The overall posture and style of this study are so self-consciously disinterested and relativistic as to read like a caricature of postmodern academic writing. This pastiche has lost not merely its sense of humor but its sense of purpose too. The fear of letting a stray value judgment slip out seems to have stultified the author's analytical capabilities. And yet values per se are largely what the study is about. The superficial irony of this is plain enough, but I think it is more than ironic. It is at least mildly disingenuous. In some respects it is cowardly.
The disinterested empirical scholar is discouraged from bringing their own values into the mix because disinterested empiricism cannot, by its own inner logic, operate that way. This book stumbles its way into a subdiscipline where disinterested empiricism is thought to be especially de rigeur but where it is actually quite inadequate. Sammond repeatedly invokes something like "the dominant presence of members of the white, Protestant, progressive middle class in the study of childhood." (7) He repeatedly names and specifies these agents of institutionalized moralization, repeatedly inviting us to consider them by profession, race, and class. Their work, he tells us, was profoundly shaped by classbound values. The fact of classboundedness and the identity of the classes in question are unequivocally named and reiterated. But Sammond seldom names the values themselves, and when he does name them I found it difficult to conjure much righteous indignation.
I do not wish to suggest that there actually is a universal morality. That is not what I believe. I don't think you have to believe it, though, to trip up on the idea that "truthfulness" and "unselfishness" are "middle-class virtues" (85) which cannot be reasonably expected of other classes. To me that sounds a lot like, say, reading being a White thing. Sammond himself probably believes no such things, but he is not allowed to say so, because this is scholarship and mere opinions aren't worth anything. The hubris of progressive sociologists, on the other hand, is an objective fact which can be presented as such, for if there is no universal morality then all progressivism is just a stillborn moral fallacy. Even "truthfulness" cannot mooch a provisional exemption. Truthfulness!
Naturally, the chickens of relativism roost in the hencoop of hypocrisy. What are the moral implications of accommodating the actions of a dishonest or selfish poor person? Does this help them or hurt them? Is it justified merely by the fact that they are poor and you are rich? By the right to cultural self-determination? Liberty? Consequentialism? Echoing overzealous committees everywhere, Sammond could claim that these properly philosophical questions are beyond the scope of his social-scientific study. I agree that they threaten to explode any such study into an unwieldy interdisciplinary patchwork; but I would strongly disagree that they are, literally, outside his scope. His own methods have made these questions essential to his scope and he makes no effort to acknowledge or address this. Instead, the really important takeaway is that most of the reformers were white, Protestant, progressive, and middle-class, whereas not all of their objects were these same things. As it turns out, this is not quite worth writing a book about.
Reformers of any slant in any area of human endeavor are vulnerable to the charge that they have put forth their own values as universal ones. Without this fundamental arrogation there can be no collective social action of any kind. The mere fact of arrogation is endemic, background radiation to the perceptible heat and light of social and political life. The arrogation of reformers is not an urgent sociological issue. What is urgent, I think, and what could have been pursued more doggedly here, is a compelling chronicle of the dynamic interaction between values and institutions. Strictly speaking, the thesis that "discursive circuits constructed around and through media-effect arguments sell products and build careers" (360) does describe a dynamic process, but it begs a lot of questions too. My sense is that Sammond forbid himself as a matter of methodology from opining, judging or blaming, and that by proscribing these things he railroaded himself into a static account rather than a dynamic one. (When your first order of business is to name the race and religion of the principals, it's hard to say much of anything more without offending.)
I also am not convinced, either by this account or by others, that the interaction between the Disney Studio and the reformers Sammond identifies was truly dynamic until quite late in the period he covers. In amongst all of the imbrication and commodification, I noticed that the dates, types and sources of the documents he reproduces throughout the book support my skepticism. Concerned parents created the market and Disney, eventually, seized on it. But Disney already had an enormous market, and progressives had a lot of ideas which were oblique to Disney and to media generally. Following academic convention, Sammond takes a laser-focus on the tiny area of overlap. It turns out there is not nearly as much for him to write about as the length of the book would imply.
If you don't already know something about the reformers Sammond chronicles, you still won't have much of an idea of what their values actually were after reading his book. He detects that the progressives have unduly assumed at least one non-working, stay-at-home parent, a luxury which many working class and immigrant families didn't enjoy; and he points out that child labor has persisted in agriculture (and disproportionately among children of color) long after progressives had more or less succeeded in abolishing it for white children. These are sobering reminders for white, middle-class readers; they are nonetheless quite underwhelming in the role Sammond has carved out for them here, where the towering monoliths of American Sociology, Enterprise, and Entertainment have collided in a giant orgy of...what exactly?
