Sennett—The Craftsman (i)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

Pandora's Casket
Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer

Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis,... I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ... She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.

Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.

Well,
if a given

fear

well and truly

traces back,

then it is not

her

fear.

And
if it is
"her" fear,
then it does not
"trace back."

i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.

"official communication" from fickle ears staff, re: "the jobs that they were counting on"

We recently received the following "official communication" from the local of which we are a member and under whose auspices our present employment is conducted:

...The Eagles are on tour right now and are scheduled to perform a few times in the Southern California area. Although they are not performing in our jurisdiction, they are contracting the string students from California State University Fullerton to replace the professional musicians that would normally be contracted for these performances. This is not the first time CSUF has done this. ...

The institution is displacing professional musicians’ jobs with their students; jobs that their students are presumably training for in the first place. ... Under these circumstances, by the time their students graduate, the jobs that they were counting on for will be no longer be filled by professional musicians. ...

We of course find this part of such stories to be at best the fifth or sixth most important part.

Also, we do greatly value the privilege of being represented by a union, but we wish this union would be more coherent in its stated positions.

First: people who willingly attend Eagles-with-orchestra concerts can't tell the difference between student and professional musicians. Those who maintain this not to be the case have a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events.

Second: whatever the failings of such an audience, these are not moral failings. It must be said that they betoken success too: namely the smashing success of the education-industrial complex in taking up the cause of the performing arts. We are unfamiliar with the CSUF strings but generally we find it unsurprising that a college group could be adequate for much "professional" work. We've heard and played in several that were. We've also done extensive "professional" work and found the bar to be quite a bit lower than we, and ostensibly the union (but only sometimes), would prefer. In two different locals in two different states we have been left mystified and incredulous at the union roster on our instrument, which extends to anyone who knows someone they can borrow a tuba from. At that point, to get bothered at students taking over "professional" work is absurd. How much of the local "tuba" roster could carry the jock strap of a state-school tuba player?

Third: ditto above with regard to quantity as well as quality. It is not breaking news that more students train in the performing arts than can work in the performing arts. The industry and the union both get what they want when more musicians split a fixed amount of work. Predictably both pay lip service to "music education." Less often but equally predictably, they also pay lip service to audience outreach. But musicianship has proven more amenable to progressive reform than has reception. You can build a better mousetrap, but you can't train anyone else to notice or force them to care.

Fourth: the notion that pre-professionals "were counting on" pickup orchestra gigs with The Eagles is one which strains credulity. The union declares that they should, the industry that they shouldn't. In any case, we suspect they are not. They and their teachers are aiming much, much higher. This is as it should be, and this is what countless union and industry photo ops have goaded us towards: high motivation can come only from high aspirations. Those among the professorate who have had significant careers outside of academia know that students who are good enough to get admitted to 4-year college as music majors already play well enough to do pickup orchestra with The Eagles, no matter if the gig is union or dark. Anyone who maintains this not to be the case has a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events. They have an equally formidable task in explaining why the skills required to play pickup orchestra with The Eagles are post-secondary and graduate-level skills rather than elementary ones; why this is what music students should be doing while their peers are reading Plato and Kant, plotting regression equations, and extracting abcessed teeth; why and how this "aspiration" can be anything other than crippling and cynical in comparison to everything else the performing arts have to offer a young person. The indications are all around us that Eagles-with-orchestra skills are elementary skills, but many of us would rather hold out hope-against-hope of filling a couple more dates on the calendar than think too hard (or at all) about what is actually to happen on those dates. The cynical proposal that aspiring freelancers attend business school rather than music school speaks a certain truth, but it is not the truth that its cynical utterers think they are speaking. They think they are extolling the wisdom of markets; in fact they are pointing up an area of exceptional failure of markets and of the conceit to meritocracy, a failure so drastic that it is not the least bit representative of general market dynamics. For this and many other reasons, we ourselves prefer the idealstic outlook which challenges performing arts students to maximize their potential and to seek a distinctive artistic voice rather than bending themselves and their work toward an existing career path. But this does nothing to raise audience receptivity to those new voices. Nor does either industry or the union have any use for self-directed artists with day jobs. Prospectively we cannot really say what (if any) value self-directed artists might have. No one has any use for them, until they do.

Paul Goodman—Class Cultures

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[161] A persistent error of the sociologists has been to regard middle-class and working-class values as co-ordinate rival systems. Rather, they are related vertically: each is a defense against some threat of the other. Primary values are human values. The middle-class "values" are reaction formations to inhibit in themselves some human values still available to simpler people. Therefore, under stress of life or disillusion, such inhibitions may give way. They may give way to an ambivalent opposite, like becoming a bum; but they may also simply relax to ordinary nature and community, spontaneity, nonconformity, etc. Conversely, the working-class "values" are nothing but ignorance, resignation, and resentment of classless values of enterprise and culture, at present available only to the middle class; and many a poor boy escapes his petty class attitudes and achieves something. In brief, it takes effort to make a middle class obsessional, and it takes effort to make a poor boy stupid.

Paul Goodman
"Compulsory Mis-Education" (1964)
in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars

[21] Because of the increasing failure of the schools with the poor urban mass, there has developed a line of criticism...asserting that there is a "culture of poverty" which the "middle-class" schools do not fit, but which has its own virtues of spontaneity, sociality, animality. The implication is that the "middle class," for all its virtues, is obsessional, prejudiced, prudish.

Pedagogically, this insight is indispensible. A teacher must try to reach each child in terms of what he brings, his background, his habits, the language he understands. But if taken to be more than technical, it is a disastrous conception. The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues; and spontaneity and sexuality are not powers of the simple but of human

[22]

health. One has the impression that our social-psychologists are looking not to a human community but to a future in which the obsessionals will take care of the impulsives!

In fact, some of the most important strengths that have historically belonged to the middle class are flouted by the schools: independence, initiative, scrupulous honesty, earnestness, utility, respect for thorough scholarship. Rather than bourgeois, our schools have become petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic, time-serving, gradgrind-practical, timid, and nouveau riche climbing. In the upper grades and colleges, they often exude a cynicism that belongs to rotten aristocrats.

Naturally, however, the youth of the poor and of the middle class respond differently to the petty bourgeois atmosphere. For many poor children, school is orderly and has food, compared to chaotic and hungry homes, and it might even be interesting compared to total deprivation of toys and books. Besides, the wish to improve a child's lot, which on the part of a middle-class parent might be frantic status-seeking and pressuring, on the part of a poor parent is a loving aspiration. There is here a gloomy irony. The school that for a poor Negro child might be a great joy and opportunity is likely to be dreadful; whereas the middle-class child might be better off not in the "good" suburban school he has.

Paul Goodman—Compulsory Mis-Education

Paul Goodman
"Compulsory Mis-Education" (1964)
in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars

[53] the docility, neatness of appearance, etc. that are useful for getting petty jobs, are not created by years of schooling but they are accurately measured by them.

...

[54] It is claimed that society needs more people who are technically trained. But informed labor people tell me that, for a job requiring skill but no great genius, a worker can be found at once, or quickly trained.

...

[56] In his speech the Secretary referred to the admirable extension of free education from 1850 to, say, 1930. But this is again entirely misleading with regard to our present situation. To repeat, that opening of opportunity took place in an open economy, with an expanding market for skills and cultural learning. Young people took advantage of it of their own volition; therefore there were no blackboard jungles and endemic problems of discipline. Teachers taught those who wanted to learn; therefore there was no especial emphasis on grad-

[57]

ing. What is the present situation? The frantic competitive testing and grading means that the market for skills and learning is not open, it is tight. ...a few great corporations are getting the benefit of an enormous weeding-out and selective process—all children are fed into the mill and everybody pays for it.

...

[84] Dr. [Lauren] Resnick's system explicitly excludes all notions of "inward" meaning. ...

...unlike the liberal or "faculty-developing" curriculum of the Enlightenment theory, no particular subject of learning is chosen because of its characteristic appeal to or stimulation of the powers, liberation, or needs of the learner. Operant-conditioning theory, she says, is essentially "contentless"; it is a pure technique that can teach anything to almost anybody. ...

In sum, on this view, compulsory schooling, so far as it is programmed, is identical with compulsory training to the goals of the controllers of behavior, and such goals are set by the "we want" of the first paragraph I have cited...

