege', check your own."

[The Minsky Moment]

I'm claiming this trend in the humanities has undermined those who would attack people like Trump. It has rusted the intellectual tools of Trump's enemies.

I understand the claim; I just dispute that a firm grounding in Popperian rationalism is that useful for responding to Twitter tantrums and "liberals can't meme."

[Oexmelin]

As it stands, it is no wonder people have become so compartmentalized. Why bother with a field filled with impenetrable jargon, that makes no pretence at arming people to actually sift facts for objective truth.

Is that a fact, or is it rather the expression of a personal bias?

(oh, the irony of a lawyer complaining about impenetrable jargon!  )

I have no idea what these classes would be, or if they have existed.

First, because the idea that an English class, or an anthropology class would be about sifting facts for objective truth to be a gross misunderstanding of what these disciplines, or even, what the humanities, are. The list of facts, in history, or English, or even in social sciences, like political science, or economics, are as tedious as they are, *in themselves* meaningless. What matters is what you do with them. How you weave them together, how you create interpretations, propose hypothesis, etc.

Second, because in no classes I have ever attended, nor any classes I have taught, or seen my colleagues taught, have I ever witness such gross brushing aside of truth and fact. I have never seen anyone argue that everything is equally worthwhile (if so, dept. meetings would be a breeze...), nor teach that crap to students. And bear in mind, I am now basically a scholar of "historical ontology" - of the ways societies have created, and validated truth, over the centuries: I have read this stuff, including some of the regular bugbears of the "decline of truth" lamentors - Foucault, Latour, Deleuze.

Knowing battles or kings, or birth of authors, or the details of a Balinese cockfight, or the GNP of Britain -- these are all things we teach - but we teach them in the service of an interpretation. There is no way around it, in the humanities and social sciences. Good profs will teach the interpretations for what they are: the product of debates and scholarship, and perhaps part of a highly dynamic and conflict-filled field. Bad profs will teach them as gospel.

What I have seen, however, from students, is an obsession over uncovering bias. It's the idea that, once you have discovered the hint of an author's perspective on things, or an ideological orientation, or even some weakness in the overall architecture of an author's argument, the thesis can be safely disregarded. It's always done in the name of truth and objectivity. 

Now, this, the idea of "unmasking" as the end-all, be-all of critique, I have seen academics do. But I have seen a lot of people do it - it's been a political trick since at least the 18th century. Whether or not this current incarnation of unmasking-as-critique is the product of academia, we can perhaps debate, and there might be more grist to your mill there. My own sense is that "unmasking" is first and foremost, a political gesture, answering a political climate - not an epistemological crisis about the nature of truth.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Mm, interesting legal thread started by Joan derailed by Berkut into an ignorant Facebook style argument over triggered people and PC culture. 

[Malthus]

I'm claiming this trend in the humanities has undermined those who would attack people like Trump. It has rusted the intellectual tools of Trump's enemies.

I understand the claim; I just dispute that a firm grounding in Popperian rationalism is that useful for responding to Twitter tantrums and "liberals can't meme."

If you understood the claim, why did you attack it by saying "This vastly overrates the cultural influence and effect of the academics - particularly on the sorts of people who support Donald Trump"?

Well, one thing is for sure - attempting to fight Trumpism by shaming his supporters isn't all that useful, either. They are shameless.

If everything is just a clash of interests, the sides are really no different - all Trump is doing, is stating openly that he's out for "his side" - White Christian nativists.

[Malthus]

(oh, the irony of a lawyer complaining about impenetrable jargon!  )

The law is a profession which has in part indulged in jargon as a barrier to entry to protect its professionals from competition. The best lawyers of course avoid jargon, particularly in drafting agreements and the like, because they are more concerned with creating things that actually work that with preserving their monopoly, and jargon leads to sloppy drafting. I can't tell you how many contracts I have reviewed that contain boilerplate clauses filled with jargon that no-one who included it had actually thought about.

So yes, I complain about impenetrable jargon, because I know exactly what it is - a shield for the incompetent and a trap for the user.

There is also this that the law has going for it: if someone drafts a contract, other people are going to have to rely on it, in perhaps desperate circumstances in the future. Real people's livelihoods will hang on the results. So sloppy thinking is likely to be ruthlessly punished by real-world consequences.

[Eddie Teach]

You have an interesting interpretation of the word "openly".

[Malthus]

You have an interesting interpretation of the word "openly".

It's hardly a secret.

[Eddie Teach]

He will deny the accusation. Coded language and/or dog whistles isn't "open".

[Malthus]

Look at it this way - if a lawyer indulges in sloppy thinking, the correction is likely to come - the client will eventually suffer. The individual lawyer may or may not suffer, in losing clients and possibly being sued, but that isn't certain. The real loser will be the client, but the loss may not be manifested for a long time - for example, when a real life disagreement arises between the parties to a contract drafted by the sloppy lawyer. Over a large number of contracts though, the probability of damage approaches certainty.

If a professor in humanities indulges in sloppy thinking, there may be no consequences at all, at least in the short term. That depends on how his or her institution is structured. If sloppy thinking is endemic in his or her field, the professor may indeed be rewarded for it, with grants and tenure. Arguably, that's happened to an extent, the extent of which is its own topic of debate. The students are generally not likely to care - perhaps the thoughtful ones will steer themselves into the hard sciences rather than the humanities (and the decline of prestige of the humanities vs. the sciences may itself be a consequence), but most students care only for marks, and will as happily parrot back sloppy thinking as not if that will earn them grades.

The suffering is felt at the societal level, as sloppy thinking becomes slightly more endemic than it was before, rather than slightly less. Because we have, at least in the past, looked to the humanities for help in thinking problems through.   

I thought this way back when I was a humanities undergraduate - and the current tsunami of sloppy thinking tends to support the notion. Of course, it isn't a sole causative factor, this is a disaster with many parents; it may not even be a particularly important one. But I do believe it's had a bad effect. 

[Razgovory]

I know Right wingers have used the idea that liberals deal in subjective truth for decades, but that's not root of this madness.  The seeds were sown in during the Vietnam war as a political strategy of the Nixon administration.  Every night there were news stories that were showing fighting in Vietnam and bloody young American boys being evacuated by Helicopter to hospitals.  The Nixon administration couldn't well say that it wasn't happening.  Everyone could see it.  So instead they decided to focus on the press.  The problem was that the media was biased and only showing the bad parts.  When the Watergate scandal started they used the same strategy.  It failed.  Vietnam was lost and Nixon was forced out, but the American Right-had a new weapon.  Liberal Media bias.  It was used liberally in the Reagan administration and when Fox News came on the air back in 1990's they banged that drum every day.  The result was the the American right unmoored from reality.  Loopy conspiracy theories couldn't be disproven because the media was biased.  A constant refrain was "the media doesn't want you to know".  In the Bush administration Fox news viewers believed that substantial caches of WMDs were discovered when no such thing happened.  Hell, polls showed that Fox News viewers were less aware of actual events than the people who watched the Daily Show, a comedy show.  Every year the American Right is becoming more and more divorced from reality.  Large numbers of people believe that Clintons are satanic cannibals.  They believe that Obama left the US military to die at Benghazi and that Hillary Clinton sold 20% of the US stockpile of Weapons Grade Uranium to the Russians.

We seem to be reaching a critical point where the President is endorsing a view that a former President is a murderer.  The shooter in El Paso wasn't targeting human beings, he was targeting phantoms.  Imaginary invaders that he believe were out to get him and destroy America.  The Synagogue shooter a few months ago was doing the same thing.  This is only going to get worse.