"Truthfulness" and "unselfishness" arise in the discussion of Disney's Pinocchio. It is the natural film for Sammond to discuss, since its overbearing didactic moralism stands out even in the Disney oeuvre. Yet transparent texts can be difficult to handle, and Sammond breaks everything he touches. With so much threadbare symbolism sitting right on the surface (Stromboli is literally a puppetmaster), Sammond cannot possibly work his way back to "middle-class values" without committing an act of interpretation. He has previously been too vague about values, whereas this film is explicit about them. Sontag warned us about this: "to interpret is to impoverish." Disinterested empiricism has taken him as far as it can, and now it is his turn to recapitulate in reverse the error of media effects crusaders by projecting upon the text the social location of those most eager to consume it. Consumer eagerness now engulfs the text from without, metastasizing into its organs of content and meaning. Suddenly it is not Edward Filene or Walt Disney but Sammond himself who has elevated consumption to a moral value! Buy a film and you become its content! And its content you! It's cheaper than the naming rights to a distant star or atoll! Hence a fleeting indulgence in armchair criticism is the precise moment when things go off the rails for good, whereby "truthfulness" becomes "middle-class," whereby poor people's untruthfulness is locked away in the black box of cultural self-determination, whereby Pinocchio cannot reflect the values of a solitary poor person unless all of the other poor people are also lining up to view it. Not just a filmic text is impoverished this way but also the "virtue" of everyone who is not "middle-class." That is quite an accomplishment.
I'm not a critic or a sociologist, but I feel like there has to be a better way to go about this. Fromm defined ideologies as "socially patterned rationalizations." Say we take those three concepts, pair them into three dyads, and then study each dyadic nexus; each one generates a limited but salient field of material which is relevant to our topic, and also a sprawling field of extradisciplinary connections. Given the organic limits of human cognition and the profusion of published research, each of the outward-facing fields is functionally unbounded; but they are perfectly finite in number (there are three of them), and this makes it possible at least to momentarily stare into each abyss and admire what makes it unique from the others and from the original topic. Then we return to the inside, reassemble the triad, and look for the triadic nexus. A geometric analogy to planes, dimensions and wormholes suggests itself. This is just silly stuff I think about, but it seems to me that this book has done none of this nor anything remotely resembling it. It is not even a one-dimensional sociology, because it has not even the first prerequisite for the dimensionalization of sociological thought, namely a sentient authorial being. The strict repression of authorial slant in this area of scholarship is quite ironic given one of Sammond's key takeaways from the inconclusiveness of Media Effects research: even children do not simply swallow whole everything they are told or exposed to. I think we can assume this of readers of scholarly publications as well. A profusion of value-oriented scholarship could actually be the best way to achieve the "parallactic" ideal that some postmodernists have put forth, whereby observation from a variety of angles permits a clearer view than any single one of them can alone. The first step towards that ideal is not to give up on fixed moral positions but rather to stake them out. A moral position can be the second point which defines a line of inquiry. This poses methodological challenges, to be sure, but there is a payoff for surmounting those challenges, a payoff with which studies like Sammond's cannot compete. Fromm and Maccoby made a blind stab in this direction which is simultaneously comical and profound: they constructed numerical scales of psychoanalytically-defined traits by which to measure the Mexican villagers they studied, they took the measurements (basically they made them up), and they performed some conventional statistical analysis of these figures to look for Results. To a self-loathing postmodernist this looks like pure arbitrary slant, the methodological equivalent of intentionally exceeding the speed limit at first sight of a cop. My contention is that if hundreds or thousands of diverse minds were to construct their own numerical scales and take their own "measurements," the aggregated results would be as meaningful as the minds are diverse. (This diversity would need to be more than skin-deep.) Against this backdrop, Sammond's approach looks like another fruitless search for perfect objectivity, distance, disinterest. If the slant is always there anyway, we might as well turn it to our advantage.