There is a typo or formatting error here which makes this a bit hard to navigate. I believe the referenced passage is:

[81] programmed instruction is applicable only where we do in fact want to change behavior in a given direction. There are cases where for political or ethical reasons we do not want to.

And so,

...I am curious to hear from Dr. Resnick the constitutional justification for

[85]

compulsory schooling in terms of the "we want" and "we do not want" of that paragraph. Who, we? and what limitation is there to "want" or happen to want? ...

...the "Discovery Method" as contrasted with step-by-step programmed instruction. One advantage claimed for the Discovery method...is that the leap over the gap is itself exciting and reinforcing, providing stronger motivation. Dr. Resnick agrees that this might be true for bright students; but she wisely points out that culturally-deprived, poorly achieving youngsters get more satisfaction from steady success, without risk of new failure. A second advantage claimed is that the trial and error in the Discovery process fits the student for the kind of learning that he will have to do outside the classroom; but here Dr. Resnick doubts that the student learns from his errors unless he is trained in

[86]

what to ask about them, that is, to notice them. (She is right. For example, a good piano teacher will have the student deliberately play the wrong note that he repeats inadvertently.) ...

What is astonishing in this thoughful analysis, however, is that she entirely omits the salient virtue that most teachers, classical or progressive, have always hoped for in letting the student discover for himself, namely the development of his confidence that he can, that he is adequate to the nature of things, can proceed on his own initiative, and ultimately strike out on an unknown path, where there is no program, and to assign his own tasks to himself. The classical maxim of teaching is: to bring the student to where he casts off the teacher. Dewey's model for curriculum and method was: any study so pursued that it ends up with the student wanting to find out something further.

Apparently Dr. Resnick cannot even conceive of this virtue, because it is contradictory to the essence of controlled behavior toward a predetermined goal. It is open. From her point of view, it is not instruction at all. In terms of social theory, it posits an open society of independent citizens—but she and Dr. Skinner think there is a special "we" who "want."

...

[88] I am rather miffed at the vulgarity of the implication that, in teaching the humanities, we should at most attempt "exposure"—as if appreciation were entirely a private matter, or a matter of unstructured "emotion."

This refers to the remainder of the above-cited excerpt:

[81] We do not, for example, want to train all students to be active partisans of a given political or religious viewpoint, or make everyone like the same kind of literature or music. In such cases . . . 'exposure' is the most we should attempt.

...

[88] When Dr. Resnick speaks of the unshaped response to the kind of literature or music "they like," she condemns their esthetic life to being a frill, without meaning for character, valuation, recreation, or how one is in the world. Frankly, as a man of letters I would even prefer literature to be programmed, as in Russia.

That is, even if behavioral analysis and programmed instruction were the adequate analysis of learning and method of teaching, it would still be questionable, for overriding political reasons, whether they are generally appropriate for the education of free citizens.

...

[89] It has been a persistent error of behaviorist psychologies to overlook that there are overt criteria that are organically part of meaningful acts of an organism in its environment; we can observe grace, ease, force, style, sudden simplification—and some such characteristics are at least roughly measurable. It is not necessary, in describing insight, knowledge, the kind of assimilated learning that Aristotle called "second nature," to have recourse to mental entities. It is not difficult to see when a child knows how to ride a bicycle; and he never forgets it, which would not be the case if the learning were by conditioning with reinforcement, because that can easily be wiped away by negative reinforcement. ...

On the other hand, it is extremely dubious that by controlled conditioning one can teach organically meaningful behavior. Rather, the attempt to control prevents learning. This is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to teach a child to ride a bicycle, allay his anxiety, tell him to keep going, and not to try to balance. I am convinced that the same is true teaching reading.

...

[90] But I am more impressed by what is perhaps Dr. Resnick's deepest concern, the possible psychotherapeutic use of more complex programming for the remedial instruction of kids who have developed severe blocks to learning and are far behind. For youngsters who have lost all confidence in themselves, there is a security in being able to take small steps entirely at their own pace and entirely by their own control of the machine. Also, though the chief use of schools is their functioning as a community, under present competitive and stratified conditions it is often less wounding for a kid who has fallen behind to be allowed to withdraw from the group and recover. And this time can usefully and curatively be spent in learning the standard "answers" that can put him in the game again.

There is a pathos in our technological advancement, well exemplified by programmed instruction. A large part of its consists [sic] in erroneously reducing the concept

[91]

of animals and human beings in order to make them machine-operable. The social background in which this occurs, meanwhile, makes many people out-caste and in fact tends to reduce them as persons and make them irresponsible. The refined technique has little valid use for the dominant social group for which it has been devised, e.g. in teaching science; but it does prove to have a use for the reduced out-castes, in teaching remedial arithmetic.

...

[128] It is really necessary to remind our academics of the ancient history of Examination. In the medieval university, the whole point of the gruelling trial of the candidate was whether or not to accept him as a peer. His disputation and lecture for the Master's was just that, a master-piece to enter the guild. It was not to make comparative evaluations. It was not to weed out and select for an extra-mural licensor or employer. It was certainly not to pit one young fellow against another in an ugly competition. My philosophic impression is that the medievals thought they knew what a good job of work was and that we are competitive because we do not know. But the more status is achieved by largely irrelevant competitive evaluation, the less will we ever know.

---

from "The Community of Scholars" (1964)

[216] It is not an interesting question whether the school system should be harnessed to the "national goals," rather than devoted to individual development, intel-

[217]

lectual virtues, or pure research. Any extensive part of society is inevitably harnessed to the national goals. ... The question is what are the national goals, how broadly or narrowly are they conceived and how rigidly must they be enforced?

...

[249] I do not think that college teaching is a profession, for it has no proper subject matter. The sciences that are taught really exist in the practice of them. The youth taught are too old and independent to be objects of professional attention like childen or the sick; yet they are not like the clients of a lawyer or architect who are given an objective service. Pedagogy, child-development, is a profession, for the children are real matter and the subjects taught are incidental. (Indeed, if we treated the reading and arithmetic as incidental and did not spend so much time and organization on them, perhaps they would be picked up more spontaneously and better. This was the Greek way.) But at the college age, one is teaching young people by means of proper

[250]

cultural subjects, or even teaching proper subjects to them. There is no way to be a master of subjects without nonacademic practice of them; and it is in that practice, and not as a teacher, that the college teacher is a professional. ...

Everybody knows this and we emphasize the need for research as essential for a teacher; but there is considerable confusion as to what is involved. In the physical and biological sciences the university pattern of research-cum-teaching works well. The professor uses his advanced and graduate students as proper apprentices, laboratory technicians and junior partners, on real projects. Historically, both in America and Europe, the scientific academies have come to lodge in the schools in a viable symbiosis. Also, in our scientific and technological society, there are plenty of extramural markets for such practice, in case a scientist does not take to teaching.

In the social and political sciences, the pattern works much less well. Usually the research is not—it is not allowed to be—a pragmatic addressing of real problems, whether in extramural society or even among the students and teachers. ... And the kind of questionnaire-and-analysis research that is done is precisely academic and largely futile, though it has flooded the popular culture as social science. But even academic daring in the moral sciences is "dissensual knowledge," as Frank Pinner calls it, and there are attempts to muffle it. In such circumstances, there is a great need for practiced veterans of moral sciences to man the schools. Are there

[251]

any? A certain number from politics and public administration. The real veterans who could teach are few; few of the few would teach honestly; and almost none of these would be hired! It is not surprising, then, if the most gifted academic social scientists devote inordinate attention to Methodology, as if sharpening their tools for some use that is not yet.

Very fair point, though it is also the case that the lack of workable Methodology was being felt particularly acutely at this time; indeed, we might say that this lack was just being noticed, and subsequently addressed with the urgency of a field whose very internal coherence (to say nothing of its ultimate worth) was thus thrown into doubt. Also, Methodology is interesting. But I also, from a greater distance in time, have not failed to perceive a certain prepronderance of purely theoretical detours in the "social science" of this time.

Needless to say, this theoretical methodology is irrelevant to our ongoing society whose needs, rather, are glaring and hardly require so much subtle documentation and analysis before getting to work.

Well, perhaps not everyone agrees on what is a glaring need; and so social scientists have attempted to "prove" it.

