Roland Fryer on Campus anti-semitism

Roland Fryer writes in the WSJ- 

Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem
The economic theory that explains the powerlessness and confusion of university administrators.

University administrators get more power if confusion and factionalism prevails on the campus. If everybody has a grievance against everybody else, it makes sense to have a large class of administrators who get paid to appear to be interested in that nonsense.  

The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores.

Not really. There has been a big 'Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction' movement since 2005. It was bound to seize this opportunity to regroup and gain funding. Previously, it had been unsuccessful because Israel is a knowledge economy. We hurt ourselves by boycotting them. By contrast, Palestinians seem to have produced little of academic value though there are plenty of excellent Palestinian Doctors and Engineers and so forth. 

Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as “violence.”

This has caused a backlash. Vivek Ramaswamy was able to parley a book attacking 'Wokeism' into a Presidential bid. But Obama had already warned against it and the film 'Undercover Brother 2' had suggested the toxic thing was actually created by 'the Man' to 'divide and rule' the ghetto.  

One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone “misgender” someone else.

We are pleased to hear that eggheads are being bullied and humiliated by stupid administrators.  

Definitions of “harmful” speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism.

Though Jews are the most ardent attackers of Israel.  

In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers.

Unless Archie could claim Jewish heritage.  

Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.

Jews are smart. Bully them and they will go elsewhere to do smart things. This is good news for Israel.  A knowledge economy needs more and more smart people. Indians can be brought in to do the menial jobs. 

At a December congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT struggled to answer when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the schools’ “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment.”

To be fair, Presidents of Ivy League Schools tend to struggle with tying their own shoe-laces.  

Two of the presidents lost their jobs, but the central question remains unresolved: How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?

People who advocate hateful violence might kill you or firebomb your house. Pick on the weak. Obviously, sooner or later, they will turn on you and accuse you of subjecting them to epistemic rape. Better still, stop speaking English. Invent your own language.  

For someone who prides himself on adherence to fact, reason and rationality, trying to follow the logic of university decision-making over the past five years has been a mind-bending experience.

Why just the last five years? Political Correctness has been around for ages. Phillip Roth's 'the human stain' came out in 2000. A professor of African American heritage is accused of racism because he uses the word 'spook' to mean students who don't show up for class. Are they ghosts? It turns out the student in question was black. The joke here is that for older people 'spook' meant White- especially a white Jazz musician. I suppose one might say that Edward Said- who was Palestinian- contributed to the rise of 'grievance studies' and the notion that those in authority had absorbed a racist or colonialist epistemology and thus should be investigated by the thought police.  

But universities are also political entities, where competing interests vie for influence over the function and purpose of the institution.

Grievance Studies can create administrative jobs for those with credentials in it. Why be an ill-paid Teaching Assistant or struggle for tenure on a pittance when you can be a well-paid administrator?  

In the case of the protests, two competing interests have made themselves heard most loudly: students and faculty who are hostile to Israel

both may have more precarious finances than the administrators 

and alumni donors who see the protests as antisemitic.

Because that is what they are. I'm not against Jews but I don't want to compete with them in a knowledge based field. On the other hand, I bet I can fart louder and longer than the best of them. Martha Nussbaum, I'm looking at you.  

Caught between them are administrators, who must figure out how to balance these interests without entirely losing the faith of either group.

Nobody has any faith in administrators. They win by showing themselves to be useless because, obviously, the solution to the problem of useless administrators is hiring more administrators.  

This dynamic can be explained by economic theory.

It was explained by C. Northcote Parkinson.  

In the early 1970s, economist Michael Spence introduced the concept of signaling, which has since become one of the foundations of information economics and earned Mr. Spence the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Signals are of two types- 'cheap talk' gives rise to 'pooling equilibria', 'costly signals' give rise to 'separating equilibria'. In Universities, more especially STEM subjects, brainy and hard working people have a trait which it is very costly for ordinary people to duplicate. There is a wide gulf between Terence Tao and me. But, I can fart louder and longer than Tao and can be much more vocal in demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery, free at the point of delivery, for Nicaraguan goats. The other thing is that most academics initially show promise but then fizzle out. Moreover, their research program may turn out to be stupid and useless. It is helpful for them to be able to reinvent themselves as moral entrepreneurs or activists of some description.  

This seminal concept helps explain how individuals and organizations communicate their attributes or intentions in situations of information asymmetry.

This is irrelevant in the case of Universities. People can easily check and see what sort of expected earnings bump they receive by studying different subjects at different Colleges. Since Universities need revenue they are bound to run some shitty courses for thickos like me. There is an element of 'cross-subsidization'.  

The best-known application is the job market. Employers and potential employees face a situation in which applicants have more information about their productivity than the employer,

No. You know less about whether you can be a good lawyer or accountant than the guy whose job it is to recruit lawyers and accountants. A good HR department screens out the lazy and the stupid unless laziness and stupidity are what the job requires.  Signals don't matter- they are easy to fake. Screening is what is important. Try to find traits which correlate with good outcomes which the candidate won't be aware off. I went for an interview with Arthur Anderson. The interviewer was very friendly. I thought he liked me and started babbling. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that I had revealed I was lazy, hated office work, and was as stupid as shit. It is difficult to disguise your true nature if the other guy has vast experience of 'screening'. 

since the employer can’t directly observe those qualities before hiring.

The candidate tries to fool the employer but he can hire good screeners. Still, if you have amazing social and educational qualifications, the employer may feel obliged to give you a chance. After all, there are always places you can park a posh but lazy fellow.  

To overcome this asymmetry, job seekers engage in signaling—taking actions that can credibly convey information about their abilities. Such signals include everything from educational credentials to the way the applicant dresses for an interview.

But the employer can find traits which correlate with success which the candidate is unaware off. True, he may take special coaching classes to fake those traits. But that itself is a desirable quality. The guy who is faking it to make it might actually make it by becoming the very thing he is trying to fake.  

When I encountered Mr. Spence’s model in graduate school,

I encountered it in my third year at the LSE in 1981.  

I was mesmerized. My doctoral dissertation extended his work to understand underinvestment in education in some black communities.

One may also speak of overinvestment in guns and drugs. True, you may end up getting shot but there is also a chance that you will spend your twenties and early thirties in jail. This may correlate to higher longevity and even educational attainment.  

The basic economics also seem applicable to what’s going on now on college campuses.

No. What is happening has to do with poor screening. Universities don't have an incentive to weed out useless Research Programs and to get rid of kids incapable of any greater cognitive effort than is required to say 'dicks cause RAPE! Ban dicks immediately!'

I must admit, if I had been a student in Hitler's Germany I would have wanted 'Jewish science' to be banned. Why struggle to understand Einstein when you can get a degree in Aryanism instead?  

The key idea is that the protests present university administrations with a two-audience signaling quandary: Behaviors that appease students may anger alumni, and vice versa.

Most students would benefit by getting rid of 'activists'. But why stop there? Get rid of administrators as well. They don't add value. 

The real problem here is that if Universities screen out the stupid and the useless, then they would also be expected to 'screen in' talent. But that's what private enterprise does! Wealthy alumni may prefer Universities to produce some people who can be trained to be productive but who are not so skilled that they can set up as competitors. Education is about neoteny- it infantilizes. But the child understands it is helpless and thus is malleable. The advantage of having a lot of gesture politics on the campus, is that kids instinctively become sycophantic and unwilling to think for themselves. These are important work skills.  

Like a job applicant’s potential productivity, university administrators’ political preferences are hidden from students and alumni,

They may engage in preference falsification or seek to give a misleading impression in order to enjoy a quiet life.  

but they may signal them in various ways. They may choose a liberal commencement speaker rather than a conservative one, they may create programs that emphasize “inclusiveness,” and so on.

Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity means creating academic programs where you can get a PhD in QMT by finger painting using your own feces 

Students and alumni observe these strategic disclosures of preference, and each group decides whether to accept the decision or agitate against it.

No. Students and alumni become agitators if there is some reputational, assortative, or other careerist benefit. BDS was and is well financed. It has its own citation cartels and social and careerist networks. Currently, it appears that an old rift within the American Jewish community has re-opened. Some Jews want to reverse America's commitment to Israel. The problem here is that Israel may benefit by going it alone- trading arms with whom it pleases. Moreover, without Israel, America has no friends in the region. Israel can do a deal with the Eurasian power bloc headed by China though the latter currently seems to be benefitting from its long standing ties with Hamas. But how long will the Sunni Ikhwan be content to sacrifice Arab lives for the greater glory of Iran? What if some new variant of the Islamic State appears? Already there have been deadly attacks inside Iran itself. 

University administrators whose preferences align most closely with their alumni will ignore the students and simply do what they think is best, as the University of Florida’s president did when he banned encampments and declared that the school is “not a daycare.” Those whose views align with the protesting students will do the opposite.

They may try to do so. The problem is that most of their assets are illiquid and so, at the margin, it is alumni donations which keep the lights on. Columbia's President was previously head of the LSE. She took a very strong line against the Unions and appears to be following the same tough line in her new post. But the political climate in Biden's America is very different from that of Brexit Britain.  

But most top administrators don’t have such strong preferences. They will engage in a high-wire act of trying to appease both students and alumni.

Administrators are fond of inaction. Hopefully, problems will go away by themselves. 

If students decide “safety first” is the most important initiative on campus,

trouble-makers should be arrested. Sooner or later, non-students will invade the campuses and nobody will be safe. 

administrators—even if they disagree—will adopt stances consistent with that and hope the alumni don’t revolt too much.

Why would the alumni object to campuses being safe?  

If a few months later students set up encampments and chant anti-Israel slogans,

either administrators enforce the law or they cease to be relevant. The same people shouting 'boo to Netanyahu' may demand the President resigns or undergoes gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday.  

then administrators will also adopt stances consistent with that and, again, hope the alumni don’t complain too much.