At great semantic and rhetorical pains, Sammond does eventually work his way around to some interesting big-picture theses about commodities and the social construction of childhood. For reformers and parents alike, the erroneous belief in strong media effects
"smoothes over some unpleasant contradictions in the construction of personhood and identity in democratic capitalist society. Quite simply: the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making...[whereby] persons must be simultaneously and impossibly unique individuals and known quantities." (360)Ay, that's the stuff! But by this time the sins of omission are piled high, reflected in the endnotes by a veritable profusion of beyond-the-scope apologias which I literally lost count of. I'm reasonably sure I have never seen so many in one place, actually, and I think that is a singularly meaningful reflection on the nexus of topic and method here.
20 comments:
Daniel Kahneman re: his time designing the interview/evaluations for IDF recruits:
"I was convinced by [Meehl's] argument that simple, statistical rules are superior to intuitive "clinical" judgments. I concluded that the current interview had failed at least in part because it allowed the interviewers to do what they found most interesting, which was to learn about the dynamics of the interviewee's mental life. Instead, we should use the limited time at our disposal to obtain as much specific information as possible about the interviewee's life in his normal environment. Another lesson I learned from Meehl was that we should abandon the procedure in which the interviewers' global evaluations of the recruit determined the final decision. Meehl's book suggested that such evaluations should not be trusted and that statistical summaries of separately evaluated attributes would achieve greater validity."
Thinking Fast and Slow (2011)
p. 230
This points, more or less, to the wisdom in Fromm and Maccoby's methodology. Put differently: this illustrates why their methodology is not absurd even when it is applied through psychoanalytic theory that is mostly absurd. How else but through absurdities to ferret out that which the mainstream cannot detect? I say keep your methodology mainstream and your theory absurd.
David Riesman
The Lonely Crowd
("Abridged edition with a 1969 preface")
(orig. 1950)
"The probabilities are that the media, in their direct, message-bearing impact, are likely to do less either to help or hurt the audience than the controllers of the media and their critics like to think. Awareness of this fact may permit both the controllers and the critics of the media to reorient their attention. They are free, much freer than they realize, to attend to the medium itself, rather than to the message it purveys or is believed to purvey. The movie producer or critic who is concerned mainly with messages, for instance of ethnic tolerance, may actually despise the movies as an art form. The editorializer or social scientist who is concerned only with arousing the electorate may hate the English language because it has become for him a mere tool. The broadcaster who wants to atone for his big salary and sponsors by slipping in a crack against business may have little respect for the aesthetic resources of his medium."
(205)
Hmm...could this have influenced McLuhan's now-famous slogan-insight?
In any case, here is a questioning of the theory of strong media effects, this time in context of the study of personality. Anything further? Perhaps there is a nexus between McLuhan's idea and Riesman's, per which the very notion of Wholesome Television, e.g., becomes contradictory. The medium itself is wicked, and it is in the medium as a whole and not in "direct" notions of its content where the strong media effects can be found.
And, re: Sammond and methodology, if the content of any medium is another medium, then it can be argued that the content of the heroic-period Disney animated film is fantasy, and the content of fantasy is a nontransferable product of each audience member. "Middle-class values" and such can enter into such investigations only on the atomic level of reception, and needless to say that this is not the level on which this study (or any study which seeks to address the particular issues Sammond raises) operates.
Richard Sennett
The Fall of Public Man
(1977)
"The word "proof" has in empirical social studies come to have an unfortunate meaning: no other explanation but the one advanced after a given process of investigation is feasible. Regression analyses, measures of chi or gamma, are now used in quantitative studies to choose among alternative interpretations, by making a hierarchy of exclusions. Qualitative studies often and mistakenly try to prove arguments in the same way. The researcher must try to exhaust the full range of detail known about a subject. Otherwise there may be data the researcher does not know which "contradict" his argument. On an exclusionary scale of truth, contradiction through the discovery of new evidence must mean invalidation of the original argument, for how can two opposing interpretations of the same subject be equally true?
"This empiricism, based on exclusion by the exhaustion of evidence, is in my view opposed to any real notion of intellectual honesty. We arrive at intellectual honesty by admitting, precisely, the reality of contradiction, and eschewing all hope of arriving at an immutable statement. The canon of exhaustion of evidence is in practice a peculiar one; it seems tied to an increasing miniaturization of focus, so that the more we "know" about a subject, the more details we know. Anesthetization of the intellect is the invisible product of this form of proof, because it requires that no judgments be made until all the facts are in—sometime.
