Thank you for your valuable comment which, I confess, is far better written than my post.
What I wanted to say was something like this- 'the facts or positive assertions encountered in the Humanities concern objects of common experience. In the past, it was difficult to check the veracity of facts quoted by pedants. Thus when Nussbaum said 'tolmema'- a word the Greeks applied to homosexuality- had no repugnant association- the Judge and Jury in a particular Court case would have taken her word for it because of her scholarly status. Nowadays, any juror could ask Google or post a question on a Stack Exchange and quickly discover Nussbaum was lying. Tolmema had the meaning 'disgraceful', 'repugnant' etc. We could also verify that a Physicist or a Doctor was lying or being stupid if they gave similarly false testimony. However, we would not be able to prove perjury on their part because we would not be able to understand their defense of their statement. They guy could say 'this is my honest opinion because such and such problem in Maths remains open- as you can check for yourself- however the prevalent theory relies upon an assumption which I don't agree with. I think there is a superior model but sadly we have not yet been able to prove this is the case because such and such experiment can't yet be carried out.' By contrast, in Nussbaum's case, we could see her defense was bogus. She produced a photocopy of a page from a Greek dictionary. But she had tippexed over the word 'repugnant'. Since we all know what a dictionary is and how to use tippex, we could easily see that Nussbaum was lying for a gesture political reason. By contrast, all the ordinary man can say about a STEM subject pedant is that he is wrong according to current thinking. We can't be sure he is either stupid or a liar. Thus though 'verification' is quick in both cases- only in the case of the Humanities is there a deterministic proof process such that we can confidently say 'this person is lying'. The same point arises with respect to value judgments. The scholar may say X means more to me than Y, but we are entitled to reply- reasonable people trusting in the reasonableness of others so as to get on with the business of life, would not accept this valuation. It is idiosyncratic. It can't provide a defense in law (where people are expected to act 'reasonably') for a tort or a crime.
This is because the 'reason' of the Humanities is 'phronesis'- practical wisdom which ordinary people have by reason of their quotidian experience. By contrast, the reasoning of Sheldon, from Big Bang, is opaque to us in the same manner that the 'super strings' he studies are remote from the dimension we are familiar with. This is not to say that to perform Classical Music, or to learn a dead language is not arduous. But that portion of the Humanities which Nussbaum says are under attack no longer insist on any such arduous engagement. In Sen's Nalanda University, you could get a Post Grad credit in 'Yoga' without doing a single asana or reading Patanjali in Sanskrit. This sort of study is indeed under attack. Why? It is a waste of time.
You are perfectly correct to say most STEM Doctorates and even a lot of Masters programs are useless- and not just in India- but at least this is reflected in the data on post qualification Earnings. There is a pay premium for some Masters programs but, speaking generally, a pay penalty for a Doctorate. Thus these programs become adversely selective. The smart kid gets hired. The cretin does a Doctorate. As you say, one result could well be the disintermediation of the University as the more lucrative modules of STEM subjects resist 'cartelization'. Here, the 'information asymmetry' problem is overcome by some open market mechanism. Your formulation is lapidary- 'STEM knowledge is useful and flows so eagerly between minds in market systems, it seems bound to soon outpace the artificially slow research metabolism of the universities.'
Your industry is somewhat unusual. The fact is Computers were inaccessible to all buy a few when I was at College. Then, suddenly, they became ubiquitous and so cheap and so powerful that it was no longer essential that your I.T guy know machine code and the 'archaeology' of the System. Still, 'legacy' problems arose for large bureaucracies. But, fixing them seems less and less urgent. Let those bureaucracies collapse and make a fresh start using wholly different methods of data acquisition.
It is quite true that STEM subjects, unlike the Humanities, experience periodic 'extinction events'. Entire Research Programs go down the toilet. Availability cascades crash and burn. Why? No one pretends that STEM subject education is good for your soul or better fits you to be a good citizen in a Democracy, or obedient functionary in a Dictatorship.