Why should administrators not try to make their Institutions more productive and better fit for purpose?  

The congressional hearings revealed that this signaling strategy was at work.

No. They revealed that the Presidents didn't know the law and were confused as to what their duty of care actually involved.  

The three presidents would risk alienating students if they disavowed anti-Israel slogans and alumni

the protesting students were already alienated. They thought BDS should have been implemented twenty years previously.  

if they endorsed them. So they offered lawyered-up equivocations that signaled confusion and weakness.

'Lawyered-up' is the mot juste. They simply didn't know the law and the legal advise they had received was incoherent, not to say nonsensical.  

Economic theory can explain why the situation on so many campuses has spiraled out of control and why no interested party—neither students nor donors nor seemingly anybody else—has anything good to say about how administrators are handling the protests.

No. Economic theory says that those with more money and greater numbers should pay to enforce the law against a small group of nutters. Why has this not happened? One answer is Timur Kuran's 'preference falsification'. The other is straightforward 'incentive incompatibility'. The problem with having more and more useless administrators is that less and less that is useful can get done.  

But economics can’t address the more essential issue at play, which is moral

No. It is just incentive incompatibility. Maybe Columbia's President- because of her previous reputation for toughness- can benefit by taking a hard line. But we can't be sure that she won't be made the scapegoat and sent back to Britain with her tail between her legs.  

Elite universities decided years ago that they would adopt a basic principle: Any speech act that attacks, questions or even declines to affirm the self-understood identity of another constitutes harm worthy of punishment.

Why did the do so? I think at least part of the answer has to do with Edward Said who showed that you don't have to teach the boring shite you are paid to teach. You can just gas on about any bee in your own bonnet. Your students too welcome the opportunity to gain sheepskins in Grievance Studies without ever having to engage with anything cognitively complex. I'd love to get a PhD in Algebraic Topology by showing that dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!  

I may not like that principle, but it’s now a fait accompli. And if you’re going to punish one person who violates it, you have to punish everyone who violates it.

Nonsense! Pick only on the weak. Don't punish a guy whose pals in Hamas might firebomb your house.  

To permit attacks on one identity group

like the US war on terror which killed or displaced tens of millions of Muslims 

while prohibiting attacks on others is worse than hypocrisy—it is profoundly immoral.

Hypocrisy is immoral. I am losing respect for Fryer  as I read this article. Still, I suppose it is in his interest to signal the sort of extreme stupidity which gets rewarded with a Nobel.  

If administrators had the courage of their stated convictions,

they would not be administrators or else their Institutions would have become vastly more productive.  

if they had principles rather than merely gestures meant to signal their status as good liberals,

gesture politics replaced the real thing because, it turned out, politics tends to be about- as Obama said- doing stupid shit.  

the most egregious antisemitism on campus would have been stopped before it could snowball.

That is the intention behind the 'Antisemitism awareness Act' which may not pass in the Senate or else be considered merely 'advisory'. The problem with antisemitism is that the workaround has been to say 'I'm against Zionism'. Alternatively, as Tucker Carlson says, you could insist that the New Testament would fall foul of any law which equates anti-Zionism with an illegal type of hate speech. 

My own feeling is that we, in the West, feel that if we are no longer slaughtering Muslims all over the place, Israel should not be allowed to do so even if it acts in self-defense. On the other hand, the US has been trying to push Israel back to its pre-1967 borders since the days of Nixon and the Rodgers Plan. What is as yet unknown is if Israel can 'go it alone'. My own feeling is that Arab leaders, sooner or later, will push back against Hamas and the Brotherhood. Alternatively, we may see a resurgence of Sunni terrorism as a counterweight to that which is sponsored by Iran. Meanwhile, the question facing Universities is how to deliver better value for money. You can't string along Teaching Assistants forever. There must be some other way to defeat 'Baumol Cost Disease'. The obvious answer is to streamline administration and defund failed Research Programs. So long as the current protests distract attention from this, the administrators are safe. But voters may be losing patience. Why not curb the nuisance posed by crazy activists? Why wait till China has overtaken us to reform our Higher Education system? 

Earl Russell's strange speech

Conrad, the son of Bertrand Russell, came to suffer from mental illness in his later life. He made what was perhaps the strangest speech ever heard in the House of Lords.  

Earl RUSSELL

My Lords, I rise to raise the question of penal law and lawbreakers as such, and to question whether modern society is wise to speak in terms of law breakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army. and gives a hungry or thirsty people cups of tea. If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking. Such is the proper social order for modern Western Europe, and all prisons ought to be abolished throughout its territories. Of course, the Soviet Union and the United States could include themselves in these reforms, too. Kindness and helping people is better than punitiveness and punishing them, and a constructive endeavour is better than a destructive spirit. If anybody is in need, you help him; you do not punish him. Putting children into care, and other forms of spiritual disinheritance ought to be stopped. Borstal ought to be stopped. And the workings of the Mental Health Act which empowers seizure of people by the police when they are acting in a way likely to be harmful to themselves or others, ought to be looked into.

What are you?—soulless robots? Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys, who later as a result burn down the school house, ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are at present treated with an indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into gaols and raping them and putting them into brothels, or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills. The spirit ought to be left free and chaining it has injured the creative 276power of the nation. The young unemployed ought not in any way to have become separate from governmental power but ought to have been given enough to live on out of the national wealth to look after themselves and never ask themselves even to think of working while there is no work to be had.

Trade union thinking on this subject is wrong. Leisure is the point and working is wrong, being in any case the curse visited by God upon Adam, and not blessed. Upper classes are right, and should be restored to vogue and favour more than is the present custom to do. Automation in the factories, with universal leisure for all, and a standing wage sufficient to provide life without working ought to be supplied for all, so that everybody becomes a leisured aristocrat. Aristocrats are Marxist. The Lord Chancellor holds the Order of Lenin. The fulfilment of industrial life is Tonga and the South Sea Islands, and not the satanic mills at all. Shops ought to supply goods without payment, the funds to pay for the goods being supplied by the State, so that all motive for stealing vanishes. And, in a completely reorganised modern society, Women's Lib. would be realised by girls being given a house of their own at the age of 12, with three-quarters of the wealth of the State being given to the girls in houses of their own to support them; so that marriage would be abolished and a girl could have as many husbands as she liked; she would, of course, be free to choose only one, should she choose to do so. The men receive the remaining quarter of the national wealth to support them, and can, if they like, live in communal huts.

The full prospects of industrial civilisation ought to he realised: it is a boon, it should be called a boon, it should be used as a boon. The free spirit in school should be preserved, so that Sir Isaac Newton returns to us. Sweden and France have modernised themselves; all other nations in Europe, including Britain, should follow their example. A nation with industrial power should use it for benefit. There are other points in which a modernising nation modernising itself could improve its administration. For instance, lunatics could he looked after individually, and it could be found out what is missing from them, and the world which is missing from them could be 277restored. The madness of the Cold War could also be removed by the whole human race, since it is quite evident that neither Communist not American exists, but only persons. What makes it abundantly clear is the saying of "little Audrey", who laughed and laughed because she knew that only God could make a tree. Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Carter are really the same person: one lunatic certifiable, or, in American terms, one nation, indivisible, with prisonment and lunacy for all.

In a word, the entire human race can banish the Cold War, with one word, by simply saying: "You don't exist." This fact ought to be recognised in practice, with logical recognition by the statement concerned, so that the aims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament can be realised, and there can be disarmament throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Insight into the truth of this statement must be acknowledged, so that logic may take hold of the mind.

The CIA should be banished from Western Europe, and Euro-communism should be substituted for the present bosses of the Common Market as the prevailing social and economic system in Europe. The Portuguese Revolution should be defended and emulated throughout Western Europe. President Carter should be brought to a full halt in his "Fulton Speech" programme for Europe, in which he mentioned Paris, Rome and Lisbon by name. There should be revolutions throughout Latin America, in accordance with the wish of His Holiness the Pope; and the CIA should be driven out from every nation of Latin America. The original Indian nation should be restored to sovereignty. It goes without saying that all prisoners throughout all these areas would be released and are released from prison and are no longer whipped and tortured.

Since the so-called Protestants who govern Britain, or claim to govern her, are spiritless papal bum-boys, if they cannot take charge of themselves and find the spirit, the confidence, the power to decide to remove British arms and all Protestants from Ulster, they should forthwith find the said confidence and power to remove them. There is no point in what calls itself the British Protestant Authority remaining a spiritless limbo any longer. All soldiers and police throughout the Northern Hemisphere should disappear. They and their functions are no longer necessary and are out of date.

Such is the future which the human race requires and desires. It is very silly to ask every generation to moderate itself and palliate with old institutions and old fogeys when what is needed is modernisation. The plea that the Establishment should he preserved is the plea that the old ogres should be allowed to gobble up the younger generation. You may preserve the Establishment, but only if you introduce new institutions when they are needed. The modernisation of British Railways is a case in point. The total abolition of law and order is needed, and the police turn into the Salvation Army, as already observed, and always help people. There are no prisons or punishments.

These points are the chief requirements for the future of the human race. They should be realised briskly and with discipline. It can be noted in conclusion that, since the police and bourgeois bosses are and have been anti-aristocratical, this House is indisputably Marxist, and inherits the banner of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.

The habit of arresting young people and raping them in gaol is part of the plot which is designed to destroy the human race by making it subserve dead spirits instead of live ones; it is a craven fear of nature, arguing a mind and spirit cringingly afraid, unalive, and not itself. No wonder that, in these circumstances, the best and most creative products and political movements have not proceeded out of Europe, hut out of Africa where these practices do not prevail. Europe has been slighting herself; she has not been giving of her best to herself or to humanity. Forward the creative spirit! Leave people as nature made them, not indoor products of ersatz suffocation. And have the courage to do so. It is noteworthy that Tommy Atkins has lost every war he has fought in for the past 25 years by reason of these spiritual attritions; and that the United States and the CIA lost the war in Vietnam because they were spiritually subservient to death for these reasons.

