The Academy in Peril

As readers of this blog may be aware, I was in Dallas on Saturday where I delivered the keynote address at the 4th annual RAW symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas. Thanks, again to USIH's own L.D. Burnett for inviting to speak on the Future of the Humanities.

Rather than reproduce my entire talk,* I wanted to briefly summarize my main arguments and then re-answer a question from the q&a period, having come to regret the answer I gave at the time (ain't blogging grand!).

I began the talk by suggesting all the hopeful things going on in the humanities these days...and I really think there are many. We're experiencing an explosion of interesting humanistic work beyond the academy. And academic humanities departments are operating in relative internal peace compared to the often nasty divisions found within them well into the 1990s.

But the second half of my talk, sub-titled "The Academy in Peril," focused on what I feel is the biggest challenge facing the humanities today: the threat posed to higher education by both its enemies and many of its supposed friends, who have all embraced a narrow, economist understanding of higher education that sees tenured and tenure-track (TT) faculty as an unconscionable fixed cost that interferes with rationalizing the operation of the university.**

We are already seeing the effects of decades of forced casualization of the academic labor force. Today, two-thirds of the 1.5 million college and university faculty are in non-tenure track (NTT) jobs.  Most of these faculty don't have PhDs, though many of them are pursuing the degree.  Marc Bousquet, one of the most trenchant observers of the current state of the academic labor system, summarizes the situation grimly, but not entirely inaccurately, as one in which PhD recipients are the system's waste products.  Far from preparing them for an academic career, graduate school is, for many PhD candidates, the academic career itself, as they become markedly less employable after they receive their PhDs. But while it makes perfect sense from an administrative perspective focused on the bottom line to replace newly expensive (though pedagogically experienced) recently minted PhDs with cheap (though totally inexperienced) entering graduate students, neither teaching nor scholarship is served by such a management technique.

Unfortunately, rather than thinking comprehensively about this whole labor system, faculty, especially TT faculty, tend to think in terms of a semi-mythical job market, which involves the competition among PhDs for the shrinking number of TT positions.

I concluded my talk not with a solution to these problems (I'm not sure what that would be), but rather with three things we should all do in order to work toward a solution:

1) Analyze.  We need to have a better understanding of the overall labor system of academia.  TT faculty, in particular, need to gain a better understanding of the experiences, needs, and hopes of NTT faculty.  Before we can devise solutions, we need to understand the problem.

2) Organize. Any solution will involve organizing.  Though I'm less convinced than Bousquet that doing so is the solution, unionization is a critical first step...where possible. Unfortunately, many states, including my own, ban faculty unions at public institutions. And the most powerful form of unionization--one that would link TT and NTT faculty in a single bargaining unit--is being bitterly contested even in places in which faculty unionization is well established.***  But even if you can't join a union, you can--and should--join AAUP. And NTT faculty should also join the New Faculty Majority.****  Finally, it is appalling that many faculty still oppose graduate student unionization efforts.

3) Advocate.  For the humanities, on and off campus. And for a new vision of higher education that puts the focus back on education and scholarship broadly understood.

So that's more or less what I had to say.

Let me add here that these things are especially important right now because a lot of people on and off our nation's campuses want to make the lives of faculty--and with them the quality of education and scholarship that goes on in our colleges and universities--immeasurably worse.

If you're a tenured or TT faculty member (or just hope to be one some day), now's a good time to take a look at how the NTT faculty are treated on your campus. Include graduate instructors in your field of vision.  What you'll see won't be pretty. And yet, what you'll see is what your administrators and educational reformers--Democratic and Republican--want your job to look like in the future.*****

The latest example of this sort of thing appeared in the Washington Post on March 23. Opining that faculty don't work hard enough, educational consultant and former New School Chancellor David C. Levy argues that all college and university faculty ought to be teaching 6:6 or 7:7 loads.******

All of which brings me to the audience question from Saturday that I wish to re-answer.

The q&a opened with a faculty member (I think), asking me what my work on Leo Strauss (which L.D. had referenced in her introduction of me) had to do with my "activism" (this word is usually meant as a pejorative in such a context).

My answer was simple: "Nothing," I said.

What I meant by that was that my work on Strauss and the Straussians really isn't informed at all by the sort of things I was discussing in this talk.  I understand--and appreciate--that many humanists understand their activism and scholarship as a kind of seamless web, that their scholarly work is, in a fundamental sense, engagé.  But that ain't me.  I'm kinda old-fashioned that way.