"In qualitative research, "proof," if that anxiety-laden term must be used at all, is a matter of the demonstration of logical relationship; the qualitative researcher has laid on him the burden of plausibility. I have come to think that burden is greater and more rigorous than the obligations felt by a researcher excluding one explanation in favor of another, regardless of their respective logical power of coherence. Empirical plausibility is a matter of showing the logical connections among phenomena which can be described concretely. This definition would make a philosopher unhappy, and perhaps put the "scientist" of society out of work, but it should, I hope, serve the expectations of a sophisticated, intelligent general reader. If that reader finds, in the present book, a reasonable analysis of how a malady of modern society has come about, the book has succeeded; if after finishing the book, he thinks of an alternative logic for explaining this distress, so much the better."
(p. 43)
On Sennett in light of Taleb:
When Taleb says that his "negative empiricism" is about "not being a sucker," I suspect he is telling us much about himself in addition to any epistemological lessons we might glean. In sportscaster terms, negative empiricism is how knowledge players "stay within themselves." When Sennett writes that he has "come to think that [the] burden [of plausibility] is greater and more rigorous than the obligations felt by a researcher excluding one explanation in favor of another," he invites us to consider that "not being a sucker" can be more about armoring the researcher against their colleagues than about fulfilling any given research mission; perhaps also that some research missions simply require the researcher to be more willing than is Taleb, evidently, to live with the jibes of small-minded people in the event of a failure. When Taleb elsewhere proposes canonizing failed entrepreneurs (all of them at once) in a national Entrepreneur's Day, he gives the game away. How could he of all people simply assume there not to be a single sucker among all those strivers? This suggestion evinces a domain-dependent intellect to rival any social scientist.
Where Taleb is more useful, I think, is in his understanding of the dangers of scale, in the observation that unchecked growth has some inherently fragilizing aspects, and in his highly unique and penetrating analysis of the gory details of all of that. Epistemologically, absolute statements are the most fragile, because they require only a single counterexample in order to be disproven. A stretch, perhaps, but this is also implicit in what Sennett says here about "proof": in taking aim at absolute statements, and in aspiring oneself to a certain absolute "exclusion by the exhaustion of evidence", the social scientist has already limited themselves to the least urgent matters.
Taleb, Jacobs, and many others would have us simply ignore "social scientists" as a rule, under the assumption that Sennett gets things perfectly backwards here. Sennett for his part plays right into the skeptic critique by claiming the rigorous high-ground. I would prefer to stay away from questions of what (and who) is most rigorous and instead embrace a certain division of labor, which as in so many other professions is all but baked into the personality spectrum. I would theorize that what Sennett's "plausibility" can (occasionally) do is detect some things (true things!) that Taleb's "negative empiricism" cannot. From there, it is up to the "sophisticated, intelligent general reader" to not be so scared of being a sucker, nor for that matter to be grasping so hard for intellectual plaudits, that they become unable to think straight. Better yet, a whole gaggle of such readers could begin to realize the "parallactic" ideal of knowledge formation (see https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2013/07/scairquotes-v_24.html), which is very appropriate to speculative, prospective matters even as it is, I think, not too helpful in the retrospective matters raised by Tomlinson (see link).
Now, perhaps Sennett idealizes a "reader" that scarcely exists. As Kahneman and colleagues have shown, human beings manufacture "plausibility" from thin air faster than reality can be made to conform to it. But that is a mere practical problem. We'll work on it. Theoretically at least, I think he well captures both the abilities and limitations of the dreaded social scientist.
Tanina Rostain
"Educating Homo Economicus: Cautionary Notes on the New Behavioral Law and Economics Movement" (2000)
Law & Society Review 34/4
"The observation that the social sciences have met only modest predictive success does not imply that they have not met the criteria of true science. With their low predictive power, the social sciences do not fare worse than the natural sciences, which, in many circumstances, have relinquished the ambition of developing a mechanistic account of the behavior of objects in the natural world. With the advent of chaos theory...natural scientists have come around to the view that the ability to predict the behavior of complex systems, such as meteorological or ecological systems, is very limited. As in the case of the natural sciences, the inability to predict how human beings will act in a given situation does not preclude the possibility of developing explanations of human behavior...