And as always, the avoidance is more influential than the attention. ...

But the case of the humanities is even worse. The very notion of a nonacademic practice of history, philosophy, or humane letters has nearly vanished—whether in statecraft, serious publishing, criticism, the pastorate. There is no humanistic attempt to improve the public tone. History and philosophy do not exist except as school subjects; there are certainly no paying jobs. Journalism and both popular culture and earnest art and writing have divorced themselves (wisely) from university standards. Therefore a journalist or writer does not seek to teach, and if he teaches it is not as a scholar. The more impressive results of academic humanities sometimes get abroad as conversation pieces that cannot make any difference; they do not help to shape social policy. Free and learned thought is simply not a social force among us; therefore, strictly speaking, there are no veterans and the humanities cannot be taught in colleges at all. Naturally there are sage and learned men in the colleges, but they are there just

[252]

because they are salaried there; they would do as well on Guggenheims.

The learned professions, of course...are still importantly taught by veterans. But inevitably the teaching is enfeebled, both in the knowledge of the teachers and in the readiness of the students, by the absence of the moral sciences and humanities. There is no philosophy of medicine, and little attempt to treat the soul and body as one; law is not ethical and neglects political theory; and engineering is not sociological and aesthetic. And the social sciences themselves are made narrow by the academism of philosophy, literature and history; they keep counting and analyzing men as they appear, without belief in what they could be or knowledge of what they have been. But there is not much future in men as they appear.

Academism has emasculated the human disciplines also academically. Classically—e.g., for Artistotle—there was no such subject matter as "philosophy." Philosophy was the heuristic, critical, and methodical part of any proper science, relating it to the system of sciences and to man. But once having concurred in the opinion that "philosophy" is the preliminary vague stage of the various sciences, professions, and arts, academic philosophy has pompously set itself up as a special Department dealing with important remnants that have no scientific or professional bearings. The linguistic analysis, that is currently the rage, is more modest; but what is it doing in the Department rather than in each field? how can one specialize in analysis as such?

...

[255] Academic exercise, like the old disputations and philosophare, is a useful means to unblock thought and deploy the possibilities of a subject. It is play and has game rules, and might lead to serious insight or decision. ... But the academic exercises in our colleges are neither play nor earnest, but a third somewhat. The rules are not intrinsic to the subject, but are an imposed schedule of courses, grades, prerequisites, and departments that satisfy—at least symbolically—a social need for degrees, licenses and skills. ...neither the students nor the teachers become personally involved, as if they were somewhere. But indeed, a major advantage of the schedule-and-grading game for academic personalities is that it keeps them out of embarrassing contact with the students. Unfortunately, however, the social pressures of conforming, competing, and fear of failing, are for real, they cause anxiety; so that the academic process, which could at least be a refined way to waste four to seven years in an economy of youth unemployment, is not even painless.

...

[259] On one hand, one can adopt the European system, as Jefferson did, in which the student follows his own interests and submits to a comprehensive examination when he is ready. He is left to himself—or abandoned to himself—... Perhaps this is best, though it must of course result in dilatory exploration which does not fit with our contemporary notions of scheduling from the cradle to the grave. On the other hand, there might be a small staff-meeting of the student's teachers to advise him. ... One can conceive of a judicious mixture of the two procedures. Our administrative mentality, however, inevitably chooses a third, unviable alternative: it decides beforehand what the goal is, according to some educator's theory of the well-rounded individual, the intellectual virtues, or the national needs;...

...

[275] Our prima facie inference from the split between the social and the intellectual must be that the studies are not vitally important, or they would be the basis of friendships. Rather, what is transmitted by the academic teaching is just the split itself, between lively interest and studies for credit.

...

[284] What was the "therapy" employed by Professor Whiteis? It was non-directive interpersonal contact. In his words, he gave "acceptance and understanding" rather than "cajoling, coercing, ordering,..." In this atmosphere, it seems, it was possible for the students to feel again the spontaneous interest that any young persons might take in a reasoned subject matter and to exercise what intelligence they had. It does not matter if this is called "therapy" or not; I would prefer a use of language that would call it precisely the normal state of things: the lively response of normal students to a teacher who knows something and who pays attention to them as human beings.

...

[303] For the sake of both the university and the professions, the professionals must return and assume responsibility for the history and humanity of their arts by taking real places again on the faculty of the university. Responsible teaching of the young is always teaching of the more ideal, for the young must transform practice in the world. If the young are free, they will not put up with narrow practical teaching; it's too boring; it's not worth studying; they ask far-reaching and embarrassing questions. On the other hand, only real practice is believable and authoritative.

At present, there is no philosophy of medicine, no jurisprudence, and no social theory of engineering. The social consequences are disastrous. And in my opinion, it is importantly because they are not on the faculty that artists and writers are so individualistic and fragmented as to be almost treasonable in their co-operation with l'imfame, and in their failure to defend the plain sense and beauty that they know. On the other hand, if they were regent masters they could set the conditions of freedom under which they are willing to assume responsibility.

...

[308] The attempt to pierce to common humanity by self-awareness in groups is more realistic, I think, than the curricular program of Robert Hutchins and his friends to establish communication by teaching the common great books and philosophy. With adolescents, a great-books program is almost sure to result in merely verbal wisdom and, in fact, a superior kind of withdrawal from the world, rather than courageous initiative. Neither Hutchins nor his mentor Mark Van Doren even seems to remember that the course of study they advocate was explicitly postponed by Plato till age thirty to thirty-five, when a man had some practical experience to be scientific and philosophic about.

...

[313, footnote] people do not choose what "pleases" but what seems important, necessary, or exciting even though painful. I say "seems"—they are likely in error—but in such errors there is something important, if only to get rid of a conceit.

Instead, Dewey says. "The educator must have a long look ahead; he must be aware of the potentialities for leading students into new fields . . . and must use this knowledge as his criterion for selection and arrangement" etc. This leads to the interminable administrative methodology of Progressive Schools. It is unnecessary. If the teacher and student stay in contact with each other and with the subject matter, in both enthusiasm and balkiness, rapidity and stupidity, the encounter will generate its own deep meaning and next attraction—or rejection.

...

[315] It is not necessary to plan for Society. Society is inevitably present in any school in how the children are, what the youth aspire to, what the teachers have mastered and can teach. This is the existing curriculum; the problem is, by scholarship, to outgrow it. And one is stuck with this curriculum, for—no matter what philosophers or administrators propose—nothing else will really be studied.

Kenneth Anderson—The Therapeutic as Rights Talk

Kenneth Anderson
"A New Class of Lawyers: The Therapeutic as Rights Talk"
(1996)

[1072] ..."social trustee professionalism"... Professional life was guided not only by technical expertise, but additionally it "promised to be guided by an appreciation of the important social ends it served. ...
[1073]
... a marriage of technical expertise and social purpose... Morally, it was based on authority and not merely on efficiency...

Over the last thirty years, Brint notes, this idea of the professions "has become increasingly disconnected from functions perceived to be central to the public welfare and more exclusively connected to the idea of 'expert knowledge'". ...

... From a sociological perspective, expertise is now a resource sold to bidders in the market for skilled labor. ...

The shift in attitudes of the professional classes, or at least those holding market-ready knowledge, has resulted in what Brint calls a "separation of community orientation and expert authority." It goes far, he believes and I agree, towards explaining the increasing gap between the (ever-remoter but evermore powerful) expert and the (increasingly resentful) mass of others, who are themselves in the grip, rather than control, of the market.

Both Brint and Kronman emphasize the instrumentalist, transactional, mobile ethos of the contemporary professional, and both stress that these characteristics are consistent with creatures who do not believe themselves to have any grip on "ends," such as the public welfare espoused by the older social trustee professionalism, except as temporarily and contingently defined by bidders in the market for expert services. Brint goes even further, based upon his empirical research into the attitudes of professionals, and notes that today:

even people in the original fee-for-service professions rarely point to the social importance of their work as justification for social distinction. Instead, they justify differences between themselves and other people by discussing the kinds of skills involved in their work . . . 'I see no reason to think that our

[1074]

work is more important to society than the work of an electrician or an auto mechanic,' said one life scientist, expressing the views of many. There is an appealing note of democratic egalitarianism in this statement, but in the background there is, more importantly, the triumph of expertise as a basis of distinction that requires no moral vaulting.