But I think I misunderstood the spirit of the question. Or at least, my very pithy answer didn't cover all it's potential meanings.

Almost immediately after the q&a ended, however, I began to wonder whether this question may have actually been intended as way of asking "Shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"*******

At any rate, there is, in fact, a very direct relationship between my scholarly work and my "activism": if my conditions of employment significantly deteriorate, I will not be able to do my work on Leo Strauss and the Straussians or much of anything beyond teaching (badly due to the increased load).  Which is, I suppose, also why I object a little to the word "activism" here.  I'm not, after all, choosing to be involved in a political struggle. I'm just thinking about and trying to improve, or at least preserve, my own labor conditions.  And suggesting that if others in a similar position don't do so as well, we will all likely pay a very heavy price for our failure.

_____________________
* I gave the talk off of an extended outline, so reproducing it would either involve reprinting a series of notes to myself or attempting to reproduce the thing ex post facto.

** I've blogged at greater length about these issues on USIH before here, here, and here.

*** Last week, an Illinois State Court prevented such a combined union from gaining recognition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is happy to bargain with split unions.

**** Seriously. If you're a faculty member--and that includes grad students who teach--and aren't a part of those organizations, follow those links now!

*****Although my talk at UTD was generally well-received by its majority grad student audience, I heard through the grapevine that some senior faculty felt that I had come across as young and naive.  Though I'll admit that I've reached the age at which being called "young and naive," like being carded, has become more compliment than insult, I really do think that, with the possible exception of those of us lucky enough to be tenured at the best-funded and least sectarian private institutions in this country, all of our jobs are--or will shortly be--under direct, sustained attack.  The naive position at this point is to conclude that, because you have tenure, the bell does not toll for you.

****** Levy's argument is pretty self-refuting. But if you crave refutations, you can visit Paul Krugman at the Grey Lady (for a short one) or Robert Farley at LGM (for a longer version).

******* Though in all fairness to my interlocutor, my own capacity for guilt and self-punishment enables me to translate, say, a desire to grab a second cup of coffee into the question "shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"

The Return of the Culture Wars! (Part LIII, LIV, LV...)

In a bit of good news for a guy writing a book on the history of the subject, the culture wars have returned with a vengeance. Or so say the pundits. As a historian of the culture wars, of course, I never thought they went away. Perennial efforts to pronounce the culture wars dead have always been pathetically ignorant of the historical earthquake otherwise known as modernity, and of its accompanying epistemic and identity-based crises. Put simply: What does it mean to be a modern American? When this question is answered—or, when people quit projecting their notion of normative Americanism onto the public sphere—the culture wars will finally, at long last, wither and die. In other words, not in our lifetimes.

That the culture wars are a seemingly permanent feature of American political culture is not to say that they haven’t morphed over time, become more intense here, less there, about this issue here, that there, depending on a host of contextual factors. Change is as much a feature of the long history of the culture wars as is continuity. The book I am writing is about the culture wars from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on the 1980s and 1990s, or the culture wars proper. In my view, this is the era when the acids of modernity burned gaping, irreparable holes in the fabric of normative America. The heated shouting matches over these new apertures, about how or whether to repair the breaches, have been the stuff of the culture wars.

By this framework, understanding the brouhaha over Obama’s contraception plan is not that difficult. But most pundits are mystified, or rather, they should admit to being mystified rather than confidently assert their typically bad analysis. Take for example Paul Krugman, my favorite Neo-Keynesian popularizer who should really stick to his mostly excellent economic commentary rather than opine on American conservatism, about which he knows just barely enough to be dangerously wrong. In his piece from a few days ago—tellingly titled, “Severe Conservative Syndrome”—Krugman returns to the deep well of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas bait-and-switch method of analysis, whereby it is thought cultural conservatives often vote against their own economic interests due to their irrational obsession with the culture wars, to which Republican politicians, on the payroll of the rich, cynically lend rhetorical support as they attend to more important matters, such as rewriting the tax codes in favor of their economic royalist bosses. Krugman relates Frank’s conventional wisdom to the present G.O.P. campaign, which he considers evidence that bait-and-switch has gone horrifically wrong:

the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy—a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum—and now the party elite has lost control. The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field—is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal?—is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