"When proponents of the new scholarship insist on fundamental continuity between the law and economics model and the law and behavioral sciences model, they tend to overlook core difference in assumptions and methods in both approaches. Much law and economics, which is based on rational actor theory, offers a fundamentally deductive approach to legal policy. ... Microeconomics shares important features with mechanistic sciences, such as Newtonian physics and evolutionary biology, which are based on equilibrium analysis... At the theoretical heart of these research programs is the "extremal" principle that "a system's behavior always minimizes or maximizes variables reflecting the mechanically possible states of the system"... As in Newtonian physics and evolution, the relationships among the objects of inquiry in the rational actor framework can be expressed through the language of differential calculus. Insofar as these approaches are fundamentally mechanistic, they aspire to predictive determinacy: In an extremal approach, it is possible to determine how the objects of inquiry will behave given any state of the system.
"Social and cognitive psychology and other social sciences that proceed inductively from observations of human behavior suggest a considerably more complicated picture. Such inquiries generally focus on "middle range" theories—theories that fall short of all-inclusive systematic attempts to explain observed uniformities of human behavior with a single set of law... Because such theories are qualified ceteris paribus ["with other conditions remaining the same" -Google], they do not pretend to predictive determinacy.
(Rostain, cont.)
"Indeed, even well-established theories can only account for a small percentage of the variance found in research data. Statistical investigations of field data typically show that a particular circumstance increases the likelihood of an event. Determining that some circumstance has such statistical relevance, however, does not imply that it will cause the effect, in the sense that one can predict that the event is likely to occur in its presence... In sophisticated quantitative models, conditions that have been found to be relevant, i.e. have an effect, generally account for less than 50% variation in a dependent variable, and typically it is less than 30%. In other words, the best empirical social science models cannot explain most of the variation seen in the variable under investigation. Inductively based social science research may illuminate the various factors that underlie a given phenomenon but will rarely establish its causes...
"Given the differences between microeconomics and empirically based social science research, the law and behavioral science movement needs to relinquish its ambition to offer broad reforms of the legal system based on a single empirically generated account of human behavior and must settle instead for a more modest agenda. The intractable difficulty of predicting human behavior counsels against adopting sweeping changes and in favor of experimenting with small interventions whose outcomes are carefully studied to see whether they might be applied to other, similar situations."
(pp. 987-989)
Michael R. Real
Mass-Mediated Culture (1977)
"Attitudinal functional research on "All in the Family" has yielded controversial results. Producer Lear, star Carroll O'Connor, and New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor have argued that the program is effective as a satire on bigotry and emphasize that Archie's narrow-minded prejudices cause him to "lose" in the end of nearly every episode. But research confirms the "selective perception" at work among viewers, confirming the classical scholastic principle "Quidquid recipitur recipitur secundum modum receipientis." ["Whatever is received is received according to the manner of the one receiving it."] Stuart Surlin's research in Georgia coincides with the joint American-Canadian study conducted by Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach. The latter found that 62 percent of their sample of viewers admired Archie more than any other character in the show and only 10 percent believed him the character most made fun of. They concluded that "high prejudiced persons were likely to watch 'All in the Family' more often than low prejudiced persons, to identify more often with Archie Bunker, and to see him winning in the end. . . . [suggesting] the program is more likely reinforcing prejudice than combating it." Others disputed that conclusion. But while liberals took delight in the blasts at Archie's bigotry, evidence indicated that larger numbers of viewers seemed to use the program to rationalize their own prejudices and repopularize old racial and ethnic slurs."
(p. 35)
William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)
"Pratt remarks that the fields of molecular biology and high-energy physics are making headline discoveries at a fast rate, not because of the richness of the areas or of the diligency of the scientists, but because those involved have learned to provide alternative hypotheses, to devise crucial experiments, and to do so expeditiously with clear results. Nowhere is there a simple deduction which is tested, as is the case in numerous papers published currently in psychological and sociological journals. Instead, there are alternatives and crucial experiments performed almost in one day, which set out not so much to prove hypotheses as to disprove them. Pratt calls the method one of multiple hypotheses, contrasting it with current procedures which he derides as "The Eternal Surveyor," "The Never Finished," or "The Frozen Method." He reminds us that Roentgen, eight weeks after discovering X-rays, had identified seventeen of their major properties, one experiment rapidly following another."