Well, that is a darn good point, and it darn well ought to apply to artists too, who tend, IMHO, to find ourselves wildly both under- and over-valued in relation to electricians and auto mechanics, depending on who is doing the (mis-)valuing.

One might therefore think...that the moral condition of the contemporary professional is essentially relativist, a refusal to take stands on the ends of social policy. Expertise, as Brint puts it in his well-wrought phrase, is its own vaulting; it needs no other, and indeed is capable of recognizing no other—except the bidding of the market.

If there is to be any legitimate basis for own-vaulting, it would be found, I think, in the particular manners and processes of acquiring the expertise, less so (perhaps paradoxically) in how it is dispensed. Surely these formal processes of education and training have changed as drastically as, and concurrently with, those other, broader social processes which have delivered the separation of community orientation and expert authority and are ever further stratifying the matter of being in the grip, rather than control, of the market.

Perhaps this makes it very difficult (and meaningless too) to sort out the effects of one from the other; I cannot help but think regardless that becoming a musican and becoming a doctor actually were more similar processes in times past than they are now, even though the rhetoric of the contemporary Cultural Entrepreneur by which this comparison has been colloquialized is of quite recent vintage.

Brint notes this simulataneous relativistic refusal to take stands on the moral ends of social policy coupled with the contemporary professional's assertion that expertise is its own authority and source of legitimacy in observing that on social issues

many professionals now have views that are better described as libertarian than liberal. Professionals very frequently want government to stay out of issues involving moral choices, and they even tend to take a stance in favor of community self-determination when it comes to the purposes of education and other socializing institutions. This tells more than is immediately apparent about the character of contemporary professionalism. Very little could be as distant from the spirit of the old professionalism—with its emphasis on community stewardship and cultural authority—as this shift toward libertarian views on issues related to cultural choice and social relations. It is the political hallmark of a new "expert" stratum with strong interests in marketable knowledge and weaker concerns about the relationship between community and authority.

Yet Brint's does not seem to me to be the only interpretation of this data.

I sure hope not
,

because

equating a

libertarian

belief
in

community self-determination

with

a
contemptible

weakness

of

concerns about the relationship between community and authority

this

seems

rather

jaundiced

.

From my own experience, I would suggest...that the apprently modest instrumentalist claim that professionals
[1075]
do not privilege ends masks, for many lawyers and perhaps a wider range of professionals, not a deficit of ends, but instead an excess of them. Many professionals, especially lawyers, in my experience, in fact have such a deep attachment to ends that any discussion of them with those who might disagree is quite literally pointless.

I think he is on to something very important here.

The silence of expert elites about ends can wrongly appear to betoken indifference or a modesty about an attachment to ends. Whereas, I would suggest it may actually stem from a belief that there is no point and no moral need to convince anyone, especially those who might disagree with you, of the virtue of one's ends. The diffidence may be strategic. It is better to be silent as to ends in any form of discourse that would require you to acknowledge other views as equal in stature to your own; it is better to present your own as the fait accompli...
[1076]
... In my own experience, the professional world is filled not with people who have no fixed beliefs, but with people who have so very, very many—but are unwilling to admit to them as such because that would require arguing their merits without the crutch of reporting them as expert opinion. If there is anything to this observation, then contemporary professionalism consists of considerably more than the auction of skilled services in a market. Such strong attachments to social ends lead to a hierarchical and anti-
[1077]
democratic division between the experts and everyone who lacks the credentials and language to challenge the pronouncements of the experts.

Well, color me simplistic, but if the very idea of expertise is so much permitted to exist, then there cannot be any real basis on which non-experts might challenge experts in their own practices. It seems to me the real question is how a community produces its experts and how their mandate is bestowed. And at that point the reclamation of expertise from the relativist refusal to take stands on the ends of social policy would seem not merely to suggest but to require a localist (which is NOT the same thing as a libertarian!) orientation.

It is not implausible to characterize this division as a class divide between professionals and the rest of society. But this observation brings us to consideration of a theory that can account for it in class terms, the so-called theory of the New Class.

Tell me more.

[1090] When lawyering becomes the means to infuse therapeutic ends into the public and private by privileged access to the dividing line between them, then notwithstanding all its talk of rights, it becomes a profoundly illiberal profession. In one of my own very few conversations with Lasch, in 1991, I put this to him. He responded that he saw lawyers as an essentially New Class conduit for the authoritarianism of the regime of public therapy. This Essay has, therefore, sought to set out at least the form of argument...for what that might mean, in order to ask what happens to lawyers and the law when the dominant paradigm of social control becomes therapeutic but its language remains the language of rights.

Beyond that, Lasch said, the issue really was the transformation of rights talk from a liberal discourse...into a therapeutic discourse. Yet, he went on, the specification of that transformation was something that needed to be examined from within the law
[1091]
and the legal profession; it was a task, he thought, peculiarly appropriate to lawyers and peculiarly difficult for intellectual historians like himself.

So perhaps Kronman ought to look further afield than he does for an answer to the unhappiness of lawyers; perhaps he ought to take a frankly class, and not just market, view of lawyers, and consider their place in a specifically therapeutic society. If he were to do so, he might well conclude that today's lawyers are, if anything, over-professionalized, and unhappy in part because they sense, as others sense, the brittleness of professional identity and its inability alone to sustain the human spirit... Brint too, having demolished one version of the New Class thesis, perhaps ought to consider the continued relevance of another, that of the New Class in service to monopoly capital maintaining its grip upon a culture of several narcissisms.

As for Lasch, the issue of the New Class and its lawyers is authoritarianism. In an age when the therapeutic has appropriated rights talk, and with it lawyers, turning it and them into agents of New Class authoritarianism and social control, the real question that needs to be answered is why there exists the continued "hegemony within the public culture of an essentially indeterminate and at the same time absolutist discourse of rights." The answer Lasch gave by the end of his life was that it predominates because, far from being merely a language of individual liberty or even unbridled individual license...it is today a language of state authority, a language of therapeutic paternalism; those who actually dream of being "liberals," in Morris' sense, will not reclaim rights talk any time soon. ...

Lawyers are deeply complicit in this colonization of the language of rights by the culture of therapy. They participate because it serves the agenda of a class that, unfamiliar with democracy except as an impediment to its social engineering, is incapable of any form of discourse that is not directed from the top to the bottom. Expertise, particularly in the social sciences, is a language of hierarchy and social control, and lawyers today, as a professional formation within the New Class, deploy the language of rights to the end of making the therapeutic coercive in the public sphere.

It is not a glorious profession because it is not a glorious class, and lawyers are right to be unhappy.

[emailed to self, 9 December, 2021]

Lasch—Educating the Whole Child

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[128] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.

...

Lasch—Submission as the Line of Least Resistance

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[140] As long as authority was internalized in the form of conscience, people either complied with it because it appeared reasonable or resisted in the name of a higher authority. Today, however, authority appears as something altogether alien, sometimes contemptible, sometimes truly terrible, more often merely as an inconvenience, in the person of a nagging mother, teacher, or employer. It is not so mich arbitrary force—the traditional enemy of bourgeois liberalism—that arouses resistance today as the attempt to hold someone up to a given set of standards. The narcissist resents being judged more than he fears being punished. He submits to punishment even when he rejects its rightness, as an arbitrary exercise of superior force in an arbitrary world, but he does not like to be asked to live up to expectations. This is why the ideology of nonbinding commitments and open-ended relationships—an ideology that registers so faithfully the psychic needs of the late twentieth century—condemns all expectations, standards, and codes of conduct as "unrealistic." It condemns the attempt to live up to expectations on the grounds that "role-playing" subverts psychic stability and health. The therapeutic community insists that only equals can enter into
[141]
satisfactory interpersonal relations ("peer-bonding"); but equality in this connection means simply an absence of demands. Equals are "peers" not by virtue of common attainments but by generational default (hence the prominence of the generational theme in modern sociology, radical politics, advertising, propaganda, and promotion). Equals ask nothing, understand everything, forgive everything. The idealized comradeship of siblings, united not by undying passion or even mutual respect but merely by a common resentment of adult authority, becomes the model of the perfect marriage, the perfect affair, the perfect "one-to-one relationship," or for that matter the commune or extended family—the distinctions have become increasingly immaterial.