The notion that the G.O.P. deployment of culture wars strategy has created a grassroots culture wars army is, to put it mildly, off. A vast historical literature testifies to the fact that rank-and-file conservatives have had more than a little say in the cultural turn taken by the G.O.P. These books are all too familiar to specialists. If you’re not a specialist, check out Kim Phillips-Fein’s historiographic essay and the ensuing roundtable in the Journal of American History. (Or for a primer, read Tim Lacy’s excellent overview of the JAH roundtable here at USIH.) One of the best books on the interplay between cultural conservatives, especially the Christian Right, and the G.O.P., is Dan Williams, God’s Own Party. Williams nicely illustrates the complexities of how the elite and the grassroots play off one another in the dialectical remaking of the Republican Party.

Another meme arising from the most recent commentary on the culture wars is that their return is premised on improvements to the economy. In other words, Republicans are cynically intensifying their focus on culture wars issues—like Obama’s contraception access plan, also read as a frontal assault on religious freedom—precisely because the economy is apparently improving, thus rendering it a less effective cudgel. The New Yorker’s resident Obama-phile David Remnick puts it like this in a column titled, “Here Comes the Culture War!”:

Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are intent on fanning any ember of cultural anxiety, fear, or resentment that can be found. The more the economy shows signs of life—however slight, however deceptive in many ways—the more the Republicans, and their media champions, are likely to resort to the kind of battles outlined in Bill O’Reilly’s 2006 book, “Culture Warrior,” which posited a country divided between decent, hard-working people of faith and pernicious secular liberals—a small but powerful Soros-funded minority that knows only contempt for “traditional American values” and wants to mold the country into “the image of Western Europe.”

It might be the case that Republicans strategize as such. Who can blame them, given the hyper-attention the media pays to any hint of cultural controversy. But, like Krugman, Remnick breezily erects an analytical bracket between cultural and economic spheres. This is a problem with the entire trajectory of most liberal commentary on the culture wars, now as ever. In order to explain how the cultural and economic have converged, let me quote extensively from a piece I wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education a few months ago, where I put the reception of Occupy Wall Street in the context of the culture wars paradigm:

Consider how traditionalists often take conservative, antistatist economic positions that would have shocked forebears such as William Jennings Bryan. Pro-family activists in the early 20th century blamed market forces for disrupting traditional life. But by the 1970s, cultural conservatives increasingly blamed the state, supposedly beholden to feminists who sought subsidized child-care centers and welfare policies that encouraged out-of-wedlock childbearing. Similarly, activists on the religious right, frustrated with the secularization of public schools that was codified by U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing class prayers in school and preventing the teaching of creationism, saw the state as the enemy of religion and family. Their newfound antistatism situated them smack-dab in a Republican coalition that sought to dismantle the New Deal order.

Increasingly after the 1960s, conservatives interpreted liberal movements such as “women's liberation” as both hostile to traditional family values and dangerously anticapitalist. The author Midge Decter captured this conflation in her 1972 rebuke of feminism, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation. Decter contended that modern American women had it better than ever in their newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet they feared their new freedoms, she wrote, because with them came new responsibilities in the competitive world of capitalism. In faulting feminists for shirking the responsibilities of living in capitalist America, Decter's cultural critique of feminism doubled as a defense of capitalism.

Responsibility became sacrosanct for conservative culture warriors. Today's anti-abortionists are not merely pro-life but also pro-responsibility. As Robert Bork wrote, abortion is “a way for women to escape the idea that biology is destiny, and from the tyranny of the family role.” Similarly, conservative racial discourse has morphed from the overt racism of white Southerners who sought to uphold Jim Crow into a colorblind rhetoric of individual merit and hard work, which shapes attacks on affirmative action.

Americans have long subscribed to political language—some call it populist—that separates those who earn their way from those who do not. At various historical moments, especially the Great Depression, a rapacious corporate elite has been assigned the role of leeches, thus enabling redistributive economic policies. At other moments, like the current culture wars, poor people, blacks, feminists, immigrants, and assorted “others” are described as parasites, hindering reform. Cultural description tends to match economic prescription, such as with the appropriately titled federal welfare-reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

========

Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, has been producing much more inspired culture wars posts at his great blog, Rortybomb. In this piece, Konczal relates the uptick in the culture wars—as measured by the huge increase in enacted abortion restrictions in the past year—to the conservative victories in the 2010 midterm elections. “Which is to say,” Konczal concludes, ”that the new Tea Party and far-right state legislators–the ones who were supposed to be all libertarian and focused on the budget while dismantling unions under a culture war truce– also initiated a wave of abortion restrictions beyond anything in recent records.” Cultural and economic conservatives are increasingly one and the same.