The Ancient Greeks fought naked: they did not have solitary confinement 279cells; not in the sense that we do so today, although the captives from the Athenian expedition to Syracuse were subjected to extreme hard labour in slave conditions. Naked bathing on beaches or in rivers ought to be universal. What is right is right. If, for reasons of present law or custom, or inward spiritual slavery, people do not reach these standards, it does not mean that they ought not to reach them. And is it not better to defend the city before it is fallen? Better than to arrive too late, and defend only what would have been, if it had not already gone? But the fact is that all oppressions can always be overthrown, and that it is never too late to overthrow them. After the oppression has declared itself, its harms to mankind are known: it is then easy to reprove them, and, hapless in its revealed injury to mankind, it is powerless to defend itself against the accusation of its guilt, and has to yield. It is helpless: the accused prisoner at the bar; hammerblow upon hammerblow of accusation and reproof can be hammered into it, and, like a fallen boxer, it cannot get up to defend itself—

Interestingly, at about this time, Welfare Economics of the Sen-tentious sort now in vogue was making a similar claim to the mentally disturbed nobleman.

To paraphrase Vivian Walsh, a Society is not free unless every individual in it can 'walk away from humanly intolerable' transactions. Thus, nobody would be required to work for a living or to go to jail just because they raped and decapitated a baby. 

Walsh says that Sen's social choice theory requires the provision to everybody of the means of being completely free of any resource constraint- including, though he does not admit this, the constraints placed on convicts in jails. 

How could this be done? Following Bulwer Lytton, we can imagine a world in which everybody has possession of a bomb able to blow up the Earth. No one would dare refuse any such person any thing. Equally, none would have to pay taxes or go to prison unless they felt like it. Such a world would be short-lived. Sooner or later a guy who is about to die of natural causes may decide that if he can't live, no one else should be allowed to. 

It seems that the old fashioned 'utilitarians' coeval with the great Earl, whose successor was one of the first peers to join the Labor Party, were aware that if Liberty was contingent upon making everyone equally powerful and wealthy, then there would be no Society. Sadly, there are certain differences which exist between men and women. It is unfair that only women can give birth. It is unfair that some people are smart, thrifty, and able to get ahead in life. Biology, like Economics, is unfair. Rationality for humans must mean reasoning in a manner which accepts the fact that Nature is indifferent to what we value. 

Sen's notion of Rationality is as crazy as the views of the third Earl Russell- 

The crazy Earl's speech was rational from Sen's point of view. It was irrational from the point of view of the House of Lord's public function which is that of subjecting Government policy to scrutiny and criticism not of some theological or utopian kind but under the rubric of the intelligent pursuit of the Nation's interests. No doubt, it would be nice if the Government could abolish death and disease and insanity. It would be wonderful if everybody could have the super-powers depicted in Comic books. But Human rationality must concern itself with constrained 'regret minimization' or, if all possible future states of the world are known as is their probability, expected utility maximization.

Suppose you meet an old friend who is boasting about the many lives saved by his son, the leading surgeon. You may say 'not till everybody's life has been saved can we praise a Doctor for saving one or two lives here and there.' I suppose, if you happen to be a Bishop you will be understood as warning against hubris and the sin of vanity. Only God truly saves anyone. Doctors should not get too big headed otherwise they will burn in Hell. This is a type of rationality- it is theological- but it is not economic rationality. The plain fact is, we should praise and reward skilled surgeons. What they do is useful. Pretending that nobody can be helped till everybody is helped is foolish. 

Sen's silly positional views of Justice

Suppose a bunch of us start talking about niceness. We agree that it is nice to be nice. I mention that cats are nice. You say dogs are nice. Should we then speak of niceness as the dog which is a nice cat? Perhaps. By doing so we are signaling that the discussion is puerile or has attracted very emotionally damaged and mentally retarded people. By babbling nonsense we are proving we are very nice. 

Something similar happened to Social Choice theory because, unlike Welfare Econ (which is just a branch of Public Finance) it was stupid and useless. Thus it morphed into saying 'Welfare is nice but Democracy is nice so Welfare is Democracy as Freedom as the cat which is a nice dog within a context of diversity, inclusivity and everybody having gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday such that public discourse becomes foundational to a nicer type of Justice. 

This ignores the fact that there are different types of Justice each of which has a different way of deciding what is the objective truth. Thus, for Criminal Justice, DNA evidence may prove that the man who raped and killed the child was Smith. However, Racial Justice or Social Justice might require us to acquit Smith because objectively speaking he is of the right race or class. One might say, 'subjectively Smith is a rapist but, objectively, because of his class or racial origin, he is incapable of rape or murder. The truth is, the three year old child he raped and killed was a bourgeois saboteur.'

In “POSITIONAL VIEWS” AS THE CORNERSTONE OF SEN’S IDEA OF JUSTICE  Antoinette Baujard & Muriel Gilardone write-

 define a positional view as an individual judgment towards any social state, considering objectively the context from which she or he is able to assess this social state.

Since the only 'context' from which a 'social state' is assessed is that of the subject's mind, it follows that a positional view is merely a subjective view.  The rapist and murderer may feel that Criminal Justice is the wrong type of justice to apply to a person in his position. Social Justice, which emphasizes his poverty and lack of life-chances, requires that he be exonerated and put in charge of an orphanage where he can rape and murder plenty more children. 

Our line of argument is therefore: consider positional view as the cornerstone of Sen’s idea of justice

i.e. Sen's idea of justice is subjective. 

as if it were a material , and show how Sen’s idea is built from there:

his idea is based on his bigotry 

this reading is likely to highlight how and why this is not a material in the sense that formal welfarism would require.

Objective welfarism would seek to identify an objective function to be maximized or (in the case of global opportunity cost) minimized. This could be done in a rough and ready fashion and may be quite useful in solving collective action problems. 

Obviously, we could ignore the opinions or interests of those we don't like by saying 'they are in no position to know what's good for them or the rest of Society.' 

 This choice is corroborated by the consideration of Sen’s earlier philosophical work. The positional interpretation of viewer relativity goes back to the beginning of the eighties. Sen (1982, 1983, and more extensively 1993) claims that the identification of the viewer’s position does matter for the evaluation of social states rather than her mere utilities or preferences.

His position in Society is already reflected in 'utilities' or 'preferences'.  Nothing further is needed save if we want to punish him because we don't like him or reward him because he shares some particular trait with us. 

In the welfarist framework, social states are assessed on the basis of given individual preferences only, with the assumptions that they are reliable and fixed.

No. The assumption is that behavior reveals preferences. 

Sen questions these strong assumptions, because individual preferences, and more broadly individual views, depend on the viewer’s position for several reasons.

No. Some views or preferences may be contingent in the manner suggested. Others aren't.  

First, the difference of view between two persons may be explained by their difference of position in the social state considered.

It may be explained by saying one has shit for brains while the other is a freakin' genius. But this is irrelevant.  

Sen illustrates this fact by the following image: if one person looks at the moon from Earth and the other from space, they may assess the size of the moon differently or similarly, relative to the size of the sun, and their observation shall consequently be considered as position-dependent (Sen 1993: 128).

But we don't actually do any such thing. Currently, there are some people in space and a lot more here on Earth. But anyone 'assessing' the size of the moon either in space or down here is getting pretty much the same answer. BTW a kid or a cretin gawking at the moon aint assessing shit.  

Second, the viewer’s position may evolve which might change her view on the social state. For instance, if the second person travels from space to Earth, her evaluation of the relative size of the moon and the sun will automatically change.

Fuck off! Neil Armstrong didn't say 'guys! I just discovered that the size of the moon changes depending upon where I'm positioned in the solar system.' He'd have been laughed at if he did so.  

Third, Sen underlines the fact that “[t]he person is not free to choose the position from which he should evaluate the states” (1983: 123, underlined by us).

Yes he is, unless some guy is torturing him and forcing him to evaluate states from a very undignified and painful position.  

Hence, her view is dependent upon such position, and there is nothing we can do about this.

there is nothing useful these two ladies can do.  

Consequently, for a given individual view regarding a specific social state, the position from which it is expressed cannot be neutral, insofar as the view depends upon that particular position.

Sez who? I may say, 'You can't tell me Sen doesn't eat dog turds because you have never spent even a single hour being me.' I may go further. I may accuse you of being biased because you personally profit by selling dog turds to Sen. This does not alter the fact that the 'neutral' view is that Sen doesn't eat dog turds. Somebody would have noticed if he did.  

Sen insists that his positional interpretation of a person’s views is not fundamentally due to a lack of “ability to imagine what it would be like to evaluate the state from a different position” (1982: 37).

because it is fundamentally due to his being as stupid as shit.  

Indeed, the concept of positional views is precisely thought to facilitate such ability,

but only in so far as that ability is the ability to thrive on a diet of dog turds 

against the standard idea in the economic literature that since “individuals are really individuals, each an autonomous end in himself […] they must be somewhat mysterious and inaccessible to each other” (Arrow 1973: 263)17.

Because in an Arrow-Debreu world there would be no language.  

But the fundamental idea is to understand what makes a social state more or less desirable from a person’s point of view because “one of the positions in that state is peculiarly [her] own” (1982: 37).

Fuck off! We can easily imagine a highly desirable social state in which we ourselves would not exist. You might say 'but you'd like it better if you could exist in that world' But the answer is 'maybe, maybe not. It depends.' 

Hence the viewer should be personally involved in the characterization of his own position.

Why do we refer to a guy whose head has been chopped off as the victim of a crime? How do we know the fellow isn't delighted with the outcome? Not till dead people can personally testify that their welfare has decreased because they were killed should murder be considered a crime.  

