It's been far too long since I've updated my blog, and now that I've got a bit of a break from my semester's duties, I'm taking the opportunity to get back to it. Feels strange to be typing away here, like a once-familiar project from long ago that one no longer does completely comfortably. What better way to get back into the swing of things than by taking potshots at some low-hanging fruit: FoxNews? In their self-styled "Fair & Balanced" way, Fox published an article about a week ago about the gender wars, and specifically the war on men in contemporary society. (I'm sure that all of you out there are shocked to learn that Fox would publish anything so culturally conservative, but you'll just have to take my word on this one, and you can read the article if you really need proof that it's true.) The argument in that article is interesting, and I'd like to explore some of the issues that Suzanne Venker glosses over with her broad brush strokes. First what's her argument?
The piece was motivated by some new stats that suggest that the importance of marriage is growing among women while declining among men. Why is this a problem? Because women want to get married, but aren't finding mates that live up to their expectations. There's a "dearth of marriageable men." The culprit: feminism, naturally. For the first time in US history, women outnumber men in the workforce, and in the university classroom (though not in the boardroom, university or otherwise). Gender politics have been shaken up mightily by this shift in the balance of education and employment. And some men don't like it: "Women aren't women anymore," they proclaim.
Women carried out a sexual revolution (and continue to do so, I'll claim), whereas men had no need for such a thing, and have therefore remained mostly the same as they ever were. And men don't like the New Women that this revolution has produced. These women are angry and defensive, says Venger, and men find that unattractive. Men have been demonized as the hated oppressors, and feel that they've had enough of all that, tired of being constantly painted as the bad guy, as the enemy, as the culprit for any and all unpleasantness in gender politics. Men are not threatened by women, they're just pissed off and don't want to deal with it. They'd rather go it alone. Men want to love women, not compete with them. Their nature is to provide for their families, picking up the extra slack at the office while the wife stays home with the babies, and, well, the house. "It's in their DNA." And the modern role of women as educated, employed individuals threatens that conception, so naturally men resist this change that is against their nature.
Women had a reason to carry out their sexual revolution, says Venger. But now that we're in the post-sexual-revolutionary world, who's winning and who's losing from the equilibrium point at which we now find ourselves? Men have much more sexual access to women than e'er they did before, no longer needing to wait until marriage to bed their best gal. This also means that men have a much easier time walking away from a sticky situation if the contraceptive fails to counter the 'ception. Women are therefore at a greater risk of being left with children and no provider, forever striving to find some kind of balance in a life that presents them with a great number and variety of expectations on their time. Men need women for sex, and they're getting that. Women need men for protection and provision, and they're at risk of not getting that, or so the author wants to claim.
It's the sexual revolution, the change in women's temperament and in their outlook on life that has been the major cause of this situation, so if women are woe-ridden by this new reality, they need only fall back into the comfortable arms of their natural calling, and allow men to do happily do the same. So put down the briefcases, ladies, tidy away those diplomas, dust off the teddies and welcome your men home with open legs.
I must admit that coming from Fox, this kind of argumentation is hardly surprising. The picture that it paints is full of assumptions: essentially, Venger is claiming that men and women acted "according to their natures" up until about 40 years ago. Then women changed, but men didn't. And now there's a mismatch. Women stand to lose from this mismatch, whereas men don't. So if women want the situation to improve, they should feel empowered to go back to the way that things were, the natural way. She talks about the reemergence of "marriageable men," whereas one gets the distinct idea that men will actually just go on being exactly as they are (or as she claims them to be) and that women will see more men as marriageable by simply lowering the bar of expectations far enough.
So, the author assumes that men and women acted in a particular way before the sexual revolution, a way that was both static and natural. That seems a very far-fetched claim. Men and women interact in radically different ways across cultures, not to mention the fact that these dynamics between the sexes are in a perpetual state of flux. It is unwarranted to assume that "the way that men and women interacted before feminism" even refers to anything determinate. There was no such single, univocal way! It therefore could not be claimed that this univocal way was "natural." (Even if there had been such a univocal way, calling it natural would be extremely problematic. And DNA won't do the work that the author wants it to do here, because even third-rate biologists will tell you that genes are useless in the absence of environmental factors, and even a third-rate sociologist will tell you that the environmental features for humans are greatly constructed/constituted by social factors. We can't assume that DNA has a particular set of instructions that is insensitive to social factors.)