Konczal explores this historical connection in another recent post, by (on the advice of Corey Robin) reading some early Ludwig von Mises, where the important libertarian thinker argues against sexual autonomy and, implicitly, birth control. That a classic libertarian like von Mises can be shown to be culturally conservative, even by the standards of his time, disrupts our cognitive political maps. (For evidence of such cognitive dissonance, check out the libertarian commenters at the Rortybomb post seeking to defend the legacy of their hero von Mises.)

Perhaps Konczal is a better breed of pundit because he reads this blog! Seriously, though, he is engaged with intellectual history in ways few pundits are. We had a Twitter exchange a few days ago—yes, people, I now tweet—where he asked me some questions about Age of Fracture, which he had recently read, in addition to our roundtable on it. I’ll conclude today’s post with our Twitter exchange—intellectual history in 140 characters or less:

From Mike Konczal @rortybomb:

@HartmanAndrew Age of Fracture: culture war "above all... was a battle over women’s acts and women’s and men’s natures...gender roles"

@HartmanAndrew Have you written on that (reading yr AoF posts now)? What's your take, as my go-to culture war historian - mostly feminism?

From Andrew Hartman @HartmanAndrew

@rortybomb Good questions. Gender has become most important of many issues driving culture wars. Race was just as important early on. But...

@rortybomb Problems arose for race as a driving force of culture wars. Whereas all blacks stood on same side of dividing line, many women

@rortybomb have stood with the right on cultural conservative issues. In fact conservatives like Schlafly, Bev LaHaye and Decter led charge

@rortybomb Plus gender shifts were more upsetting, more felt, by more people--and were more closely associated with deindustrialization

@rortybomb Read Bethany Moreton God and Wal Mart to get sense of how cultural right adjusted to feminized labor market of service industry

After Ideology

(Dear Readers: This guest post is written by my good friend Corey Washington and his co-author Johanna Carr. I first got to know Corey in 2001, when he was still a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Since then he quit the philosophy business and got a second Ph.D. in neuroscience from Columbia. He's now a consultant in New York City. Corey's background gives him a fairly unique perspective, I think. I have always enjoyed our debates because he attacks issues from such a different vantage point. He and Johanna are in the beginning stages of writing a book that is an argument against the very notion of ideology. I asked him to write up a synopsis for the USIH blog, since this seems like the perfect venue for critical feedback on an essay in the realm of ideas. Like most of us, Corey loves a good debate. Enjoy.)

I recently finished reading two books endorsing atheism – God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Each gives a variety of reasons for believing that God does not exist, but the central argument offered by both men is a variation on Occam’s razor:

(a) The hypothesis that God (an all powerful, all knowing, all good being who intervenes in the world) exists is extraordinary.
(b) Being extraordinary, it requires extraordinary supporting evidence before it should be believed.
(c) There is no compelling, let alone extraordinary, evidence for God’s existence.
(d) Hence, one should infer that God does not exist.

Many of my friends are atheist (or agnostic), and mostly for reasons similar to that above. They do not believe in God, because they see no good evidence that he exists. Clearly, they engage in evidence based reasoning about religion. At the same time, almost all of them describe themselves as falling into some political grouping: Marxist, socialist, social democrat, liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist – sometimes per economics, sometimes per social issues, sometimes regarding both.

When they talk about politics, they often express very strong beliefs in political ideas based on very little evidence. They might claim legalizing cocaine would benefit society at large or more stimulus spending would be bad for the economy. Some maintain life would be better if there were no markets, others if there were no taxes. While some of these claims are extraordinary and others not, in each case the evidence presented clearly falls short of what a rational person would demand in order to endorse a given claim as vehemently as its advocates do.

It is clear that for most people support for their policy views follows from an underlying ideology rather than from strong evidence. They argue for no taxes because they believe small government is better. They argue for legalizing cocaine because they believe in the right to privacy. In very few cases, do they present a well-formed opinion based on research and evidence. And as any rational person knows only evidence, not ideology, is a sound basis for such empirical claims.