In other words, he should participate to the identification of the positional parameters

e.g. being in a coffin six feet underground 

that influence his view in a way that remove the idea of a pure subjective and person-dependent view. Positional parameters are, for Sen, a question of “any general, particularly non-mental, condition that may both influence observation, and that can systematically apply to different observers and observations” (Sen 2009: 158).

see above 

In order to characterize a position, it is thus required to highlight the conditions “that (1) may influence observation, and (2) can apply to different persons” (Sen 1993: 127). For instance, “being myopic or color-blind or having normal eyesight; knowing or not knowing a specific language; having or not having knowledge of particular concepts; being able or not able to count” may be such conditions or positional parameters.

but so could being or not being dead or being or not being me. If you were me you would understand that not only does Sen eat only dog-turds but also the Universe should be shifted a few feet to the left to improve its feng shui.  

Sen's idea of justice is that Rawls's theory was naughty and should be sent to bed without its supper. This was because Sen was in the position of having no idea of justice but a great love for talking meaningless shite. 

Our paper offers a novel reading of Sen’s idea of justice, beyond the standard prisms imposed by theories of justice – resting on external normative criteria

like guilt or innocence 

– and formal welfarism –

which is interested in raising welfare rather than talking endless bollocks 

involving the definition of individual welfare and its aggregation.

putting money values to things can be helpful. Courts have to do so to award damages. 

Instead we take seriously Sen’s emphasis on personal agency

which is irrelevant for both Justice and Welfare.  

and focus on his original contribution to the issue of objectivity.

He says subjectivity is actually objectivity 

Firstly, we demonstrate that Sen’s idea of justice, with at its core “positional views”, is more respectful of persons’ agency than would be a theory based on individual preference or capability.

But we don't require such respect of our agency when it comes to Justice or our Welfare. You may say, the police should give you a chance to beat up your rapist rather than take it upon themselves to kick his fucking head in. Equally, you may think it rude of a surgeon not to offer you a turn with the scalpel when operating on you. But, in both these cases, you would be considered a fucking lunatic.  

Secondly, we argue that Sen’s conception of objectivity considers that both information and sentiments are relative to a position.

Because Sen confuses subjectivity, which may be position dependent, with objectivity.  

Such an alternative approach to subjectivity allows the formation of more impartial views through collective deliberation and a better consideration of justice by agents themselves.

No. It merely allows the talking of endless bollocks and the pretense that we must consult impartial spectators from Patagonia or Pluto. 

 We now want to show that another mistake would be to miss Sen’s departure from the standard preferentialist framework and continue to understand people’s voices as individual preferences.

A voice is something people prefer to lend to some things not others.  

The focus on preferences raises many problems for welfare studies,

No. There are only pseudo problems arising out of stupidity.  

and even more for democratic issues, as included in the general criticism of welfarism introduced by Sen.

A criticism which fails because it is stupid.  

The legitimacy of Sen’s positional approach is based on

stupidity 

the defense of persons’ agency and relative values (Sen 1982)

both are fully reflected in preferences 

against a certain tendency of consequentialism,

which does not exist 

often associated to welfarism in normative economics.

by shitheads. 

This may appear paradoxical since welfarism is generally defended on the grounds that favoring individual utility exclusively and above all else amounts to respecting individuals’ sovereignty.

Nonsense! Welfare is independent of 'sovereignty'. We can be concerned with the welfare of a lunatic in a padded cell. On the other hand if you say welfare means sovereignty which means training senior citizens in sodomy then you can write a paper about how welfarism falls short of a conception of sovereignty based on elderly dudes ass fucking.  

In Arrow’s welfarist framework (1963), such an approach is translated by the condition that each individual is free to have a definite ordering of all conceivable states, in terms of their desirability to him according to a wide range of values.

No. In Arrow's framework, nobody is free not to have any such thing nor to tell the fucking Social Choice rule to go fuck itself.  

Nevertheless, Arrow concludes that “the doctrine of the voters’ sovereignty

 a voter is not a sovereign 

is incompatible with that of collective rationality” (1963:60),

not to mention the fact that a voter is not a fucking sovereign 

i.e. with a social decision that would respect each individual ordering.

unless they decide to respect them by not respecting them at all. 

In this sense, he shows one possible way to be respectful of individuals’ sovereignty

by tenderly supporting them in imparting skills in sodomy to senior citizens.  

is to return to standard individualistic assumptions, according to which individuals’ orderings do not reflect individuals’ values regarding social states but his utilities in each social state – i.e. “his own consumption-leisure-saving situations” (Arrow 1963: 61).

which are epistemic. Thus an intensional fallacy arises- i.e. nothing is well ordered. Social Choice is an impossible project save for  

Sen applies the opposite reasoning, arguing that within welfarist consequentialism, the person is likely to lose her sovereignty,

the person has none under welfarism. That is why lunatics can be incarcerated for their own good.  

insofar as an external evaluator restricts any individual view to “a special case of consequence-based evaluation in which the outcome morality is evaluator-neutral”

in other words, we don't evaluate the outcome with reference to the degree to which it promotes or retards training in sodomy for senior citizens which is the only true measure of popular sovereignty within a framework of diversity, inclusivity and elderly peeps fucking each other in the ass.  

As a result, there is no room for deontology that Sen defines as wanting “not to maltreat others, in dealing with them (e.g. by violating their rights,

failing to facilitate their life-chances with respect to imparting training in sodomy for senior citizens while remaining mindful of the Palestinians occupying Gazza's football strip 

breaking his promises, etc.)” (1982: 23). Nor there is room for autonomy, including “the desires, projects, commitments

sodomy workshops for senior citizens 

and personal ties of the individual agent” (Sen 1982: 23), except if it directly affects his personal well-being.

Sen came from a shitty part of the world which was pursuing shitty economic policies. He thought Social Choice theory should tell stupid lies about how maybe Cuba was actually much richer than America and Bangladesh, in 1974, was fucking paradise.  

In contrast, Sen states that “[a]gency encompasses all the goals a person has reasons to adopt,

No. Agency is about a sense of one's own power to act and the feeling of being in control. It has nothing to do with a theological goal like gaining God's grace and thus getting to the Good Place. Equally one may want all welfare economists to devote themselves to tenderly imparting training in sodomy to senior citizens without oneself having to do anything to bring this about.  

which can inter alia include goals other than the advancement of his or her own well-being” (Sen 2009: 287).

No. Any action can be seen as aiming to advance the agent's well being. 

Sen (2009: 281, italics are ours) considers that: […] the informational inputs in a social choice exercise in the form of individual rankings can also be interpreted in ways other than as utility rankings or happiness orderings. […] 

No. Because of the intensional fallacy they can't be seen as any type of ranking or ordering at all.  

the nature of the debate on the consistency of social choice systems can be – and has been – moved to a broader arena through reinterpreting the variables incorporated in the mathematical model underlying social choice systems […]

Sadly, there is no fucking math underlying it. Preferences are epistemic. They change as the knowledge base changes. This means the 'intension' that is Preference has no well defined extension. This is the intensional fallacy.  

and indeed voice is a very different – and in many ways a more versatile – idea than the concept of happiness.

People want to be happy. They don't want to hear voices.  

Sen challenges the standard and narrow approach to “individual voices” in social choice theory, drawing important lessons from famous results (Arrow 1963, Sen 1970). He particularly questions Arrow’s assumption that social choice theory relies on orderings of individuals considered separately, without any interpersonal comparisons or social interactions.

There are no orderings. To assume otherwise is to commit the intensional fallacy.  

For instance, as soon as equity is a concern,

or the fact that some peeps belong to the right Race or Religion while others are scum 

the problem is not anymore the consistency of the voting rule, but the fact that “we are in the wrong territory by concentrating only [on] individual preference orderings” (Sen 2014: 39) 13.

More particularly because there are no fucking preference orderings.  

If we add the concern for minority rights

or killing kaffirs 

and liberty,

or instructing senior citizens in sodomy so as to achieve popular sovereignty for penguins 

Sen interprets the result of “the impossibility of the Paretian liberal” (Sen 1970) as highlighting the crucial dependence of democratic social choices on the formation of tolerant values (Sen 2009: 337).

Sen came from East Bengal. Democratic social choice there involved killing or chasing away kaffirs.  No democracy has come into existence without some degree of religious or other type of intolerance. A 'Paretian Liberal' is a Liberal- i.e. one who thinks very few decisions should be made collectively. Pareto optimality just means that there are no more bilateral trades to be made. It does not mean stupid shit Arrow pulled out of his arse. 

This necessarily involves social interactions with a more comprehensive approach of person’s voices and situations.

No. It involves talking stupid shite. It's not as though these nutters spend their time talking to Trump supporters.  

Sen’s criticism of the standard welfarist interpretation of the informational inputs of social choice exercises may also be related to his view on behavioral approaches.

Sen's own behavior was bad. He didn't help the poor. He ran off with his best friend's wife. Naturally, he didn't want to b judged on his behaviour.  

Sen (1973) argues that behavior is an extremely limited source of information,

it is the only source of information on actual behavior- i.e. what people actually do as opposed to stuff they talk about doing.  

so that the revealed preference theory is not easy to justify in terms of the methodological requirements of our discipline.

It was useful enough. People do need to estimate demand curves and work out elasticities and so forth.  

To him, the thrust in this theory has undermined “thinking as a method of self-knowledge and talking as a method of knowing about others” (1973: 258).

How? Economists get paid to estimate elasticities and so forth. They, like everybody else, is welcome to think and talk and wank.  

In contrast, the concept of “positional view” opens a path to both introspective and public reasoning.

by telling stupid lies or just wasting everybody's time with woke, virtue-signaling, bollocks.  

Like Peter (2012) has underlined, appeals to external authority has become problematic in economics and, more generally in political theory.

In which case people should stop pretending Arrow's theorem or 'Paretian Liberal' means shit. 