...

[185] In a study of the American high school, Edgar Z. Friedenberg found that high school students regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution." In response to a series of hypothetical problems in social control, Friedenberg's subjects rejected both libertarian and openly authoritaran solutions, justifying their preference for social engineering on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Thus if a teacher finds an unruly student smoking in the washroom, he should neither "beat him coolly and with emotional restraint" or publicly humiliate him, on the one hand, nor ignore the offense, on the other hand, as a minor infraction that should not add to the student's reputation as a troublemaker. Having rejected authoritarian solutions for reasons that were "cautiously bureaucratic rather than indignantly humane," the students voted overwhelmingly that the offender should be sent to the school psychiatrist. Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, would enlist his own cooperation in the school's attempt to control him.

...

[187] Friedenberg's students "believe that enforcement of regulations, rather than any internal stability or homeostasis, is what keeps society from breaking down into disorder." They regard law not as a body of authoritative commandments but as "an indispensible technique for controlling behavior." This distinction goes to the root of the contemporary situation; it explains the growing devotion to "law and order" in a permissive society. The demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to attempt a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law enforcement comes to be seen as the only effective deterrent in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and wrong. The campaign to empty law of moral content—to banish the ideas of right and wrong and to replace them with an ethic of human relations—has had an unintended consequence. Divorced from the concept of justice, the law becomes nothing more than an instrument by means of which authorities enforce obedience. In former times, men regarded law as the moral consensus of the community—a means of "setting up categories," in Friedenberg's words, "under which society could subsume and isolate those whom it defined as miscreant." Today they see law merely as a means for controlling behavior. "Neglect law enforcement and the social structure decays."

The prevalence of this view does not mean, however, that subjects and citizens regard authorities as "essentially benign" or hesistate "to discuss the possibility," in Friedenberg's words, "that a social institution . . . might be hostile or destructive in its purpose." On the contrary, official protestations of benevolence elicit contempt or cynical indifference. "Apathy," widely deplored by political scientists and other observers of the political scene, greets all public statements in a society saturated with public lies. The official pretense that officials only want to "help" is rightly regarded as the biggest lie of all. People submit to the rules of social life, then, because submission usually represents the line of least resistance, not because they believe in the justice of the rules or the good intentions of those who promulgate them. The public takes it for granted that power corrupts those who wield it, but it regards this fact not with indignation but with a resigned sense of its inevitability. Dis-
[188]
belief in official pretensions, which formerly might have aroused resistance to the state, becomes another form of obedience, another acknowledgement of the way things are. Men submit not to authority but to reality.

If submission rests not on loyalty to a moral consensus but simply on a belief in the need for law enforcement, it rests on a shaky foundation. Men break the rules whenever the opportunity presents itself, not only because infractions of the rules so often go undetected, but also because authorities themselves conspire with offenders to overlook such violations. The contmept for authority, which leads to rising rates of crime and to the "legitimation of the ripoff," originates in part in the ease with which authorities can be corrupted. Yet the corruptibility of authority serves in a curious way to strengthen the hand of those who wield power. The official who winks at an offense puts the offender in his debt. Moreover, he exposes the offender to blackmail. He keeps people in line precisely by overlooking their transgressions, a technique of control that closely resembles the "flattery of the lie," by means of which industrial supervisors assert power over subordinates by tolerating falsehood and inefficiency. Lawbreaking contributes to law enforcement. The complicity between the criminal and the crime fighter, the subordinate and the superior, the violators of rules and the enforcers of rules, contributes to the maintenance of order by keeping troublemakers in a state of chronic uneasiness.

Lasch—Gilligan's Island

Christopher Lasch
Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism
(1997)

"6. Gilligan's Island"

[129] ...Gilligan's data often seem to be at odds with her conclusions. She and Brown deplore the "self-silencing" that sustains a "patina of niceness and piety," but the impression conveyed by their description of school life is a good deal more grim than these words would suggest. Niceness and piety are not much in evidence at Laurel School in
[130]
Cleveland. The social tone, moreover, is set not by adults, but by adolescent cliques with their gossip, their whispered secrets, and their rigorously enforced structure of popularity. ...

Gilligan's early work celebrated women's "concern with relationships" as the source of their "morality of responsibility"; but the snobbery and the backbiting that prevail at Laurel School might well give her pause about the "human strength" of "affiliative ways of living." The ugly side of adolescent sociability suggests that a "web of relationships" can be suffocating, inhibiting, and oppressive rather than "creative and cooperative." ...

[Gilligan] and Brown observe in passing that it seems "profoundly misleading" to describe women as "connected" and men as "separate." Such characterizations, they say, ignore the "depths of men's desire for relationship and the anger women feel about not having power in the world." But this is a trivial objection. They would have done better to remind them-
[131]
selves, on the strength of their own evidence, that women are just as likely as men to misuse power, to relish cruelty, and to indulge the taste for cruelty in enforcing conformity. ...

Brown and Gilligan would be uncomfortable, I suspect, with the suggestion that women and men are equals in their capacity not only for kindness but for cruelty. It is an article of faith, among those who claim to speak for the oppressed and exploited, that black people, say, cannot be accused of racism or that women should not be judged by "masculine" standards of justice. Early feminists refused to absolve their sisters in this way. Indeed they were sometimes accused of hating women, because they dwelled unsparingly on the petty tyrannies by means of which women sought to compensate themselves for the narrowness of their lives.

The demand for access to the great world of politics and learning derived its original force from the observation that narrow circumstances breed narrow minds. But when feminists began to argue for their rights on the grounds that it would give "maternal influence" a wider sphere, they sacrificed moral realism to political expediency. They turned conventional stereotypes to political advantage but lost the ability to explain what makes the world of women, unless it is integrated into a more impersonal world where the quality of ideas or workmanship counts for more than "relationships," so confining to the spirit, so productive of petty jealousies, so highly charged with envy and resentment.

[134] Gilligan and Brown read the annals of Laurel...as another chapter in the "conflict between integrity and care," with a subplot that vaguely alludes to Little Women, The Secret Garden, and other classic tales of enterprising girlhood. But the absence of adult ideals, not their ruthless imposition, is the real story here. The girls at Laurel suffer from the effects of generational segregation, the deflation of ideals, the loss of an impersonal public order. In most societies known to historians or to anthropoligists, the young get an education by working alongside adults. The requirement that adolescents spend most of their time in school is a fairly recent innovation, closely linked to the rise of modern nation-states.

Formal schooling prolongs adolescence, and at the same time walls it off from unsupervised, pedagogically unmediated contact with the world of adults. Fortunately, schools are never wholly self-contained. Adolescents avid for knowledge of the world have always managed to evade pedagogical supervision and to acquire vicarious experience of adult ways, largely through the medium of unauthorized reading. ...
[134]
It is only in our own time that schools have fully committed themselves to the dogma of immediacy, to the deadly notion that young people can be interested only in things directly touching their own lives. The replacement of historical narratives by the study of "social problems," the preference for literary works with a contemporary setting and an adolescent cast of characters, and the attempt to sanitize the curriculum by eliminating anything that might give offense all serve to discourage imaginative identification with images of the exotic or unfamiliar. Adolescents will not get much sense of a life beyond adolescence from a reading list limited to Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[170] The therapeutic conception of insanity, disease, and crime repudiated theological assumptions of their inevitability and relieved the patient of responsibility for his actions, insisting that he was neither possessed nor willfully sinning, but sick. The new conception of the family as an asylum similarly repudiated fatalism and the assumption of original sin, insisting on the child's innocence and plasticity. ... Whereas the church, in attempting to stamp out sex, had merely made it an obsession, these theorists maintained, marriage put sex at the service of procreation and encouraged a healthy acceptance of the body. This...had demonstrably better effects on the health of the individual and the community, according to bourgeois moralists, than the church's denial of the body.