My friends are not unusual. Political beliefs, like religious beliefs, are usually based on very weak, and selective, evidence. People tend to have the same political orientation as their parents, which may result from environment, i.e. growing up in their parents’ household, or a genetic predisposition to a particular political orientation, as recent studies have indicated. People also often develop views as a result of hanging around others with a certain political orientation. Once formed, political views are maintained and reinforced by reading material that supports one’s positions and by discounting material that conflicts. Likewise, people often embrace views advocated by the “experts”, they find idedologically appealing, while discrediting those with equivalent credentials, whom they do not. (When I discuss economics with my friends in Amherst, MA, they quote economist Paul Krugman about as often as Christians quote Jesus.)

In short, ideology seems to be the equivalent of religion, without the God stuff.

Given how randomly political beliefs are formed and injudiciously maintained, we have little reason to be confident they are true. To see this, suppose you set out to maximize the number of true beliefs, and minimize the number of false beliefs, you have about a controversial issue. How should you proceed? You should probably do what scientists do when investigating a new subject: read a range of papers from credible sources; be careful to get different perspectives on the issue. Talk to experts in the field with varying points of views; get their assessments of what you have read and heard from others. If possible, you might even try to conduct your own experiments.

Throughout the process you would try to be very even-handed, weighing conflicting evidence for strength and credibility. You would also be hyper-critical of hypotheses you are considering endorsing – always looking for evidence that what you believe is wrong, so as to avoid coming to an incorrect conclusion. In the end, you might end up endorsing one view (if the evidence was overwhelming), but most likely you would end up taking an intermediate position. Notice how strikingly different this approach is from how people generally form their opinions on political issues.

There is good scientific evidence that political reasoning is based on innate, non-rational principles. Nevertheless, the fact that people reason so badly about politics is striking given that people are intelligent and believe strongly that it is important for their political beliefs to be true. Religion may also be innate and non-rational, but if people are rational enough to give up God-oriented religion because there is not sufficient evidence, why do they not give up ideologies as well?

When I ask this question, the responses are quite similar to what you hear when you discuss atheism with a religious person. Atheists/agnostics cannot imagine how you could act ethically, or more broadly make sense of the world, without an ideology. That is, ideology seems to give many atheists/agnostics a value system just as religion does for believers. I believe ideologies also provide people with a community of like-minded friends, as do religious beliefs, and people are loath to alienate themselves from their friends. But if your goal is to have an accurate political view of the world, what use are such ideologies and communities if they are based on beliefs one has very little reason to think are true?


Corey Washington's Background:
M.S., MIT, Linguistics, 1987.
PhD, Stanford, Philosophy, 1994
Asst. Prof, U Washington, 1992-1996
Asst. Prof. U Maryland, 1996-2003
PhD Columbia, Neuroscience, 2010
Corey is presently a New York City consultant.

Johanna Carr received her degree in Philosophy, emphasis on History of Science, from Stanford 1991. After years in the tech world, failing to effect any change in corporate politics, she is currently pursuing a second PhD in Motherhood.

After Ideology

(Dear Readers: This guest post is written by my good friend Corey Washington and his co-author Johanna Carr. I first got to know Corey in 2001, when he was still a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Since then he quit the philosophy business and got a second Ph.D. in neuroscience from Columbia. He's now a consultant in New York City. Corey's background gives him a fairly unique perspective, I think. I have always enjoyed our debates because he attacks issues from such a different vantage point. He and Johanna are in the beginning stages of writing a book that is an argument against the very notion of ideology. I asked him to write up a synopsis for the USIH blog, since this seems like the perfect venue for critical feedback on an essay in the realm of ideas. Like most of us, Corey loves a good debate. Enjoy.)

I recently finished reading two books endorsing atheism – God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Each gives a variety of reasons for believing that God does not exist, but the central argument offered by both men is a variation on Occam’s razor:

(a) The hypothesis that God (an all powerful, all knowing, all good being who intervenes in the world) exists is extraordinary.
(b) Being extraordinary, it requires extraordinary supporting evidence before it should be believed.
(c) There is no compelling, let alone extraordinary, evidence for God’s existence.
(d) Hence, one should infer that God does not exist.