One important issue with formal welfarism is indeed linked to the empowerment of an external authority.

Professors like Sen or Rawls or Arrow are external authorities

An external person, should she be a philosopher, an expert or a policy maker (let us call them expert for the sake of simplicity), decides upon the proper material and the proper aggregation properties; equivalently, experts may decide upon the axioms, i.e. the desired properties, characterizing the representative aggregation, and the theory of justice associated with the chosen material. These decisions mechanically translate into policy proposals, without being debated by the persons concerned by the implementation of the policy.

Why not? They could be debated. The external authority is welcome to look at those debates. In practice, the Bench may look at parliamentary debates to determine the intention of a piece of legislation. The Judge is an external authority. 

That the experts intend to favor these individuals’ welfare by doing so is not questionable. What Sen forcefully denounces is that this top-down process may conflict with the persons’ agency .

In which case that person may have an action in law against such usurpation. Thus if you officiously come and wipe my bum for me, I can charge you with indecent assault. Your argument that you were concerned with my welfare fails because I am perfectly able to wipe my own bum.  

Thus, a necessary condition to reestablish persons’ agency is primarily to preclude welfarism, and to let agents choose the kind of evaluation they want to bring into the collective process of decision.

No. Re-establishing agency requires removing impediments on their freedom of action- e.g. being in jail. Precluding 'welfarism' doesn't do shit.  

Sen however offers a way around this moral problem

which does not exist 

without giving up normative reasoning, which explains he stays close to social choice theory. In our view, what Sen keeps exploring from Arrow’s (1963) seminal program are two general ideas: 1) that the diverse individual values or views are the essential basis for a democratic theory

though this simply isn't true. Chichilniksky showed that Preference and Endowment diversity must meet a Goldilocks condition for Markets or Democracy to work. But this is fucking obvious. 

Empires- like the British Raj- can be very diverse. The transition to Democracy, however, is likely to involve ethnic cleansing. That's what happened in India during Sen's boyhood. 

and 2) that the comparison of social states is the means to express such views.

the comparison of imaginary states- maybe. Social states are difficult to fully specify or acquire information about. 

But, in Sen’s idea of justice, these two general ideas are translated in a way that is far less mechanist and easy to grasp than in social choice theory.

Sen gives an argument for labelling as 'Just' any fucking arbitrary action by policy makers while labelling as 'unjust' any proper, diligent, juristic procedure.   

 According to our reading, Sen distinguishes three kinds of inappropriate positional views on justice.

Sen doesn't get that there are different kinds of Justice- e.g. Criminal Justice, Distributive Justice, Nazi Justice, scolding Judges for not tenderly imparting skill in sodomy to senior citizens while pretending to be a penguin, farting vigorously and running away, etc.  

A first kind is what Sen calls “objective illusions” (Sen 1993: 132) or “positional illusions” (Sen 2009: 166) that Sen attributes to the narrow informational bases available in the considered position.

These don't exist because no subject in any fucking position can't also have a big enough information base. 

Another kind is “adaptive preferences” that Sen has sometimes used in the context of gender inequality and poverty evaluations, to highlight the social conditioning of individual views (see Gilardone 2009).

Again, these don't exist. If everybody can have Muth rational expectations fuck would they bother with adaptive preferences for?  

This second kind is due to the narrowness of perspectives and expectations, given social circumstances, from the considered position.

Sen was repeating in his own addled fashion the old chestnut about how darkies are actually happier plucking cotton and eating water-melon on Massa's plantation.  

The resultant adjustment of claims and desires represents an obstacle for dealing with persistent inequalities or poverty.

No. The obstacle is not having enough money.  

A third kind of inappropriate view is parochialism. Parochialism amounts to under-scrutinized local values, fixed beliefs and specific practices. Parochial views are strictly dependent upon the traditions and culture of the small community one belongs to.

These worthless cunts belong to a very small, very ignorant, very parochial community. Let them continue to eat each other's shit.  

As a result, if public reasoning is confined to the perspectives and understandings of the local community only, it might not help to overcome shared prejudices or cultural biases.

That is the only way it would do so. If 'public reasoning' relies on foreign or otherwise exogenous arguments, all that has happened is that there is a prejudice against what is indigenous or endogenous. You get Sen-tentious self-hating Hindus.  

All these views are inappropriate to ground a collective view on justice, but also to represent well one’s values and interests.

A typically bombastic ipse dixit pronouncement which is meaningless when it is not mischievous.  

A crucial stake of public reasoning is thus the possibility for individuals to reflect or reason on their own positional views.

It is always possible for sentient beings to reflect or reason on their views. But this has nothing to do with 'position'. Cats perceive mirror images of themselves differently from apes like us. But, cats growing up around mirrors soon learn to ignore the fictitious 'invasive' cats they keep glimpsing. In other words, if it is useful to overcome 'positional' illusions', that is what tends to happen if this adds survival value.  

We already justified the focus on “positional views” with the importance of reflexivity on one’s own position and some understanding that it could be different.

But this happens without 'public discussion'- e.g. among cats.  

Communicating one’s view is the means to check whether the proposed claims and the arguments supporting them are publicly defensible and resistant to a trans-positional examination.

No. There is no necessary relationship of this sort. There can be complementary perceptual or 'marking services' - e.g. a hunter can see somethings better than his dog but the dogs sense of smell means that the dog can sense some other things better than the hunter. This is a case of symbiosis. Speaking generally, there are mimetic effects such that an 'objective' view is adopted thanks to signals from other sentient beings absent any type of discussion or verbal activity. 

In other words, the submission of positional views to public reasoning allows both reflexivity and mutual understanding, providing the informational basis available in each position is revealed.

No. Even in the case of highly mathematical information, 'reflexivity and mutual understanding' may be wholly absent even though there is observational or behavioral equivalence. This is like the 'matam'/vigyaan or doctrine/science distinction in Hindusm.  

The confrontation with others’ positional views is a means both to move toward more transpositional views and to improve their agency.

Or it is a dialogue of the deaf. Still if one bunch of guys have better outcomes, there may be a Tardean mimetic effect such that behavior is the same though doctrines or dogmas remain very different and there is no mutual communication or dialogue.  

This last point is rather implicit in Sen’s idea of justice.

He has no idea of justice. He just gasses on about how we should never adopt any operationalizable principle but just go on deafly discussing stuff while waiting to hear from impartial spectators in Patagonia or on Pluto.  

But since such confrontation may help to remove positional illusion, it can be said that the search for greater transpositionality and the pursuit of greater individual agency are intimately connected.

Only in the sense that the search for greater farts and the pursuit of greater individual agency to achieve rocket propulsion by lighting those farts are intimately connected.  

In this sense, a sphere of deliberation is needed for competing lines of reasoning, diverse experiences, information and knowledge to be exposed and discussed.

It is a useless sphere featuring useless shitheads like Sen.  

According to our reading, Sen’s idea of public reasoning aims at broadening information available from every position, and not from the position of a so-called social evaluator.

In which case, why pay the 'social evaluator'? Also why not invite the cat to express its views?  

The access of information to each individual as well as interpersonal comprehension are therefore central issues to be addressed by a theory of justice.

No. They are addressed by common sense regarding how actual people change their behavior to improve outcomes for themselves. This has to do with mimetics reinforced by improved outcomes not endless discussion.  

Both shall reveal crucial for the identification of inappropriate views, and as a result for favoring their evolution. While the three kinds of inappropriate views that we had identified – objective illusions, adaptive preferences and parochialism – rely on distinct positional bias, it can be argued that they are sometimes closely related. For instance, “the apparent cogency of parochial values often turns on the lack of knowledge of what has proved feasible in the experiences of other people”

No. Cogency is a function of 'harmonious construction'. Some can do it. Some can't. But what makes parochial values prevail or fail is the success or failure of 'bourgeois strategies' arising out of the uncorrelated asymmetries underlying 'oikeiosis'. One may reject parochial values and mimic the values of the metropolitan culture so as to enjoy better outcomes. This happens whether or not there is 'public discussion'.  

 In other words, parochialism may support positional illusions or adaptive preferences.

Sen occupies a particular- useless but well remunerated- position. His preferences are 'adaptive' in the sense that he changes what he says minimally so as to continue to be well rewarded. But he is a useless shithead.  

Public discussion would therefore benefit from including the views of people from other communities in order to identify the positional bias as extensively as possible.

No. Public discussion benefits from being brief and from screening out nutters or fools or virtue signaling cunts from distant countries.  

Sen (2009: 123-152) introduces the concept of “open impartiality” to insist on the fact that the discussion should not be confined to persons who are entitled to make collective choices or engaged in social evaluation because they belong to the polity for two main reasons.

America could quickly destroy itself by letting China make its decisions for it. The main reason Sen advocates this sort of stupidity is because he has shit for brains. He doesn't just hate his native Hinduism. He also hates the America where he has done well for himself. 

The perspective for those “inside” may firstly be enlightened by distant views on local understandings. Secondly, outsiders might “bear some of the consequences of decisions taken in that particular polity” (Sen 2009: 134) and this information may change insiders’ views on their own decisions.

If that information was relevant, the 'insiders' would have paid to gain it anyway or else would have suffered a loss of some kind such that their menu of choice got restricted.  

In other words, open public reasoning opens up two important ways for changing positional views in transpositional ones providing mutual comprehension is made possible: 1) enlightenment, and 2) a greater sense of neighborhood.

Or being invaded and enslaved. Your new neighbors may have good reasons to value raping you regularly in between robbing you.  

To reach the condition of mutual comprehension and reduce the felt distance between individuals who may have the most difficulties to understand each other, one key may be to inform as much as possible on the differential of positional parameters between persons.

The raped should learn to empathize with their rapists. Also, they should chop off their own arms and shove those arms up their assholes. Then we could all have a nice public discussion about the various ideas of poetic Justice applicable to Sen-tentious cretins.  