I suppose, as you say, Universities could go back to 'performative disagreement over textual interpretation' as part of a Straussian 'Noble Lie'. The trouble is Noble Lies are only valuable to the Nobility. Nobody cares what the son of a waiter, who is himself a waiter in between doing his PhD on Gramscian Grammatology, thinks about Virgil or Valmiki. We may care what Bo Jo really thinks about Virgil or Rahul Gandhi really feels about Valmiki. But this is because of their position of privilege- all of it inherited in Rahul's case.
The print revolution disrupted the Medieval University system but ended up transforming them, more especially in Germany, into 'Research' institutions. That process took centuries. Perhaps we are already seeing a greater disruption, brought about by the silicon chip, but telescoped into decades. The problem with University 'Research' is that it can generate inutile availability cascades- Germany has plenty of bureaucrats and politicians with plagiarized PhDs. They are actually smarter than the ones who labored over equally worthless dissertations.
Could the internet cull inutile 'availability cascades'? Yes, in STEM subjects because there is an incentive compatible mechanism for 'likes'. But the Humanities, alas, are going in the opposite direction. In the process, some originally STEM types- like Dawkins, Denett etc- are joining this Gadarene rush over the clifftop of Reason. As with 'Print Capitalism', we see a proliferation of cults and chauvinistic silos of unreason in our Digital Age.
I need hardly say that Socioproctology is exempt from this process. Its origins lie in the philosophia perennis of the Anti-Masturbation Movement. All true Paideia begins and ends with getting kids to stop playing with themselves for the duration of your lecture. Fingering the credentialized assholes who shit over everything is just a bonus. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo!
7 comments:
It’s me, Anonymous.
Thanks for this generous and thoughtful response. I’m with you up till the antepenultimate paragraph but one.
I wasn’t imagining a return to the ‘noble lie’ rationale for the archaeofuturist university so much as a combination of inertia, boredom, automation and a sort of minimal existential commitment to tradition. Much as utterly materially minded engineers can be found in the hallowed porticos of Thiruvannamalai and Chidambaram chanting the Vedas not out of any sincere belief in a specific metaphysical claim but rather in a kind of Larping spirit.
I’m not sure how seriously you take the prospect of automation wiping out service and manufacturing in the industrialized world. A point that’s stuck with me for years ever since I read that much ballyhooed Economist cover story ranking professions by their invulnerability to automation—clergy nearly topped the list. I suppose what I imagine is the university faculty resuming the ancient role of the clergy, as they were for centuries at Oxbridge and indeed at Nalanda. Harder to say what might become of Humboldt University or UC Berkeley in this scenario.
Perhaps if I were a more preternaturally brilliant engineer I would think differently. But in perfect honesty I cannot really name anything I do that might not be rendered obsolete by an easily conceivable next gen AI using NLP to facilitate a much higher-level programming language usable by nonengineers. Any operation of human cognition that we can precisely define seems by definition automatable.
Would you please elaborate the second to last paragraph, I got turned around amid the torrential whorls of implication here.
Also, what benefits do you claim for NoFap? Are you a partisan of the Nietzschean version of brahminism
When I was young, people got married early- immediately had a baby or two- and basically checked out of the wider world. The arrival of Broadband coincided with the kids going off to college or moving out. It was a window into the world which had left us behind. Our kids, however, could not get married early- house prices had risen too much- and took pride in remaining connected to the wider world. They were curious about its tectonics. They didn't want to retreat to a suburb and get mummified. They felt at home in the digital world. We, on the other hand, were hopelessly analog and our future was to become analogues of our fathers who, as you say, would chant Vedas in imitation of their forefathers not because of any presentist ethical or soteriological consideration but pure ontological dysphoria- the feeling of having been born in the wrong Universe. If you are born in the wrong body, you can get gender reassignment surgery. Being born in the wrong Universe means wishing to die free of certain karma binding particles. Religion is thus a special type of pathogen avoidance strategy. It is easy to make fun of it because its purification rituals are not based on the correct Structural Causal Model. To be frank, if 'casteism' has declined, it is only because we believe in the Germ theory. We think chemicals and antibiotics work, 'madi' does not. Still, for older people like me, the old taboos re. pathogen avoidance are still present in our unconscious. We can't give ourselves wholeheartedly to 'Larping'- or indeed to radical, as opposed to ritualistic, thinking- because our roots are in another, incompossible, world. But it isn't Humanistic. On the contrary it is STEM like in that it features incessant 'pralaya' extinction events.