From the beginning, a medical view of reality thus underlay attempts to remodel private life. The struggle between the new remissions and the old proscriptions, between personal fulfillment and
[171]
self-sacrifice, between the ideology of work and the ideology of creative leisure, began in the nineteenth century. Liberal clergymen themselves participated in the campaign to transform religion into moral and mental hygiene. They allied themselves with a nascent feminism and with the campaign to feminize society by extending the domesticating influence of women to institutions beyond the home. The religion of health had a special appeal to women because of its concern with personal relations, its attempt to substitute domestic enjoyments for the rough and brutal camaraderie of males, and its glorification of the child and of maternal influence on the child's development. The conflict between the work ethic and the therapeutic point of view, which became sharper as the century wore on, also presented itself as a conflict between masculine and feminine "spheres"—the split between business and "culture," the practical and the aesthetic, so characteristic of bourgeois society and of American society in particular.

Lasch—on education, from early essays

Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)

Ch. I, "Origins of the Asylum"

The humanitarian reformers [e.g. Samuel Tuke's York Retreat, founded 1796] consciously or unwittingly took over from the cloister the principle that withdrawal from the world is a necessary condition of spiritual cleansing. The results, however, were unexpected: a principle that served very well the needs of an institution into which entrance was voluntary and residence expected to be permanent took on quite different meanings when transferred to places people were forced to enter for a time in the expectation that they would emerge once again into the world, fully prepared for the burdens of citizenship. Whereas the purpose of the monastery was to teach one to live as a monk, the asylum could not very well claim that its ideal product was the ideal inmate of an asylum, tractable, amenable to arbitrary discipline imposed from above, and unable to function outside systems of total control; yet such was in fact the person asylums tended to create.
(p. 8-9)

Lasch—Instrumental and Practical Reason

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

The antidote to instrumental reason is practical reason, not mysticism, spirituality, or the power of "personhood." In the Aristotelian tradition of political theory, phronesis or practical reason describes the development of character, the moral perfection of life, and the virtues specific to various forms of practical activity. Technique, on the other hand, concerns itself exclusively with the means appropriate to a given end. The highest form of practice, for Aristotle and his followers, is politics, which seeks to promote the good life by conferring equal rights on all citizens and by establishing rules and conventions designed not so much to solve the problems of social living as to encourage citizens to test themselves against demanding standards of moral excellence... The Aristotelian conception of practice has more in common with play than with activities defined as practical in the modern sense. Practices in the Aristotelian sense have nothing to do, as such, with the production of useful objects or with satisfying material needs. ...

The classical conception carries with it a certain contempt for the production of material comforts and useful objects...; but it nevertheless enables us to identify one of the disinctive features of the industrial worldview: its instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity. Instrumentalism regards the relation of ends and means as purely external, whereas the older tradition, now almost forgotten, holds that the choice of the means appropriate to a given end has to be considered as it contributes to internal goods as well. In other words, the choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities for self-understanding and self-mastery. Industrial societies conceive of the extension of human powers only as the replacement of human labor by machinery. As work and politics lose their educative content and degenerate into pure technique, the very distinction between technique and practice becomes incomprehensible. Industrial societies have almost completely lost sight of the possibility that work and politics can serve as character-forming disciplines. These activities are now understood strictly as means of satisfying material needs. Moral ideas, meanwhile, lose their connection with practical life and with the virtues specific to particular practices and become confused instead with the exercise of purely personal choices and the expression of personal prejudices and tastes, which can be neither justified nor explained and which should therefore not be regarded as binding on anyone else.

(pp. 253-255)

As regards the extrinsic benefits of music education, there are at least two ways to parse this

degenerat[ion] into pure technique
.

There is the

pure technique
of the
soulless technician

and
the

pure technique
of the
postindustrial worker

.

These twin degenerations have very different ramifications, but they come from the same place: the desire for control; which incidentally, for Lasch, also underlies the elite desire to escape the common lot and to divest from civic enagagement and public services.

It is my experience of music educators (and of my own younger self) that the throttle of control is, in the sphere of education, much more delicate than we would like it to be.

Precisely because

the choice of the means appropriate to a given end has to be considered
,

it follows that when the "end" itself has simply been dictated to the student rather than arising from their own inclinations, the search for "means" can never be all that it could and should be.

Indeed,

The Aristotelian conception of practice has more in common with play than with activities defined as practical in the modern sense
;

and there is precious little play in running scales and arpeggios unless you yourself have decided that this is what you really, dearly want to be doing.

This is not a new idea. It is not imcompatible, I don't think, with a traditional, technique-centric music pedagogy. What it is fully imcompatible with, rather, is the desire for control, for accountability, for measurable outcomes, for teacher sets clear expectations for students. It ceases to be possible after the instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity which attaches to the doctrine that music makes kids smart.

At this point in history, it is essential to question the boundless confidence in human powers that acknowledges no limits, which finds its ultimate expression in the technology of nuclear warfare. But this cannot be done by disavowing all forms of purposive intelligence or by dissolving the subject-object distinction that allegedly underlies it... Selfhood—an obsolete idea, according to Bateson and other proponents of the "new consciousness"—is precisely the inescapble awareness of man's contradictory place in the natural order of things.

This "awareness" of inescapble contradiction seems to me to lead unavoidably to at least some of the central conceits of postmodernism, the same conceits which Lasch quite vehemently rejects in his discussion of art. This I find puzzling.

Advocates of a cultural revolution echo the dominant culture not only in their confusion of practice with technique but in their equation of selfhood with the rational ego. Like their opponents, they see rationality as the essence of selfhood. Accordingly, they argue for a "resurrection of the body," for "feminine" intuition and feeling against the instrumental reason of the male, for the alleged aimlessness of play, and for the "poetic imagination," as Bateson puts it, as a corrective to "false reifications of the 'self.'" The distinguishing characteristic of selfhood, however, is not rationality but the critical awareness of man's divided nature. Selfhood expresses itself in the form of a guilty conscience, the painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations. "Bad conscience is inseparable from freedom," Jacques Ellul reminds us. "There is no freedom without an accompanying critical attitude to the self," and this "excess of freedom and the critical turning back upon the self that freedom begets," he adds, "are at the source of dialectical thinking and the dialectical interpretation of history."
(pp. 257-258)



As for the party of the superego, it equates conscience not with an awareness of the dialectical relationships between freedom and the capacity for destruction but with adherance to a received body of authoritative moral law. It hankers for the restoration of punitive sanctions against disobedience, above all for the restoration of fear.

A perfect capsule rejoinder here of the view that an armed society is a polite society.

It forgets that conscience (as distinguished from the superego) originates not so much in the "fear of God" as in the urge to make amends. Conscience arises not so much from the dread of reprisals by those we have injured or wish to injure as in the capacity for mourning and remorse.

(pp. 258-259)

Lasch—Education and Politics

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

The great weakness in [Horace] Mann's educational philosophy was the assumption that education takes place only in schools. Perhaps it is unfair to say that Mann bequeathed this fatal assumption to subsequent generations of educators... An inability to see beyond the school after all—a tendency to speak as if schooling and education were synonymous terms—should probably be regarded as an occupational hazard of professional educators, a form of blindness that is built into the job. Still, Mann was one of the first to give it official sanction.
(pp. 151-152)

one begins to see that Mann wanted to keep politics out of the school not only because he was afraid that his system would be torn apart by those who wished to use it for partisan purposes but because he distrusted political activity as such. It produced an "inflammation of the passions." It generated controversy—a necessary part of education, it might be argued, but in Mann's eyes, a waste of time and energy. It divided men instead of bringing them together. For these reasons Mann sought not only to insulate the school from political pressures but to keep political history out of the curriculum.
(p. 153)

History has given way to an infantilized version of sociology, in obedience to the misconceived principle that the quickest way to engage children's attention is to dwell on what is closest to home: their families, their neighborhoods; the local industries; the technologies on which they depend. A more sensible assumption would be that children need to learn about faraway places and olden times before they can make sense of their immediate surroundings.

I feel very much this way as an adult. Unfortunately the issue of engag[ing] children's attention is not so easily dispensed with. Not for lack of trying nor for lack of opportunities to experiment, I certainly have not yet figured out how to do it; and I have not forgotten (I cannot forget) how difficult-to-engage I was as a child.

There is something of the ancient conflict between rationalism and empiricism here, but considered through the lens of development rather than epistemology itself...which is pretty interesting.