(pp. 129-130)
Stephenson:
"There are some who look with an uneasy eye at these mass pleasures; behind them they see the lurkings of "hidden persuasion" and "tyranny over the mind"... Mankind, these critics feel, is being painlessly put to sleep... This, it seems to me, is a jaundiced view. I suggest, instead, that often it is the very beliefs that mass communication cannot change that keep mankind out of step with the times."
(p. 1)
More:
http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/stephenson-ptmcbuilding-culture.html
Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)
Quoting Philip Rieff:
"the final, moral virtue of the historian: . . . he is not neutral."
...and yet...
"Between The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Fellow Teachers there is a significant shift in Rieff's tone. In the later work he warns against "play-acting of the prophetic role" and urges "objectivity." He no longer writes as a public intellectual or addresses himself to the "general readership" he was addressing in 1951."
(pp. 224-225)
"[Rieff again:]"I am neither for nor against [the culture of the therapeutic]. I am a scholar-teacher of sociological theory." The disclaimer was not very convincing; it was symptomatic of a change in the cultural climate, however, that Rieff felt obliged to make it."
(p. 225)
"For many intellectuals of integrity, the cultural revolution of the late sixties discredited the idea of committed public scholarship. The concept of the public became indistinguishable from the phenomenon of publicity. Under these circumstances Rieff's decision to write less, to publish with University presses and scholarly journals, and to devote his energies to "strengthening our enclaves" becomes intelligible, if not defensible."
Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)
"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."
(p. 11)
(more)
Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)
Ch. X, "After the New Left"
"It is just because it has an ideological dimension, in [Michael] Miles view, that student rebellion may portend a larger movement, "since there is not the slightest possibility of the left organizing these social forces [the new middle class, new working class, etc.] without a systematic alternative vision which first identifies these progressive social forces in its analysis and then appeals to them in its social content." An ideology in this sense is inseparable from the search for a constituency and serves not to encourage but to check the left's propensity for fantasy."
(pp. 137-138)
(more)
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
""Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either."
(p. 148)
(more)
Robert Sklar
"The Making of Cultural Myths—Walt Disney"
(pp. 58-65)
in The American Animated Cartoon: a critical anthology
ed. Peary and Peary
"Richard Schickel, in The Disney Version (1968), argues that Disney's retelling of the fairy tale of the home-building pigs and the hungry wolf had a basically conservative point, in keeping with the producer's conservative political allegiance: the pig who exhibits old-fashioned virtues, hard work, self-reliance, self-denial, is the successful one. It's just as plausible, however, that the most effective pig is the one who does not minimize the fact of crisis and builds with modern materials and tools."
(p. 64)
Perhaps he was the pig who stayed up late reading McLuhan and Lasch.
Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
APPENDIX D
"The Freedom to be Academic" (pp. 256-279)
(online here)
[271] "(3) Again, in discussing the influence on America of the great German universities of the nineteenth century, the historian, Professor Metzger, beautifully analyzes on the one hand what was carried over, the methodic thoroughness, specific competence (but not the universality of interest), the freedom from utilitarian narrowness, dedication to absolute freedom of truth; and on the other hand what was sloughed off or suffered a sea change.
"We come to the heart of the difference
when we compare the American and German conceptions
of inner and outer freedom.…
The German idea of “convincing” one’s students,
of winning them over to the
personal system and philosophical views of the professor,
was not condoned by American academic opinion.
Rather, as far as classroom actions were concerned,
the proper stance for American professors
was thought to be one of
neutrality on controversial issues,
and silence on substantive issues
that lay outside of their competence.
Innumerable utterances affirmed these limitations.