The point about STEM subjects is that their objects of inquiry are one's where intuition- i.e. direct 'instinctual' knowledge or certainty- is misleading and insufficiently fine grained. Thus, we can have a Freudian intuition, but we can't know a priori that Neurosis does not really exist. The AMA decided it wasn't a real thing because there was no point spending Insurance dollars on a supposed disease which got worse the greater the ability to pay for treatment. In the early Seventies, people cheered when Foucauld's psychiatrist- who pioneered chemical treatment for schizophrenia- was chased out of the Academy by Trotskyite 'anti-psychiatry' activists. But- thanks to drug abuse- Schizophrenia increased and only chemical treatments were effective. Our intuition regarding the Mind was faulty. Medicine had to move in an anti Humanistic direction to continue to 'pay its way'. The irony is Foucault was a big anti-Humanist. But he was following a paranoid intuition of a Humanist sort.
More generally, everything 'Sciencey'- like Game theory- turns out to be highly counter-intuitive. The fitness landscape is not hospitable to availability cascades precisely because it sets traps for intuition. Consider Freeman Dyson's recent contribution to Game Theory. It killed off a thirty year long cascade re. the 'inevitable' evolution of morality. The closer you 'carve up this world according to its joints' the more Humanity is disclosed as being an unimportant parasite upon some accidental tumor or fracture. This means, automation, as we conceive it, will never be the automation which will occur. Thus Engineering will thrive by becoming less and less recognizable as what we now think of as Engineering
That which we can precisely define is based on an intuition re. Tarskian primitive notions. But the fitness landscape for STEM mutates those intuitions in a manner which defeats 'deontic logic'- i.e. the algorithmization of decision processes. In any case, there will always be Djikstra style concurrency problems. So Engineering will usurp Management Science in a manner which makes nonsense of what is taught in MBA programs. Indeed, this has been the one stable aspect of what has been taught in Business Schools for four decades!
STEM subjects 'pay for themselves'- i.e. generate a surplus over and above the dead weight loss brought about by their 'cartelization' or 'credentilization'- because they are gross substitutes- at the margin Maths can improve Medicine but Bio-engineering may substitute for Chemical Engineering- however, human intuition can't predict how or why or where this will next happen.
'Print Capitalism' led to endless Protestant schisms and various different nationalist, linguistic, class and gender based, chauvinisms. The Digital Revolution has witnessed something Cliodynamics could have predicted- alt right incels and NoFap and so forth. But what was the arrow of causation? Was there one? Dunno.
My Anti Masturbation is a joke. I once gave a speech on what Veda says about cow-slaughter. I suddenly realized the students who had invited me were going to beat the shit out of me. So I said 'leading cause of cow slaughter is Masturbation' and proceeded to give the sort of speech I used to hear as a boy. The students didn't like it but what could they do? Declare they were wankers? Maybe in Delhi, but not Patna in the Nineties!
Nietzche, sadly, was misguided by German philology- which believed it could recapture the 'life-world' of ancient people- and misunderstood Manu. Brahmanism is about Vatsalya- it is a Freemasonry such as that which Kipling describes in the Janeites. Its about people looking after each other in a maternal fashion in the face of trauma. So is everything else which is Human. Thankfully, the fitness landscape provides ever renewed traumas. As Queen Kunti says- vipadah santu tah sasvata- let adversity ever confront us.
Sir, you are too kind. I will gladly send something to you in the new year. But I feel wholly unprepared to take guru darshana as yet and prefer anonymity for reasons I am sure you must understand
Guru dakshina means one thing. Guru 'darshana' is Gay. You pay 'munh dekhai' to the bride not the bridegroom.
In any case, I am sui generis as a writer and nobody reads me. But my capacity to enjoy Life increases as a result of my utter and complete inutility and 'exclusion'. I live larger thanks to this shit, I don't do this shit for a living. I can only hope you attain an equal felicity.
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