Many of my friends are atheist (or agnostic), and mostly for reasons similar to that above. They do not believe in God, because they see no good evidence that he exists. Clearly, they engage in evidence based reasoning about religion. At the same time, almost all of them describe themselves as falling into some political grouping: Marxist, socialist, social democrat, liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist – sometimes per economics, sometimes per social issues, sometimes regarding both.

When they talk about politics, they often express very strong beliefs in political ideas based on very little evidence. They might claim legalizing cocaine would benefit society at large or more stimulus spending would be bad for the economy. Some maintain life would be better if there were no markets, others if there were no taxes. While some of these claims are extraordinary and others not, in each case the evidence presented clearly falls short of what a rational person would demand in order to endorse a given claim as vehemently as its advocates do.

It is clear that for most people support for their policy views follows from an underlying ideology rather than from strong evidence. They argue for no taxes because they believe small government is better. They argue for legalizing cocaine because they believe in the right to privacy. In very few cases, do they present a well-formed opinion based on research and evidence. And as any rational person knows only evidence, not ideology, is a sound basis for such empirical claims.

My friends are not unusual. Political beliefs, like religious beliefs, are usually based on very weak, and selective, evidence. People tend to have the same political orientation as their parents, which may result from environment, i.e. growing up in their parents’ household, or a genetic predisposition to a particular political orientation, as recent studies have indicated. People also often develop views as a result of hanging around others with a certain political orientation. Once formed, political views are maintained and reinforced by reading material that supports one’s positions and by discounting material that conflicts. Likewise, people often embrace views advocated by the “experts”, they find idedologically appealing, while discrediting those with equivalent credentials, whom they do not. (When I discuss economics with my friends in Amherst, MA, they quote economist Paul Krugman about as often as Christians quote Jesus.)

In short, ideology seems to be the equivalent of religion, without the God stuff.

Given how randomly political beliefs are formed and injudiciously maintained, we have little reason to be confident they are true. To see this, suppose you set out to maximize the number of true beliefs, and minimize the number of false beliefs, you have about a controversial issue. How should you proceed? You should probably do what scientists do when investigating a new subject: read a range of papers from credible sources; be careful to get different perspectives on the issue. Talk to experts in the field with varying points of views; get their assessments of what you have read and heard from others. If possible, you might even try to conduct your own experiments.

Throughout the process you would try to be very even-handed, weighing conflicting evidence for strength and credibility. You would also be hyper-critical of hypotheses you are considering endorsing – always looking for evidence that what you believe is wrong, so as to avoid coming to an incorrect conclusion. In the end, you might end up endorsing one view (if the evidence was overwhelming), but most likely you would end up taking an intermediate position. Notice how strikingly different this approach is from how people generally form their opinions on political issues.

There is good scientific evidence that political reasoning is based on innate, non-rational principles. Nevertheless, the fact that people reason so badly about politics is striking given that people are intelligent and believe strongly that it is important for their political beliefs to be true. Religion may also be innate and non-rational, but if people are rational enough to give up God-oriented religion because there is not sufficient evidence, why do they not give up ideologies as well?

When I ask this question, the responses are quite similar to what you hear when you discuss atheism with a religious person. Atheists/agnostics cannot imagine how you could act ethically, or more broadly make sense of the world, without an ideology. That is, ideology seems to give many atheists/agnostics a value system just as religion does for believers. I believe ideologies also provide people with a community of like-minded friends, as do religious beliefs, and people are loath to alienate themselves from their friends. But if your goal is to have an accurate political view of the world, what use are such ideologies and communities if they are based on beliefs one has very little reason to think are true?


Corey Washington's Background:
M.S., MIT, Linguistics, 1987.
PhD, Stanford, Philosophy, 1994
Asst. Prof, U Washington, 1992-1996
Asst. Prof. U Maryland, 1996-2003
PhD Columbia, Neuroscience, 2010
Corey is presently a New York City consultant.

Johanna Carr received her degree in Philosophy, emphasis on History of Science, from Stanford 1991. After years in the tech world, failing to effect any change in corporate politics, she is currently pursuing a second PhD in Motherhood.

Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)

Happy New Year!

1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:

1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck

2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:

Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.

BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.

3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.

4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.

5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:

This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.

6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.

7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).

Tim's Light Reading (1/6/2011)

Happy New Year!

