Author: Ophelia Benson

Well, this is what I’m always saying. This is where anti-elitism gets you. Influential political operatives who are not ashamed to sneer at education.

Why this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat, Bush’s chief political strategist replied, “Somebody with a doctorate.” Lemann noted, “This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk.” Fundamentally, much of today’s GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate academics, including scientists, with liberals.

And hence with really terrible people. The GOP could of course look at it another way – they could wonder why people with more education tend not to be of their party, they could pause to wonder what that says about their party. They might wonder what people have learned, that tends to make them dislike right wing parties. That would be one reasonable reaction. Or they could do what they are in fact doing, they could be certain in advance that dislike of right wing parties can’t possibly be well-founded and that therefore any activity that tends to promote such dislike must be corrupting and polluting. Hence higher education is a bad thing.

And then of course that has the incalculable added benefit of giving an entirely spurious but tragically convincing aura of populism to the party of tax cuts for the rich, so that people who make too little money even to pay taxes vote GOP all the same in the illusion that the GOP is on the side of Just Plain Folks and against elites. Stark nonsense. The GOP may pride itself on sneering at people with doctorates, but it’s very much in favor of elites.

Now, language is an interesting subject, isn’t it? So much of what we talk about at B and W comes down to language – well it would, wouldn’t it, since we’re talking about what gets written and said in academic ‘discourse’ and ‘texts’. Naturally it’s language, what else would it be, mud pies? But it’s interesting all the same.

I mentioned Deborah Cameron the other day, after hearing her with Richard Hoggart on Thinking Allowed. A friend sent me a link to this article of hers, which is an excellent read. Also quite amusing in places.

In the past, the habit of talking about oneself was almost universally decried as impolite, immodest and vulgar. Today’s experts, by contrast, do not regard self-effacement as a virtue…As BT’s ‘better conversations’ booklet puts it: ‘Unless you’re able to recognise your own feelings, you won’t be able to express them clearly and be open with other people.’

Well, maybe, but so what? What makes us all think that other people want us to be open about our feelings? How do we know they don’t want us to shut up about our wretched feelings and talk about something more interesting? Hurrah for people who are closed, and not only don’t express their feelings clearly, but don’t express them at all. Granted, that’s a slight exaggeration. Here I am expressing a feeling right now: exasperation. I’m very clear and open about it; aren’t you pleased?

Multinational corporations may require their employees to import the American English preference for informality into languages like Hungarian, where the distinction between formal and informal address is more strongly marked in the grammar (and where formal address would be the unmarked choice for the context).

Tell me about it. I often feel like a Martian in my own land. Oddly enough, I don’t like it when complete strangers telephone me to sell me something, and to start things off call me by my first name and ask me how I am. I must be Hungarian then.

Will we all consent to become the caring, sharing, self-reflexive, emotionally literate communicators who are currently idealized in both expert and popular literature? Or might we have our own ideas about what makes it ‘good to talk’?

I have one or two more thoughts on this matter of scientific literacy that we were discussing last month (that is to say, yesterday), inspired by this article on the CSICOP website, which was in turn inspired by a pair of articles in the Guardian.

One thought, which I touched on but in a jokey not to say flippant manner, has to do with how manipulative and touchy-feely and sub-rational it all seems. The public feels this and feels that, and the public feels this or that because we do things to make them feel that way. We hold their hands, we flatter them, we plant moist kisses on their cheeks, we tell them we really value their opinions. Is this not a little creepy? A little like the way we talk to six year olds who need a nap? Or the way advertisers and ‘Public Relations’ experts and real estate agents and political operatives and indeed politicians themselves talk to us? There are books and expensive seminars on how to do that kind of thing, how to tickle people’s sensitivities and nudge their fears and activate their prejudices in order to get them to do what we want. Hitler was good at it and the nice people who sell everyone enormous SUVs are good at it, too, but are those really examples of how we want scientists to talk to us? We all become like poor stupid drugged Linda in Truffaut’s movie version of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ thinking the nice man in the giant TV screen is really talking to her. ‘And what do YOU think, Linda?’ ‘And what do YOU think, Public?’ ‘Montag, look, they’re talking to me, they want to know what I think!’

The other thought has to do with some unexamined assumptions. Or some sacred cows, would be another way of putting it. Especially the assumption that the public already knows enough about science to make decisions about it. All the public, apparently, all six billion plus of us, infants included. How did we get that knowledge? Were we born with it? Is it innate? Do we just kind of breathe it in, or get it by osmosis? Susan Greenfield puts the matter this way:

Or could the “it” be that I was implying, however covertly, a patronising attitude to an otherwise Renaissance general public, who are already, as Turney avows, clear minded and up to speed with the subtleties and problems facing the integration of science with society? This mindset is, of course, in the focus-group-anti-elitist spirit of our age.

Exactly. The public must be universally wise and reflective and knowlegeable enough, because that’s the only decent thing to think. If experience and evidence contradict that happy thought, well, experience and evidence must be elitist, so we’ll just pretend they don’t exist.

I’ve had one or two further thoughts about Deborah Cameron’s ‘Good to Talk’ article.

And the relevance of this to the subject of conversation is that intimacy must be created and sustained to a large extent through a particular kind of talk, involving continuous mutual self-disclosure. The modern cliché ‘they just couldn’t communicate’, proffered as an explanation for the break-up of a marriage or other significant relationship, does not imply that the parties never spoke or that they found one another’s conversation unintelligible. Rather it implies a lack of honesty and emotional depth in their exchanges—a failure by one or both individuals to share their feelings openly and express their true selves authentically.