Eliot, in the very address that so eloquently declared
that the university must be free,
made neutrality an aspect of that freedom:
“… It is not the function of the teacher
to settle philosophical and political controversies
for the pupil,
or even to recommend to him
any one set of opinions
as better than another.…
The student should be made acquainted …
with the salient points of each system.” (Dev. 400)
"Professor Metzger goes on to argue that this norm of neutrality itself springs from an American bias of thought, its empiricism, resistant to intuition, speculation, fantasy—in the end, a suspicion of deliveries not fairly quickly verifiable.[8] I
[272]
do not think he sufficiently estimates the disadvantages of the limitation to “neutrality” as against the German freedom to “convince.” In the first place, with the American limitation, competence almost automatically becomes specialization, for what quickly verifiable fact is to connect the various parts of study? There is no system of facts, only systems of thought. Again, is Eliot’s ideal of neutral presentation something that can possibly exist in a classroom? Have you ever listened to a convinced Whiteheadian trying to present the philosophy of Kant? Then is the teacher to have no conviction of his own? It is plausible for the school to be neutral and present all sides, but how can the teacher be neutral? But most important, Eliot and Professor Metzger do not see realistically the situation of the student in the face of neutrality and competence: his moral nature must have some culture or other, and if no ideal or moral connections are made in the university, this culture—unless he has had an unusually lucky upbringing—will fall to the first extramural propagandist, or intramural but extracurricular propagandist, or even worse, it will continue in an infantile set of prejudices and unconscious conventionalities while his intellectual life will be correspondingly arid and without vital strength and prone to panic before Senatorial committees or rabble rousers. As I have said above, the teacher is responsible either way, whether he freely exerts his influence or withholds it; and I think he does better not to worry about a standard of scientific certainty and impartiality, but, relying on the sense of his own integrity, to act forthrightly according to probabilities, keeping an open mind and heart. Best of all, no doubt, that he have a wisdom and learning that cuts under controversy and relieves its sharpness, but this is not a “stance” but a fact. It is a fact if the professor’s urbane detachment, encyclopedic scope, urgent following-up, insistence on accuracy, or ability to make the controversy fascinating in
[273]
itself (there are several admirable styles of teaching—none of them “neutral” ), if these continually provide a new unsettling challenge to the student’s wish to have an answer; but it is only a stance if the student feels he has come up against a limit of “no opinion.” I don’t think the majority of teachers are in fact this good. Finally, it seems likely that an important reason for the American standard of professorial neutrality has been the youth and sexual immaturity of our college students as contrasted with the German university students of that time; our students are more impressionable; but it is hard to see the logic of, on the one hand, dropping the older paternalism (or giving it over to administrative deans) and, on the other hand, discouraging discipleship; the students are told they are no longer children but young men, but they are forbidden the love affairs, both physical and intellectual, of young men. Yet where could such affairs be safer than at a university? Indeed, the contradiction is sometimes worse. There was a case at a famous Eastern college where in the aftermath of a sexual escapade the dean gave a student’s name to the police; a great foreign teacher, who had once served as Rector of a European school, exclaimed indignantly, “We were not in loco parentis and we protected them; you act in loco parentis and you do not protect them!” There spoke eight hundred years."
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. ...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] "A teacher must try to reach each child in terms of what he brings,... But... The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. ...
[22]
In fact, some of the most important strengths that have historically belonged to the middle class are flouted by the schools:... Rather than bourgeois, our schools have become petty-bourgeois,...
...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."
(more)
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[150] "One thing that has always amazed man is his own inner yearning to be good, an inner sensitivity about the "way things ought to be," and an excruciatingly warm and melting attraction toward the "rightness" of beauty, goodness, and perfection. We call this inner sensitivity "conscience." ... This self-feeling in nature is more fantastic than any science-fiction fact. Any philosophy or any science that is going to speak intelligently about the meaning of life has to take it into account...
[151]
"Curiously, this vital ontology of organismic self-feeling...hardly made a rustle in modern science until the appearance of the new "humanistic psychology." This fact alone seems to me to explain the unbelievable sterility of the human sciences in our time and, more especially, their willingness to manipulate and negate man. I think that the true greatness of Freud's contribution emerges when we see it as directly related to this tradition of ontological thought. ...Freud mapped out the dream of freedom of the Enlightenment: to expose artificial moral constraints on the expansive self-feeling of the life force."
(more)
David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. Oswald
Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues
(2020)
[15] "It is axiomatic in the psychological methods literature that virtually no observed measure (or indicator) is “construct pure.” That is, a score collected by an instrument (test, questionnaire, etc.) designed
[16]
to measure a given hypothetical construct may reflect that construct to some degree, but it will certainly reflect other, construct-irrelevant factors, such as participants’ familiarity with a particular method of assessment...and psychological states that may affect their responding... There is no perfect way to deal with this problem, but when multiple measures of a construct are obtained, it becomes possible to use data-analytic techniques...that are explicitly designed to deal with this issue by allowing researchers to model latent variables that are closer to theoretical constructs of interest than observed variables are."
Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)
[111]
"American social science is united in its lack of serious interest in American power. It willingly follows what Martin Nicolaus has called "the one and only general sociological law that has ever been discovered, namely that the oppressors research the oppressed."
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