Since most children have no opportunity for extended travel, and since travel in our world is not very broadening anyway, the school can provide a substitute—but not if it clings to the notion that the only way to "motivate" them is to expose them to nothing not already familiar, nothing not immediately applicable to themselves.
(p. 159)

Lasch—Omnicompetence

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

According to Walter Lippman...the "omnicompetent citizen" was an anachronism in the age of specialization. In any case, most citizens, he thought, cared very little about the substance of public policy. The purpose of journalism was not to encourage public debate but to provide experts with the information on which to base intelligent decisions.
(p. 10)

(This "in opposition to John Dewey and other veterans of the progressive movement.")

Lippman's argument rested on a sharp distinction between opinion and science. Only the latter, he thought, could claim to be objective. ... This cult of professionalism had a decisive influence on the development of modern journalism. Newspapers might have served as extensions of the town meeting. Instead they embraced a misguided ideal of objectivity and defined their goal as the circulation of reliable information—the kind of information, that is, that tends not to promote debate but circumvent it. The most curious feature in all this, of course, is that although Americans are now drowning in information...surveys regularly report a steady decline in their knowledge of public affairs. In the "age of information" the American people are notoriously ill informed. ... They have become almost as incompetent as their critics have always claimed—a reminder that it is debate itself, and debate alone, that gives rise to the desire for usable information. In the absence of democratic exchange, most people have no incentive to master the knowledge that would make them capable citizens.
(pp. 11-12)

a misguided ideal of objectivity

the kind of information, that is, that tends not to promote debate but circumvent it

it is debate itself, and debate alone, that gives rise to the desire for usable information

All brilliant points.

The misguided ideal of objectivity also prevails, I think, in certain academic milieux. To be sure, academia is the place for it. There should always be some of this kind of academic work being done as a necessary safeguard against the total unmooring of discourse from its empirical foundations. But there are, nonetheless, many academic projects where the conceit to objectivity is counterproductive for precisely the reasons laid out by Lasch above; if many of these are one-off projects, nonetheless they collectively comprise a sizable chunk of academic turf. Further, it is always worth asking whether the rigidly objective academic posture has emerged organically from the task at hand or if it is a merely calculated piece of theater designed to give a certain impression to a certain audience for a certain self-interested reason.

The circumvent[ion] of debate by appealing to hard facts (which usually are just hard to verify) has a history worthy of its own book. Interestingly, Lasch begs an exemption for religion here, precisely where some of us (as he is aware) would think of it first.

Priding themselves ["devoutly open-minded intellectuals"] on their emancipation from religion, they misunderstand religion as a set of definitive, absolute dogmas resistant to any kind of intelligent appraisal. They miss the discipline against fanaticism in religion itself. The "quest for certainty," as Dewey called it, is nowhere condemned with such relentless passion as in the prophetic tradition common to Judaism and Christianity, which warns again and again against idolatry, the idolatry of the church included. Many intellectuals assume that religion satisfies the need for moral and emotional security—a notion that even a passing knowledge of religion would dispel.
(p. 90)

These are beautiful thoughts, but I can't help but think we have passed through incomplete evidence here, i.e. merely the worst of the "intellectuals" and the best of the "religious."

As for debate itself, this is so brilliant and so important, but damned if it is not also extremely unpleasant nowadays. Because we live in the age of information I have often found myself simply unable to engage (whether to agree or disagree hardly matters) with much of anyone too far outside my own political orientation, because their arguments, whether well-crafted or ill-constructed on the rhetorical level, so often invoke supporting evidence which I am entirely unable to evaluate for sheer lack of familiarity. Regular competence is elusive enough; omnicompetence feels unattainable. Human beings cannot become "omnicompetent" on any larger scale than the village. By affinity I am a big-city person to the bone, but on a purely rational level it is becoming ever more difficult to ignore this problem.

We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.
(p. 163)



The attempt to bring others around to our own point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponents' arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it (as Lippman thought of it) as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents' minds—something that can happen only if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of thought and expression, and sound judgment. As Lippman noted, small communities are the classic locus of democracy—not because they are "self-contained," however, but simply because they allow everyone to take part in public debates.
(pp. 170-171)

We lose sight of this nowadays because we seem veritably surrounded by others' "views," hemmed in on all sides by them as it were. But perhaps the real story is how many people don't articulate anything in particular, perhaps because they have nothing to articulate, and moreover (as Lasch would have it here) because they don't have to.

Bodies and Artifacts (i)—Sennett's Graffiti

Richard Sennett
The Conscience of the Eye (1990)

I often saw this graffiti [of the New York subways] in my mind's eye when I listened to my son play the violin. The Suzuki violin method teaches a child to play music before he or she knows the names of the notes; the method stresses beauty of tone and expression from the first lesson. When a pupil first begins the violin in the Suzuki method, the teacher therefore performs a generous act. On the neck of the violin the teacher tapes down two little strips of blue plastic, so that the student knows exactly where to place his or her first, second, or third fingers... The beginner is thus spared that excruciating experience of playing sour, out-of-tune notes. By converting the violin into something like a guitar, the teacher makes the student the gift of pitch.

At first the student accepts this gift without reservation. You put your fingers down exactly where the tapes are and that's that—you've solved the problem of pitch. In this early stage one of the tapes on my son's violin once came off by accident; he asked me to fix the instrument so that he could play again. I suggested, with the parent's knowing, infuriating helpfulness, that he find instead where the finger goes by listening to the sound it makes. This proposal would have robbed my son, however, of the certainty with which he began.

As the lessons went forward he learned more and more to listen to how he sounded, and in the process those little bits of tape began to annoy him too. There was the day that he learned that the violin, made of natural materials, changes its tone according to the temperature and humidity of the weather; some days the blue plastic bands were accurate guides, other days not. Then he learned that the same note has different shades, depending on the key in which it appears. Perhaps his most decisive experience in using these tapes was the month in which he found out how to create vibrato on a string. ... As he moved through each of these stages, hearing more, the plastic tape seemed an arbitrary answer, precluding the ear's discoveries. About a year after he began, he removed the plastic tape with which I once refused to "fix" the violin.

Such progress on the violin is what musicians call learning to listen with a third ear. It can be described more philosophically: the student learns there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty. In music concreteness means the student hears as if he or she were listening to another person playing; one's playing then becomes a tangible thing to be studied. Uncertainty means, in music, that the more the student can hear himself or herself in this way, the less satisfying musically are gestures that are at first easiest for the hand. My son, once he began to listen with a third ear, experimented with holding his left hand in odd postures that produce sour notes under some conditions and sweet notes under others; when he conducted these experiments on his left hand he was less concerned with problem-solving than with problematizing.

It was, as I say, as my secretarial self wandered over the relation of the concrete and the uncertain in music during those scrapings necessarily attendant upon executing "Twinkle, Twinkle Litle Star," that the graffiti of the subway appeared in my mind. The metal subway walls or the brick walls of buildings had no inherent character for those who sprayed them; these were planes to write over, whereas my son was learning to explore things for their own properties. But the exploration of his materials had a disturbing result. What made him engage even more concretely with them was uncertainty about how to draw sound out of a wooden box fitted with strings. This education was turning him outward, to judge his own expression, orienting his senses to results rather than intentions. It was an education in the "it," whereas the children making graffiti knew only the declarations of the "I." To speak of making things in an exposed condition...is to talk about creating uncertainty and possibility in a thing. An untaped violin makes, in Hickeringill's diction, discoveries to its player. And there is a virtue to making something as an exposed, uncertain "it" rather than a declarative "I": the violinist became more critical of the quality of the expression than the graffitist, for he could judge the sounds as things in themselves.

Our culture puts a great value on concreteness, at the expense of abstraction. ... The emphasis on making things concrete is a reflection of the value modern culture puts on objects—objects endowed with solidity and integrity. ... The uncertain seems to belong in the domain of insubstantial hesitation and tender-hearted, inward subjectivity. But toleration of uncertainty is as much a part of scientific investigation as of artistic creativity. A scientist who proceeds methodically from one self-evident fact to the next discovers nothing. ... Focusing on the concrete is satisfied by discoveries which reveal the unexpected and the problematic. It is in this sense that there is a correlation between concreteness and uncertainty.

Power enters into this correlation. The implication in a Miesian, sublime object is of domination by the maker over the eyes of those who passively appreciate his or her creations, whereas a more uncertain object should invite reciprocal intervention. Graffiti on a New York street reflects this power relationship: the walls of the "I" dominate others who had no choice in their making, who cannot participate in their form, who can only submit to them—though with no awe. The graffitist repeats over and over again his "I"...he confirms his sign. This "I" establishes an aggressive rather than an exploratory relation to the environment.