Gender politics are constantly in flux, and often favour the flexibility and freedom of men in the social realm, to the detriment of women. However, the feminist movement has made huge strides in improving that situation. Has parity been reached? No, but we're a heck of a lot closer, and the sexual revolution is not over: the dynamism of sexual politics persists.
One important reality that the author is pointing out in this article is that many men have been resistant to keep up with the times. Many men dig in their heels, and will only consider progress in sexual politics kicking and screaming, led reluctantly by the wrist, like a child (husband?) through a shopping mall. Venger claims that men have not really lost much, haven't been seriously threatened by the progress of women, and therefore can't be pressured into progress of their own. Threats aren't exactly my idea of a good motivator, though they can be effective. However, the author is wrong in claiming that men are not threatened by the sexual revolution: after all, if a central pillar of manhood is to get a job and contribute to the workforce, then they are being seriously threatened by women. The author herself claims that for the first time ever, women outnumber men in the US workforce. Sounds like a serious enough threat to me, if men are to define themselves by their jobs. Men aren't getting the jobs or the education that they used to. Having women in classrooms and shop floors means that there are fewer spots for men. (Though, of course, there are always an infinite number of jobs, right? I mean, that's why we don't need unions or any government control over market forces: there are always other options, and the market can regulate itself.) The classrooms and the shop floors are becoming more and more dominated by women, numerically speaking. The boardroom is resisting so far, but inroads are already being made there, and it's only a matter of time.
So why don't we give up this regressive rhetoric? Why not just admit that women have changed the world a lot in the last 40 years, and probably even for the better. (Men haven't played no role in that either, and I think it's important to point out that progressive men do exist, perhaps contrary to popular belief.) There's more work to be done moving forward, the dynamics of gender politics haven't been sorted out, probably not even close. But it's time for men to realize that things aren't going to, and shouldn't, go back to the way they were. And that means no longer whining that "women aren't women anymore." It means manning up and heeding the call of social progress.
Saturday 1 December 2012
Saturday 3 November 2012
Post-Philopolis ruminations, pt 2
Before jumping back into these ruminations, I just want to mention that we're looking for feedback on Philopolis Guelph 2012. So, if you attended the event a few weeks ago, please fill out this really short feedback form. We really appreciate it, and it makes a huge difference for us to have some insight into who's coming to the event, how they heard about it, and how we can make it even better.
Alright, back to the matters at hand. Last time, we were addressing the issue of what to do about things like the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and The Innocence of Muslims. What we were specifically interested in is whether we ought to allow these things, by law. In order to address that question, I was examining the role of free speech in a democratic society, its importance for rational and critical dialogue, and more specifically the joint responsibility of all parties in a dialogue to listen to the other parties without breaking off dialogue prematurely, as well as to make their point clearly without offending the other parties and thereby forcing them to break off the dialogue.
Alright, back to the matters at hand. Last time, we were addressing the issue of what to do about things like the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and The Innocence of Muslims. What we were specifically interested in is whether we ought to allow these things, by law. In order to address that question, I was examining the role of free speech in a democratic society, its importance for rational and critical dialogue, and more specifically the joint responsibility of all parties in a dialogue to listen to the other parties without breaking off dialogue prematurely, as well as to make their point clearly without offending the other parties and thereby forcing them to break off the dialogue.
Another very good friend of mine talked about the role that power dynamics plays in this dialogue: it is one thing for a newspaper in the Islamic world to run blasphemous cartoons against Christian laws, but quite another for a newspaper in the West to run analogous cartoons against Islamic laws. A dominant power can use free speech to sanction acts of oppression against a lesser power, whereas the converse is not the case.
Cultural critique is important; we really should be reflecting on our culture and the values that underpin it. It is also very important that we not segregate ourselves along cultural lines, and on that basis prohibit any cultural critique "from the outside." Critical reflection upon culture (including the historical narratives we construct for our cultures and ourselves) is fundamental, lest fundamentalism take hold unchecked. Freedom of speech is an important component of this: cultural critique sometimes needs to speak against the powers that be or the dominant ideology, and restrictions on free speech impede that. However, it seems to me that we can use the insights from my previous post to understand the need to restrict hate speech: as individuals participating in a common dialogue about our culture (which is all to uncommon in North America these days) we have a responsibility not to offend the sensibilities of our interlocutors to the breaking point, forcing them to abandon the dialogue.