Sen on Tagore's Childhood

Tagore hadn't been happy at any of the schools  he was sent to and, once his mother died, he was educated at home from about the age of 13. It appears he was weak in English. His third brother- who was attracted to scientific research- arranged various classes for him. At the age of 17 he was sent to England where he attended some lectures on English literature given by Henry Morley at UCL. I suppose the plan was for him to qualify as a barrister. However, his father decided he would be more usefully employed looking after the family estates back home. This suggests that he was of good character and sound understanding but not particularly 'academic' or attracted by the prospect of a glittering career as a leading advocate. Hearteningly, Tagore makes it clear that he was affectionately treated by his English hosts. He spontaneously came to love and understand their culture though he had no regrets in returning to rural Bengal and the unglamorous occupation of rent-collector. 

Is there a connection between Tagore's unhappiness at schools in Calcutta with his decision to make Shantiniketan a school rather than a Vedic patshala? Not really. His father wanted a patshala but it would have imposed too big a financial burden. Tagore had some notion that maybe kids from his school could go off to Japan or America and learn engineering or agronomy or other such useful stuff. 

I may mention, Tagore says that, as a child, he used to pretend to be a teacher and would terrorize the columns of the banister which were meant to be his pupils. Thankfully, no such sadistic intention inspired the creation of Shantiniketan which Tagore turned into a school for his sons and other relatives- more particularly those who were delinquents or irremediably stupid. (I should explain, the family would have had to pay to train the priests and then pay to keep them fed- i.e. such education was a complete drain on the family's income) 

Not all Shantiniketan's pupils were cretins. The  sons (or grandsons) of teachers at Shantiniketan were likely to be smart since they would inherit little wealth and thus needed to pass exams or else acquire artistic skills. 

Amartya Sen, famously, was one such gifted pupil as was his best friend- whose wife he later ran away with. He says of Tagore's account of his boyhood published shortly before his death that 'it is an odd book.'

I suppose he means it is impressionistic and dwells on things we don't associate with Tagore- e.g. a childish belief in ghosts and monsters. Still, the fact is, Tagore could take pride in the fact that students at his school were free of such superstitions. Also, they didn't feel they were worthless if they could not rival the achievements of young boys who rubbed snuff in their eyes to keep awake while burning the midnight oil. 

Obviously, Tagore’s own account of his childhood days has intrinsic interest of its own, but it also tells us something about the development of the priorities that deeply influenced his later life.

I suppose, if one had to write a school essay on this topic, we could say Tagore rejected servility, rote-learning and blind acceptance of authority on the basis of his earliest experiences. As against superstitious and ritualistic practices, he affirmed instead man's participation in God who is the universal witness. 

On the other hand, since Tagore was a poet and song-writer, what we find in the book is a lyrical description of the circumstances in which he attracted the attention of the Muses. I thought it interesting that it was a teacher at the Normal School who first praised Tagore's handling of the traditional 14 syllable poetic form. However, it was the very simple rustic Bengali songs he first learned which Tagore would return to. 

Of the many different connections that are of interest,

there are none of interest to non poets

let me select three for brief comments.

First, Rabindranath passionately disliked the schools he encountered,

scarcely surprising in a poet. Still, he first received praise at the Normal School. This gave him confidence. At a later point, it was the appreciation and encouragement he received, for his poetic effusions, from educated girls his own age which confirmed his literary vocation. But it was a hobby rather than a means of livelihood.

and as a drop-out, he was educated at home, with the help of tutors.

again, not surprising given his family's wealth and social status.

Already in his childhood he formed some views on what precisely was wrong
with the schools he knew in the Calcutta of his day, some, as it happens, with fairly distinguished academic records.

Those views were shared by everybody. Passing examinations had become important. Schools were in the cramming business. This was fine if you came from a poverty stricken home and hoped to qualify as a Civil Servant or Lawyer. But it was the wrong sort of 'paidea' for a gentleman who owned thousands of acres of land. 

When Tagore established his own school in Santiniketan in 1901, he was determined to make it critically different from the schools he knew.

Because it was in a rural location and would only attract thickos as fee-paying students. The advantage for the families concerned was that their delinquent sons couldn't get into too much trouble in a remote village. Also they would at least learn to speak Bengali in a cultured manner.  

It is not always easy to spot what made his school in Santiniketan so different
(this is in fact even more difficult to identify if you have been mainly schooled there,
as I have been), but the Boyhood Days tells a great deal about what Tagore was
looking for in his vision of a school appropriate for children.

It was appropriate for thickos of whom nothing very much was expected. The children of staff members, however, might be more motivated to study on their own. 

One particularly important idea to look for is Tagore’s focus on freedom, even for school children, on which Marshall did comment.

Tagore needed to charge fees. But only wealthy thickos would pay those fees and beating wealthy thickos might backfire. They might knife you or run away. In either case, you lose revenue.  

This, in fact, identifies an aspect of Rabindranath that the standard commentaries on him – from W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound onwards – missed.

Strangely enough, few people are focused on becoming a slave. There is no need to remark that a particular dude wanted to be free rather than to pluck cotton under the lash.  

Yet his yearning for substantive freedom in human life comes through very clearly in Boyhood Days, and it stays throughout his life as a constant thought.

Very few people yearn for slavery.  

Let me now turn to a second connection that deserves some attention.

Rabindranath wrote a lot of songs and invented a lot of tunes. He came from a musical family. This doesn't deserve a lot of attention because there is nothing unusual about a musical dude coming from a musical family.  

At his home Rabindranath was surrounded by people who loved music, varying in taste from austerely classical to more relaxed art forms of song-making and singing. Rabindranath had a fine introduction to classical Indian music, but he resisted the usual long years of formal training of the aspiring specialist.

It was uncommon for a gentleman to undertake that type of training. One does not need classical training to be a good enough song composer. 

The third connection I want to comment on concerns Tagore’s intellectual world, in particular the emergence of Tagore’s rather special priorities in analytical and empirical inquiries and his expectations from them.

Tagore was a successful Estate manager who was also a productive writer. His was a commercial and creative world, not an intellectual one.  

This is a complex subject and has been much misunderstood.

There is nothing to understand. Tagore wasn't an intellectual. He did take over his father's religious role and, in the context of the export of Eastern wisdom, this meant he had to ponce around in a kaftan waxing mystical.  

However, since the beginnings of Tagore’s priorities and expectations are clearly noticeable in Boyhood Days, the subject deserves a little exploration here, for a better understanding even of the later Rabindranath.

Tagore was a straightforward man. He didn't claim to have been an intellectual genius or to have experienced nirvikalpa samadhi at a tender age. He genuinely was of good character and genuinely had artistic talent. He tried to help his tenants and he definitely helped some of his students.  

Tagore’s commitment to reasoning was strong – sometimes fierce – throughout his life.

No. You may say he, like other Brahmos, was more committed to Reason than to Mysticism or the belief that supernatural 'siddhas' can be gained by esoteric means. But he was not committed to reasoning because there is little point doing so if the sensible thing to do is self-evident.  

This is well reflected in his arguments, for example, with Mahatma
Gandhi (whom he chastised for obscurantism),

but who could get him the money he needed to run Shantiniketan 

with religious parochialists

i.e. Muslims whom he correctly predicted would take away his agricultural estates in the East.  

(whose reasonless sectarianism upset him greatly),

Lots of Hindus had to run away from East Bengal.  

with the British establishment (for their crude treatment of India, in contrast with what he admired greatly in British intellectual life and creativity),

Tagore understood that his class would lose wealth and power when and if the Brits ran away.  

with his Japanese admirers (who received, despite Tagore’s general admiration of Japan his sharply angry critique for their silence – or worse – in the face of Japan’s newly-emerging supernationalism,

Japan had a Divine Emperor. The Japanese were Imperialists of a type which had existed in East Asia for at least 3000 years. 

including the Japanese treatment of China),

Tagore was passing around the begging bowl. He couldn't afford to alienate anybody who might give him money.  

and with the administrative leadership of both British India

Sadly the Brits Indianized the administration- which promptly turned to shit 

and the Soviet Union (he compared the Soviet achievements in school education across its Asian and European span very favourably with the gross neglect of school education in British India, while also chastising the Soviet leadership for its intolerance of criticism and of freedom of expression).

No. Tagore was under the impression that the Soviets had cured the Muslims of their aggressive instincts. Since Tagore managed his family estates, he knew that universal literacy would kill off his own source of wealth.  Tagore wasn't a fool. He didn't think scolding Stalin or Hitler would do any good. 

Tagore’s commitment to a reasoned understanding of the world around us came through also in his wholehearted support for scientific education (his school insisted on every child’s exposure to the new findings emerging anywhere in the world).

Back then, if you expected people to pay to attend your school, you had to pretend you'd teach science and math rather than tree-climbing.  At a later point, Tagore tried to turn his school into an University. This happened at around the time Sen's grandfather was appointed Registrar of the newly created Dacca University which rose and rose. Shantiniketan stagnated more particularly after it was taken over by the Central Government. 

The same commitment to reason is seen also in Tagore’s cultural evaluations, including his firm mixture of pride in Indian culture

but he gave no reason for it- or rather, no good reason. True, he had no choice but to imbibe some Bengali culture because he was Bengali but Bengali culture turned out to be shit. 

and rejection of any claim to the priority of Indian culture over all others.

Smart people all over the world started to study Western culture. Why? It was better and thus had priority. Sen writes in English and teaches at Harvard rather than Howrah Skool of Bengali Boringness.  

It is also seen in his refusal to see something called "the Indian civilization" in isolation from influences coming from the rest of the world:

And yet scholars publish books on Indian civilization as though it were indeed isolated. This is because there is little trace of Greek or ancient Persian civilization in the Indic record.  

this remains very relevant today, not just as a critique of what is now called the "Hindutva" approach, but also of the widely popular theses of the "clash of civilizations," which is frequently invoked these days as a gross –and rather dangerous – simplification of the complex world in which we live.