(pp. 207-209)

Stephenson, PTMC—Postulates

William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)

1. Play is distinguishable from work.
Play is disinterested, self-sufficient, an interlude from work. It brings no material gain. (Prizes are for show; amateurs play for fun, professionals for money.)
Work is not disinterested, is not an interlude in the day for most people. It produces goods, services or ideas, etc., by application of effort for a purpose.

2. Much work and play is subject to social control, and some, instead, is a matter of convergent selectivity.
Social control is the way in which cultures function from the standpoint of involuntary, categorical imperatives. (It is said that everyone must work, that idleness is sinful, that work is a duty and one's salvation, and so on.) Social control induces conformity, consensus, and established custom or is an outcome of such cultural conditions.
Convergent selectivity is relative freedom from social control, tending toward individuality of choice in behavior. The behavior is more voluntary. Convergencies may be chaotic, as in a gold rush; or they may be ecstatic, as in mountain-climbing. All are directed toward individuality and self-existence.

3. Work and play which are subject to social control are supported by inner belief systems, that is, latent or inner beliefs of individuals, formed by childish introjections and early internalizations in primary group (home) situations. One's religious, political, economic, and other important values and beliefs are fixed early in life and are thereafter largely immutable.
Conditions of convergent selectivity are of a more superficial nature and concern fads, manners, fashions, taste, and the like. Moral and ethical sanctions are largely bypassed, no issues are involved, no deep controversies, but only more or less acceptable difference in taste or minor matters of opinion.

4. Public opinion is subject to social control; advertising, drama, art, and so on involve convergent selectivity.

5. The self is differently involved in conditions of social control and convergent selectivity. I distinguish self from ego. The former is overtly attitudinal, and the latter a matter of mental structure.
Self-attitudes are developed largely in interactions under social control. (The boy who wins a prize at school adds to his self-stature thereby, and almost all that we are in selfhood respects is given to us in relation to social controls.) But the self so put upon us is to a degree false—a façade only. The person has to be what custom or status demands of him.
Convergent selectivity is an opportunity for the individual to exist for himself. Such existence is experienced as enjoyment, contentment, serenity, or the like. Certain free aspects of self are possible outcomes of convergent play.
The mass media, plays, art, and the theater generally offer opportunities for convergent selectivity. The self so involved is enhanced. There is an increase of self-awareness—typical, for example, of the mountain climber. There is no gain in social or material respects but much gain in one's self-existence.

...

7. Ordinary life would be impossible without communication, in school, church, business, on the farm, and so on. ... It is important, however, to distinguish between that part of communication supporting social control and that part of it offering opportunities to convergent selectivity.
... Communication in conditions of social control is a "mover" in national and individual development: it informs a nation of its work, its five-year plans; it teaches literacy and technology; it develops industry and extends markets. Further, it is involved in all urbanization, industrialization, and educational growth.
Mass communication, literature, drama, and the like serve instead for sociability and self-existence. These are vehicles for communication-pleasure—directly in the enjoyment they enjoin, and indirectly in the social conversations they support.

8. Convergent communication, being communication-pleasure, serves mainly as a "fill" in mass communication. The "important" communication concerns social control matters. The "fill" serves to maintain status quo position, since it serves no "work" purposes. It pleases, entertains, and projects fashions and fads. It is basically aesthetical, and amoral, a-ethical. Its function is not to relieve anxieties but to increase the sum total of self-existing possibilites.
(The "human interest slant" given to popular "news" put the reader in the position of a confidant, reflecting inner-experience, inducing reverie about himself and so on—all pointed toward more existence for oneself.)

9. Culture develops in play, and play enters into social control and convergent selectivity situations alike. But the play in religious practices, the armed forces, the law courts, in diplomacy, professional practices, is always more or less subject to internalized belief systems; deeply held values, loyalties, needs, and ethical matters are everywhere evident.
The play in convergent selective situations is at best indifferent to such values, needs, and beliefs.

10. There are correspondences between social character and social control and convergency. Traditional and inner-directed forms of social character, such as Riesman describes, are formed in relation to social controls. Other-direction, instead is fashioned more by convergent selectivity; it is characterized by communication-pleasure.

11. The mass media, in much that pertains to social control as well as convergent selectivity, do not communicate truth or reality but only a semblance of it—of a fictional, representational, or charismatic character. Reaching the truth is a matter for science, technology, reason, and work. Charisma, imagery, and fiction are characteristic of convergencies.
But this is not to be despised. On the contrary, reality is so complex that its symbolical representation is essential to give it meanings that ordinary people can appreciate. Politics is conversation about freedom, democracy, liberty...issues which need bear little relation to ongoing real conditions or legislative actions. But all these can be good fun, that is, good communication-pleasure.
(pp. 192-195)

What is a bit bizarre about all of this, despite Stephenson having prefaced it with seemingly every available caveat, is that it seems not so simple to really draw the line between communication-as-mover and communication-as-fill. Or, perhaps it is not possible to draw this distinction generally, but it is (potentially) possible to draw it with respect to particular individuals, and just maybe groups too, based on their apperceptive profiles, i.e. what they are apt to notice and what they are apt to ignore.

That being as it is, who could deny that music education now takes place almost exclusively in contexts

supporting social control
?

The final victory of access over elitism cannot be merely to carve out a place for the arts in amongst the elite social control mechanisms.

Rather, arts education must at some point take in the realm of

convergent selectivity
,

of the

fill

which

serves no work purposes
,

which is

basically aesthetical, and amoral, a-ethical
,

and most of all indeed, whose

function is not to relieve anxieties but to increase the sum total of self-existing possibilites
.

If Stephenson is so much as in the ballpark here, then one obvious implication of his theory is that the education system (the whole thing, not just music) is a social control mechanism through and through, one which was designed by and for the internalized belief systems of people who are long dead; this then would explain a good deal (not all) of its present dysfunction. Of course we have been hearing this for almost as long as there has been public education, and usually not from the most reliable or disinterested sources. But that doesn't mean it cannot be true now.

Where I personally really start to have trouble here is with the statement that

reality is so complex that its symbolical representation is essential to give it meanings that ordinary people can appreciate
.

First off, from the bird's eye view, the main reason that social reality is now too complex for even extra-ordinary people to grasp has nothing to do with media per se; rather, it is that we today suffer from towering edifices of, in Talebian terms, connectivity without responsiveness. When it is impossible to know the consequences of your actions, it is impossible to act ethically. Not even an ideal media can resolve this problem in its present complexity, and so media is ultimately just another sideshow to the far broader (ultimately broad) issue of recovering humane conditions of scale, materially and psychologically. (No, I'm not holding my breath.)

Moving to the level of national and regional institutions, and notwithstanding the above, I do think Stephenson underrates how the mass media intentionally withholds great swaths of reality which are in fact rather simple and easy-to-appreciate but which conflict, one way or another, with the media's commercial imperatives. If you've grown skeptical or numb in the face of such statements as this, Matt Taibbi's recent book Hate Inc. is worthy of your attention, even if he does gild the lily just a bit.

Finally, considered on the local and microsocial levels, the statement is really just a slightly dressed-up version of the lie that tells the truth trope which prevails in middlebrow literary circles, and as such is subject to all of the same critiques. (See this massive thread for a head start.)

Stephenson is correct that play is essential to a humane existence; but he does not adequately consider that playing with social reality is inherently distorting of that reality and that this cannot, no matter how much fun we have or how hard we try to be mindful about it, truly be free from ethical and moral ramifications. Playing with social reality is playing with fire. It's much safer to play with, say, artistic abstraction or low-stakes athletic competition. Perhaps Stephenson thought he was being pragmatic here. I would contend that such a statement is only truly pragmatic in service of elitism itself.

Stephenson's caveats:

None of these [postulates] is axiomatic. The postulates are not analytic propositions, capable of precise definition. All instead are synthetic complexes with excess meaning. Theorems or hypotheses cannot be derived from them in any logical order.
(p. 192)

Well, okay. But it's not too sporting to offer up such a detailed analysis while maintaining that none of it is axiomatic.