This is all true, and good stuff, but there’s a further aspect Cameron doesn’t go into (at least in this article). Why is self-disclosure and the authentic expression of our true selves purely emotional? Why is it only feelings and emotions that we’re supposed to reveal, disclose, express, communicate, converse and talk about? When how and why did we decide that the true authentic hidden-until-expressed self is purely emotional? Why aren’t our thoughts and ideas part of our selves too? Why can’t self-disclosure be cognitive as well as or even instead of emotional?

It’s interesting to note, for one thing, that if we did understand the self that way, the tacit or covert preference for the putative female style of communication might disappear.

The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states…But in a culture that places emphasis on self-reflexivity and the creation of intimacy through self-disclosure, it is entirely logical that the (real or perceived) asymmetry between women and men should come to be apprehended as a serious problem. It is also logical that the problem should be seen to inhere primarily in men’s behaviour—for despite the efforts of authors like Deborah Tannen to present the sexes as ‘different but equal’, comments like the one quoted above from BT suggest an implicit common-sense belief in female communicational superiority.

If women are boringly and claustrophobically assumed to be better at communicating their feelings, men are perhaps assumed to be better at communicating about ideas. All too often that is seen as a flaw – a sign of how emotionally crippled and stunted men are compared to honest, open, in touch with their feelings women. Well that’s one way to look at it – but then, another way is that it’s women who are crippled and stunted, unable to get their heads out of the boring egotistical sludge of their own personal feelings and think about something more important.

When how and why did we decide that feelings are better than thoughts? And not only better but also somehow more real, more honest, authentic, internal, of the self? I wonder if it has to do with benevolent impulses toward egalitarianism and inclusiveness. Perhaps we’re afraid that not everyone has much in the way of thoughts and ideas, but we’re pretty sure that anyone can have feelings – it’s simply a matter of ‘getting in touch’ with them. So we convince ourselves that the core of our being is emotions, and that thoughts are some sort of aristocratic artificial overlay, an external frippery and decoration that disappears when the going gets tough; and then we convince ourselves that the core is the part that counts and the overlay is a slightly suspect sophistication or adulteration or pollution. So we end up coercing each other, with the best of intentions, to distrust the cognitive and overtrust the emotional. We get atrophied intellects and hypertrophied feelings. There are some drawbacks to that arrangement, I think.

On second thought, I take it back. That business about incentives and rewards. The fact is I don’t really believe that, or if I do it’s only about 25%, it’s only set about with a mass of stipulations and qualifications and reservations. I don’t so much believe it as see that other people have a point when they believe it. Or perhaps I mean I don’t so much believe it as want not to be a silly fatuous naive wool-gatherer who doesn’t understand how the economy works. I don’t want to have the kind of ideas that, if anyone were ever so stupid as to put them into practice, would immediately reduce the economy to a level with Bangladesh’s. So as a result I tend to concede ground that I don’t really concede. I make dutiful noises about incentives, but they’re only dutiful. Because I don’t believe it, I think a lot of that stuff is pure rhetoric and self-interest, is rich people throwing up a smoke screen to veil the fact that they always want more and more money, whether that’s good for the economy or in fact bloody bad for it. More money for me please even if that does mean that all those tiresome poor people can’t afford to buy anything and so the economy tanks.

And above all I don’t believe money is the only incentive there is. Well I wouldn’t, would I – nobody pays me a dime to do this. Nobody pays me a dime to do most of the things I like to do, I just like to do them. Don’t we all. Do we get paid to look at the sunset, to watch birds, to read Flaubert or Austen, to swim, to go to the theatre? There are such things as intrinsic goods, and intellectual activity is often thought to be one of them. The fact is I don’t really believe that academics at Oxford necessarily become mediocrities just because they don’t have a star system and no one is rushing around to give them a flat overlooking Christ Church meadow and a cottage in the Dordogne. Why should they? If they’d wanted to get rich they would have gone into a different line of work in the first place. Not everyone values money above everything. Academics at Oxford can perfectly well be motivated to write brilliant books and/or teach inspiringly for internal reasons, reasons having to do with thinking the job is worth doing and valuable and interesting. I don’t want to be woolly but I also don’t want to think or even pretend to think that money is the best thing in life.

The Boston Globe has a depressing article about the star system in US universities. Maybe in the great scheme of things it doesn’t matter much, maybe I’m just a Puritan to find it so dreary. But it does seem so Hollywoodish, so rock star-ish, so hype-driven, so silly, so irrational-appeal-based, and hence so anti-intellectual.

“One couldn’t imagine all of this happening in Oxford, where there’s a kind of gentleman’s agreement that we’re all equally brilliant,” Ferguson says in an interview. “It’s extremely bad form to suggest that one person is as vulgar as to be a star.”

Yes…well I know what you’re thinking. You’re picturing a crowd of moss-covered mediocrities in Oxford contentedly trudging along the daily round, boring their students into fits and never publishing anything, but by gum they’re all equal. Fair enough. There is something to be said for making a fuss over people who teach or write better than others; for incentives and rewards. I can see that. But do they have to be so enormously better than everyone else’s rewards?

Star compensation at these “nonprofit” universities can top $200,000 for only a class or two a week, which in turn has widened the divide between haves and have-nots in higher education. Columbia offers fancy apartments with majestic views to woo stars (though not every home is as stunning as Sachs’s town house west of Central Park); meanwhile, part-time faculty who do the bulk of the teaching are forming unions just to fight for cost-of-living wage increases.

Philip Cook and Robert Frank wrote an excellent book called The Winner-Take-All Society explaining how these markets work and also why they’re not entirely desirable. All very academic.