Sen didn't notice that the country he lived in was waging a ruthless war against Muslims. 

In every case, Rabindranath’s firm convictions were driven explicitly by critical reasoning which he clearly spelt out.

No. He didn't give any rhyme or reason for anything he did or believed in. This was because nobody was paying him to do so. Sensible people don't do boring shite unless they get paid for it.  

And yet to many contemporary observers in Europe and America, Rabindranath appeared to be anything but a follower of reason.

Because he was a follower of a religious sect headed by his daddy.  

It was faith he was identified with, and with a penchant for mystification over seeking clarity.

All faith is founded on mystery not reason or 'clarity'.  

While some of Tagore’s admirers (of suitably mystical kind themselves) loved this "re-done Tagore," others found it unattractive, even detestable.

Nonsense! Some of his admirers found fault with translations but none considered Tagore as other than mystical- i.e. Brahmo- though, no doubt, in youth he had shown himself capable of writing on epic and romantic, but not erotic, themes. Satire and scolding were not alien to him but he had too much nobility of character to wish to wallow too much in that vein. 

A clear formulation of that interpretation of Tagore can be found in two unpublished letters of Bertrand Russell to
Nimai Chatterji.

No. Russell was never an admirer of Tagore. His poet was Shelley and, later on, his dialogue was with TS Eliot. 

 This passage in a letter of his clarifies matters-  

Romanticism, it seems to me, is the creed of passion, the belief that the good consists in overmastering emotion, of whatever kind, the stronger the better. Hence, it is led to dwell specially upon the strongest emotions- love, hatred, rage, jealousy-with one exception: No romanticist praises fear, though this is certainly as strong as any emotion can be.

Romantics dwell much on the fear of being rejected in Love or of dying without having made a name for oneself. Indeed, Romanticism was a cult of Fame which is the only way the tortured, narcissistic, genius can triumph over death and utility. Russell, being a philosopher,  truly was as stupid as shit.  

The reason is that the romanticist loves emotion

because she fears it. This is why the Romantic would rather fake it than make it- if that thing was the type of Love we Hindus call 'Vatsalya' as between Mummy, Baby, or Christ who suffers us all, as little children, to come to Him.

as an assertion of personality,

what else could it be if it were also to inspire love? Nobody has a passion for peristalsis, or a romantic view of respiration.  

of individual force, while fear expresses the antithesis to this, the slavery of the individual to the world.

Fear is an emotion. The Romantic prizes the hero who is more afraid of fearing Death than of dying. The world neither enslaves nor grants manumission. It is the antithesis of nothing though, to Shelley, it represents a 'slow stain' or the contagion of a but commercial or congregational and civic conatus.  'Rather Use than Fame' was the motto of my old school- which Russell's grandson and great-grandson, the Sixth and Seventh Earls respectively, attended.

The world, in the view of romanticism, is primarily material for the development of the individual-

Vivekananda considered the world a 'moral gymnasium'. Shaw took over this notion but attributed it to the English.  

thus Kant is the parent of the romantic movement,

Russell is thinking of Coleridge. He is wrong. 

and Nietzsche is its child.

No. There is a line from Fichte, not Kant, to Nietzsche 

Its antithesis is not classicism,

Yes it is- unless you speak a Romance language.  

but Buddhism, quietism,

Kant, by birth, was a fucking Pietist or 'quietist'.  

the doctrine of submission to fate,

Is absent in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism- even the Ajivika tradition. It arose in the West out of Augustine's poor knowledge of Greek. The Bible does not say we all sinned with Adam. Russell wrote about Pelagianism etc. from a point of view of radical philological ignorance. But then, he needed the money. Stupidity sells. Nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the book buying public. 

and the hope of annihilation or absorption as the reward of virtue.

We are all annihilated or absorbed at every moment of our social, or 'species' bein.  

This is, of course, more akin to romanticism than classicism is; but that is, the nature of antitheses.

Russell is parading his ignorance of Hegel here. To be fair, it wasn't till Lawvere, in the late Sixties, that we had a mathematical (category theoretical) description of the Hegelian dialectic. But we can see it easily enough in the Zermelo vs Skolem quarrel. Essentially, Zermelo was saying that Math's world of objects can only be grasped by infinitary means. Tagore, being a Brahmo Brahmin of a Dara Shikoh monist/majazi/ mayavadi type, is solidly on the side of Zermelo. But, as I pointed out in my last book, this is but 'zugzwang' though, to Zermelo, the gift- lemma means gift- of Zorn. 

The worship of passion has, I confess, a great instinctive attraction for me, but to my reason it is utterly abhorrent.

Russell's passion caused brilliant heirs to be born to his body. One, sadly, developed a mental illness late in life, but there can be no doubt that his descendants are of great value to a Crown and a Country,  I now ineffectually sully and disfigure by my blinkered and Blimpish passionate avowals of allegiance.

By contrast, Nimai Chatterji adorned a culturally ecumenical  Commonwealth. 

On 16th February 1963, Earl Russell wrote to Nimai Chatterji:

I recall the meeting [with Tagore] of which Lowes Dickinson writes only vaguely.

When did that cunt write otherwise? You could go to prison for being homo back then. 

There was an earlier occasion, the first upon which I met Tagore, when he was brought to my home by Robert Trevelyan

considered a bit soft in the head. Harrovian, donchanknow. 

and Lowes Dickinson. I confess that his mystic air did not attract me and I recollect wishing he would be more direct.

Russell wanted the big bearded Indian to denounce Imperial Britain in passionate terms. 

He had a soft, rather elusive, manner

back then, Russell had very very bad halitosis. People thought this might prevent his having sex with women. Thus, the fellow was probably a confirmed sodomite. It is better to a bit elusive with aristocrats of that description. 

which led one to feel that straightforward exchange or communication from which he would shy away. His intensity was impaired by his self-asorbtion [absorption]. Naturally, his mystic views were by way of dicta and it was not possible to reason about them.

Russell didn't like Tagore's poetry. LEJ Brouwer did. But then Brouwer was pretty mystical in a somewhat puritanical manner. Russell, on the other hand, believed that the true poet is a thaumaturge- Yeats and Crowley were actual magicians- and though very much a Socialist and a Pacifist, Russell was no Puritan. He liked sex.  An American dentist fixed his teeth and suddenly even quite well brought up women were prepared to perform coitus with that silly cunt. Tagore, on the other hand, was an 'improving' landlord and family man with strict Victorian values. Russell, quite naturally, was repelled by, what appeared to him to be, a pillar of the Indian establishment. 

In a later letter, dated 26th April 1967, Russell was even sharper in his denunciation of what he took to be Tagore’s flight from reason:

Zermelo was making a similar flight. Brouwer and Weyl- to Hilbert's great anguish- were making a flight in a different but equally fatal direction. Meanwhile, Frege, in the Twenties, was turning into a proto-Hitlerite.  

'His talk about the infinite is vague nonsense. The sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not mean anything at all.

Russell was a logical atomist. He thought there was a finite list of true predicates of any particular object. Moreover, something like an 'atomic proposition' must exist. Tagore was saying, quite reasonably, that there in no limit to the web of predication which in any case might be delusive or 'sublatable'. There are no simple, i.e. atomic, propositions. There can be a universal witness but there is no algorithmic method of cranking out all knowledge because the thing is limitless- i.e. faces a halting problem. Interestingly, Turing, in the Thirties, used Brouwer's choice sequences to establish the sort of 'phenomenological' result for which Husserl had sought in vain. Witlesstein, too, in his witless way, had returned to Philosophy after hearing Brouwer's lecture. But he didn't understand that 'pendulum numbers' were perfectly Hilbertian. Russell, meanwhile, had become a 'Friend of India' of a singularly useless sort.

So what’s going on here?

Russell didn't like Tagore's poetry. Brouwer, an intuitionist, liked Tagore's poetry and his mystical view of the universe.  Still, Russell, like Tagore and Elmhirst and Jeddu Krishnamurthy founded his own progressive school. After all, thickos too need edumication. 

Why would the reason-centred priorities of Tagore appear just the opposite of that to some towering intellectuals in Europe and America whom he met?

Because Tagore didn't have any 'reason-centered priorities'. We might just as well suggest that Russell didn't like Tagore because Tagore had a very large vagina which made growling noises.  

And, in the present context, what insights can we get from Tagore’s recollections in his Boyhood Days about this dissonance between Tagore’s consistent
championing of reason and Russell’s belief that Tagore hated reason with a passion – a passion of the "self-absorptive" kind.

Russell identified reason with mathematical logic. Tagore wrote poems not the fucking Principia. Russell suspected Tagore was a narcissistic Godman. He wasn't. But he did want money for Shantiniketan and thus had to play the part of the Eastern Sage scolding the materialistic West in return for hard currency. .  

For an adequate understanding of what is happening, we have to

tell stupid lies. Tagore had no interest in logic and never supplied compelling or convincing reasons for anything he did or believed in. This was fine because he was a poet of a mystical type.  By contrast the 'fundamental assumption' of a Logic based Metaphysics is, to quote Dummett, 'the assumption that, when we have a sentence containing a logical constant, that sentence could have been derived using the introduction rule for the constant'. I think Tagore, like Gentzen, would have thought there must be an 'elimination rule' at the same time. Otherwise you have a natural deduction system that is foolish or anti-inductive.  The Brahmo sect sought a Creator who is the Universal Witness but can't in any sense be instrumentalized by reason of performing a function. 

take out, first, two incidental factors

firstly that he was a poet and secondly that he was the head of a mystic sect 

that no doubt had their influence but which could obscure a fuller picture of the contrast of epistemic priorities that lies behind the apparent dissonance.