1. The Most Influential Thinker In Europe Is...---According to a poll conducted by the journal Social Europe, "the thinker with the most influence on the European left-of-centre political agenda" is an American, Paul Krugman. A fellow USIHer, Andrew Hartman, will be pleased with #3. Here's the top ten:

1. Paul Krugman
2. Juergen Habermas
3. Slavoj Zizek
4. Anthony Giddens
5. Daniel Cohn-Bendit
6. Umberto Eco
7. Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
9. Oskar Lafontaine
10. Ulrich Beck

2. A Scandalous Conversion in the Philosophy of Religion---A (former) philosopher of religion at the University of Houston, Keith Parsons, has given up his academic discipline. Parsons said he could no longer sincerely present arguments for theism in an academic setting. Too much support for Intelligent Design seems to have been Parsons tipping point. Here's a snippet from the article:

Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.

BTW: The online magazine Religion Dispatches has quickly become a go-to site for thoughtful analysis and news on its namesake topic. Add it to your reader; all the the cool kids are doing it.

3. Almost All of Us are Unhappy with Our Jobs---A survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management reports that 84 percent of workers are looking for a new job. ...I just thought I'd throw this out there light of the history job market news.

4. Good Censorship---On January 1, Lake Superior State University put forth its 36th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." I like several of the selections---fail, viral, man up, momma grizzlies, refudiate, wow factor---but disliked the hate for "back story." Here's the sour quote in the press release on that term:

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BTW: I don't think it's an accident that at least two phrases from Sarah Palin made it into the list.

5. Tips on Refereeing for Journals---Thom Brooks of Newcastle University wrote an article for the open access Social Science Research Network (SSRN) titled "Guidelines on How to Referee." Here's the abstract:

This essay offers clear practical advice on how to act as a referee when asked to review an article for an academic journal. The advice is also relevant for reviewing manuscript proposals for academic publishers. My advice is based on my experiences in editing an academic journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and four book series. I will draw on these experiences throughout as illustrations. The structure of the advice is as follows. First, I will begin by saying a few words about the academic publishing industry. Secondly, I will discuss whether one should accept or decline an invitation to review. Thirdly, I will examine the question of what appropriate standard should be applied when reviewing submissions. Finally, I conclude with advice on how to draft a report before submitting it to an editor.

6. The Intellectual Historian's Toolbox---Larry Cebula at Northwest History offers advice on what should be in a "Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History." I agree with all of his recommendations, as well as the suggestions given in the post's comments. In addition, I would add something specific to Cebula's #1 that Ben mentioned in a post here a few days ago: Google's "Books Ngram Viewer." Here's a link to what Google says about that tool.

7. Rethinking Human Rights---The ubiquitous Scott McLemee reviews a book for The National Conversation that takes human rights talk to task for its latent utopianism. The book's author, Samuel Moyn, a Columbia University historian of European intellectual life (and co-editor of Modern Intellectual History), seems to argue that strong doses of hard-headed empiricism (in the mode of Jeremy Bentham) and an on-the-ground, rough-and-tumble political sensibility would be beneficial to the future of human rights ideals. The book's title is The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL

A History Of The Idea Of Macroeconomics

Paul Krugman wrote a (very) long but worthy reflection on the history of the idea of macroeconomics. As you can see from my phrasing, I believe this piece rides the line between the history of ideas and the history of economics as an academic discipline. Your opinion of Krugman's analyses of the present will likely dictate your acceptance of his narrative of events. He writes on the period beginning in the 1920s and ending with the Great Recession of 2008-09. The central characters in Krugman's drama are Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes, as well as the intellectual descendants of each (today's freshwater and saltwater economists, respectively). Again, the piece is rather lengthy but the pay-off makes your effort worthwhile. - TL

A History Of The Idea Of Macroeconomics

Paul Krugman wrote a (very) long but worthy reflection on the history of the idea of macroeconomics. As you can see from my phrasing, I believe this piece rides the line between the history of ideas and the history of economics as an academic discipline. Your opinion of Krugman's analyses of the present will likely dictate your acceptance of his narrative of events. He writes on the period beginning in the 1920s and ending with the Great Recession of 2008-09. The central characters in Krugman's drama are Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes, as well as the intellectual descendants of each (today's freshwater and saltwater economists, respectively). Again, the piece is rather lengthy but the pay-off makes your effort worthwhile. - TL