The first incidental factor is Tagore’s partial inclination to play the role that was assigned to him by his early admirers in England – W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and others –

They didn't assign any role to him. Rothenstein had met him in India. He told everybody that Tagore came from one of the best families in the Empire's Second City and was the head of an important Hindu sect. Also, his poems were good. If you liked Sarojini, you will dig Rabindranath. 

in which his poetical exposition, particularly in Gitanjali, of what can be seen as extraordinary features of the world overwhelmed his understanding of ordinary but very important things that make up the world and in which Tagore was (as Boyhood Days confirm) deeply interested from his very early days.

the ordinary thing Sen does not understand is that Tagore was not deeply interested in science or math or engineering. He speaks deprecatingly of his one attempt to invent a sort of ink press for flowers.  

This would later flower into his interest in science, culture, education, politics, ethics and epistemology.

He had no such interests though he did write a little book about how Science is nice.  

Russell "knew" what to expect from the man that Lowes Dickinson brought to Russell’s home,

No. He had heard rumors about the Nationalist- even Terrorist!- proclivities of the Hindu intellectual. Was Tagore similar to Vivekananda and Aurobindo? The big beardie wouldn't say.  

and he seemed to have decided that he got plentifully exactly what he expected to get from Rabindranath.

No. Russell was a radical. He'd have enjoyed hearing a vigorous takedown of Christianity or even an envenomed denunciation of the British Raj. Had Tagore produced a bomb from under his beard, Russell would have been even more thrilled. But Tagore wasn't going to rise to any bait. Bad enough having to rely on an Irish nationalist like Yeats. The sensible thing was to keep Russell at arm's length. During the Great War, the Brits had to imprison that son of an Earl.  

Tagore’s admirers in England would not leave much room for any way of contrasting the allegorical poetry of Gitanjali (itself over-mysticised by its English rendering)

which Tagore himself worked on or, at least, approved 

and Rabindranath’s prosaic beliefs about the ordinary world.

Nonsense! English people understand that a mystical poet still needs to take a shit from time to time.  

As I have discussed elsewhere, Rabindranath was initially happy enough to play this role, even though he was shocked by the over-praise he was getting.

No. Tagore wanted to make money for Shantiniketan by selling his books. His friend Okakura had made good money out of 'the book of tea'. Even Sarojini had made money out of her English poetry. Now that Vivekananda was dead, Tagore had a brief window of opportunity to corner the market for Yogi-bhogi bollocks.  

The second factor is Russell’s propensity to dismiss anything that he did not find to be immediately clear to him.

Russell had no such propensity. That's why he was able to make a big contribution to set theory and the theory of types.  

If Rabindranath got the raw end of that perspective in Russell’s reactions to him,

he didn't. The two may have disliked each other but were considered to be great thinkers 

he did not fare any worse than Friedrich Nietzsche had in the caricature of him that Russell had produced in his History of Western Philosophy, in the form of a simulated conversation between Nietzsche and Buddha concocted by Russell to bring out the stupidity – as well as some possible nastiness – of Nietzsche’s ideas as interpreted by Russell.

Russell says he knows no way to prove the Buddha is right and Nietzsche (as imagined by Russell) is wrong. An intuitionist might say there is a 'witness', access to whom would allow us to reject one position and affirm another. The Brahmo Religion says God is that 'witness' (Saakshi).

Despite the importance of these associative factors, Rabindranath’s
understanding of intellectual priorities did, in fact, have some special features which contributed to the misunderstanding that is being examined.

He had no notion of 'intellectual priorities'. A guy who likes poetry will have one type of poetry. A guy who likes math will have different priorities and predilections.  

One of them was Tagore’s willingness to accept that many questions will
remain unresolved

not for God- the universal witness- or for those who are absorbed into the Godhead 

and their answers can remain uncompleted.

Tagore would have no problem with 'completeness' being 'infinitary'. Sen is babbling nonsense.  

The domain of unfinished accounts would change over time,

God is outside time. Sen simply won't accept that Tagore was a theist. He genuinely believed in his daddy's religion.  

but not go away, and in this Rabindranath saw not a defeat but a humble – and also beautiful – recognition of our limited understanding of a vast world,

why not see the beauty in the humble recognition of a cat that is a dog?  

even an incomprehensibly large,

nothing is incomprehensible for God 

possibly infinite, universe (the kind of remark that so exasperated Russell).

Russell was cool with Leibniz who was a theist. He didn't get exasperated with Einstein or Godel. 

Rather than seeing this as a defeat of reason he clearly saw this as the way reason works in human life, at any point of time.

Leibniz has a principle of sufficient reason. Plenty of atheists don't.  

He also saw some aesthetic beauty in the continuing incompleteness of our answers: this is where, I presume, Russell would have walked away had Tagore not been sitting at Russell’s own home.

Russell could always say 'I forgot I have an appointment with the Queen Gor'bless'er. Pray excuse me, gentlemen'.  

We can glimpse the early beginnings of this celebration of the unresolved and the incomplete in many remarks in Boyhood Days (this is another "hint" to the young reader),

a stupid one. The young reader knows that fairy stories are purely imaginary. Nothing epistemic is involved in their being unresolved or incomplete.  

but none perhaps more spectacular than the youthful Rabindranath’s retreat from the discipline of tutored knowledge that was being poured into him. He would regain his peace when he could resume his reflection of the vast universe that lay beyond his tutors’ grasp (p. 43):

In bed, at last, I found some moments of leisure. There, I listened to
the story that never reached its conclusion.

"The Prince rides across the boundless terrain…."

Tagore makes it clear that he didn't enjoy learning English in Calcutta because it was taught by people who didn't know the language well. In England, living with an English family, he quickly gained anything in its literature that was congenial to him.  

This is not the occasion to pursue Tagore’s views of knowledge and
reason further, and yet I found it striking, as I was rereading Boyhood Days (I had read the book, in Bengali, in my own boyhood days), how many of these connections with Tagore’s epistemic and aesthetic priorities were already beginning to take shape in those early days.

He had no epistemic priorities because he wasn't setting up in a knowledge profession. He was setting up as a creative poet and song writer. He shows us that his Sanskrit and classical Bengali was up to snuff. It wasn't true that he was an illiterate yahoo. Also, since he had lived in England and took Morley's lectures, his knowledge of English literature was more than sufficient for his purpose. True, he somewhat overeggs the cake regarding his family's poverty and his own suffering at the hands of venal servants but, after all, poets are meant to be sensitive little flowers. 

Before ending, I would like to make a couple of comments on a more
mundane subject. It has been claimed that to say goodbye is "to die a little."

To learn you are too stupid to do Physics and must be content with an Econ degree is to die more than a little.  

To read the translation of a book one knows in the original is also to die a little,

No. The translation may be superior or more illuminating.  

and no translation, no matter how good and accurate, can prevent that.

Rubbish! There are Persian poets who say that Fitzgerald's translations of Khayyam are better than the original or even that they are the original. 

One of the special problems arises in this case from the fact that
words in one language sometimes do not have exact equivalents in another language.

In which case, why not import it?  

The problem is compounded by the fact that some words have more than one near-equivalent in another language. In fact, the English rendering of Gitanjali, somewhat influenced by Tagore’s early admirers in England, had tended to select the most "mystical" of the near-equivalents, sometimes mercilessly killing the necessary ambiguities in Tagore’s Bengali expressions.

But the bloke did it himself. Gitanjali is a work by a bilingual author. There is no law against having your poems touched up by a person with superior literary skill.  

The plurality of near-equivalent English words applies even to the
title of this book. "Chelebela" in Bengal refers to childhood, even though the word used in that compound expression, to wit "chele," also does mean a boy,

no. It means a child of either sex. Sen will admit this in his next sentence.  

in its literal and original use. Bengali dropped gender about seven hundred years ago (there is not even any equivalent of the English distinction between "he" and "she," or between "him" and "her"), and it is quite standard for words like"chele" to be used to cover both sexes, that is, girls as well as boys. So
"chelebela" could be translated as "Childhood Days," and not
specifically as "Boyhood Days."

Just 'Childhood' is enough though his book does stretch to his adolescence. However it is written from an infantile, not an analytical, perspective. Tagore as a teenager is shown as being affectionate and in need of affection- like a child. 

In this case, this might not matter tremendously, since Rabindranath was indubitably a man and his childhood was clearly his boyhood as well.

It does not matter at all.  

There is perhaps more of a problem with Tagore’s "Preface" which begins with the sentence: "I received a request from Goswamiji to write something for the boys." There were both boys and girls in the school (indeed my mother herself had been a student there

because her Dad taught there 

long before me), and no matter what the genderized form of the Bengali expression is, Tagore’s interest in presenting his recollections of his early years would have involved his willingness to cater to the curiosity of both boys
and girls in the school (there is internal evidence of this in the text as well of
Tagore’s reach across the gender divide).

Tagore gives us an insight into a boy's mind. He says he was exiled from the women's quarter.  Also, he was not given instruction in how to wear saree because he had a dick, not a vag. 

Goswamiji too whose request, we learn from the Preface, started off this entire project, was a marvellous teacher, and as I remember vividly, cared no less for the girls than for the boys. The request for "something for the boys" (taking the genderized form of words in the restrictive sense) must have included the girl students at the school as well. The coverage of many Bengali words,
such as "chele," has this plasticity.

In which case, why bring up the matter? Goswami was a teacher. He requested Tagore to write 'something for the kids'. Tagore obliged. That's all there is to it.  

Are there things in the Bengali absent in the English translation? Yes. This has to do with Tagore's relationship with his oldest brother whose poetry must have influenced him. It seems the older man was also a bit of a mathematician and a philosopher. In the English translation, the old man comes across as something of a zany. I have heard that in the original there is a touch of respectful 'mimesis' to an old man whom visitors to Shantiniketan considered an eccentric jester. 

.