This need to restrict hate speech is particularly acute for something like the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. As I discussed some months ago, these cartoons are a symbolic act of domination, as to depict God (or the Prophet) is to claim power over him, and thereby to claim the subservience of the entire culture that worships him. So the cultural critique that is being leveled here is boot-strapping: it is not a criticism of any particular facet of the culture, but instead a wholesale criticism. Furthermore, it is a criticism arising from without rather than from within. These cartoons symbolize the West's complete rejection of Islam.
Or at least they can symbolize this. Many in the West of course did not agree with the spirit expressed by these cartoons. But we must strive to make that clear. If the editor and cartoonists responsible for these cartoons are making a statement that we don't agree with, a deep-cutting and wholesale rejection of an entire religion that we feel is inappropriate, we cannot simply let their statement become a representative for the views of the West as a whole. One way to do that is to restrict free speech through legal means. If indeed we are committed to refraining from such legal limitations, that is acceptable. However, it puts the onus on us as individuals to dissociate our views from those that are being expressed.
There are important cultural criticisms to be made, both about other cultures and about our own. However, it strikes me as untrue that any culture is so distorted and warped that it is beyond repair, and these wholesale rejections suggest just such a thing to me: "Your culture is fatally damaged, and the situation can only be repaired by abandoning the culture, wiping the slate clean and starting again." It also strikes me as unfruitful to approach anyone with this sort of cultural critique. Who would listen to that sort of thing anyway?
Wholesale cultural rejection is unnecessary, it's unhelpful, and in the case of the criticism originating from a dominant power and being leveled against a lesser power, it is oppressive. Should we allow such criticisms under our laws of free speech? If we had a reasonable prospect of such critiques being widely disowned by members of the dominant culture, of these critiques not being allowed to speak for our culture as a whole, I'd say that we should allow them under the law. However, that would require a much more prevalent practice of cultural dialogue than is currently the case in North America, and so I feel that leaving these statements legally unchecked is dangerous. If freedom of speech is indeed so important to us, then we must make more of an effort to speak. To leave speech unchecked, either by legal means or by means of dissociation in the public sphere, leaves open the possibility that some would act as representatives of our culture as a whole, and do so irresponsibly.
Saturday 27 October 2012
Post-Philopolis ruminations, pt 1
Hi all, this post is long overdue. Things in my neck of the woods have been hectic (to say the least) for the last few weeks, and I've missed sitting down to get my thoughts out there on the wire. It feels good to get back to it, and I hope that this time between posts has renewed your enthusiasm as readers as much as it's renewed mine as a writer. Let's get to it.
Almost two weeks ago now, some of my Guelph cohort and I ran the second Philopolis Guelph philosophy festival, at which over 20 activities were offered. One of the presentations that I attended, about politics, had a strange atmosphere about it, and it soon became clear that the presenter had quite a strange political view indeed. In order to avoid out-Heroding Herod, I shan't get into the details of what was said, but the outcome was that someone was so offended that she walked out of the presentation. The presenter was disappointed, but also extremely surprised. He shouldn't have been. His hypothesis was indeed very offensive, even to me. However, I felt it a better move to stay and talk to him than to abandon the situation.
After arguing quite conclusively that his hypothesis was drastically thin on substance (I really rolled up my sleeves on that one and didn't let him off the hook), I started to talk to him about understanding one another as a joint responsibility. He was shocked and disappointed that the lady had walked out of his presentation before he had had a chance to make his point more fully, or defend it appropriately (which ultimately he was unable to do anyway). I stressed that while she definitely does have a responsibility to stay and listen, to allow him to make his point, he also has a responsibility not to be so abrasive and offensive that she feels that walking away is the only course of action left open to her. The listener has a responsibility to try to understand the speaker's point, and to understand it in the most charitable manner possible before taking issue with specific issues; but the speaker has a responsibility to respect the listener and not make the process of understanding unduly difficult, specifically in this instance a responsibility to present ideas in a non-offensive way (though in this case that likely wasn't possible).
It was an interesting discussion, and arguing that understanding through dialogue is a joint responsibility allowed me to keep him from relinquishing any responsibility for his actions. I hope that he took seriously what we talked about. (And as a good philosopher, I suggested some things that he might find helpful to read in this context: it was Charles Taylor, for those keeping score at home.)
This whole discussion came back several hours later when I gave my own talk. My talk was about Cassirer's phenomenology of myth and how we can use it to understand the Islamic injunction against iconographic depictions of the sacred. (As regular readers of this blog know, I've already written a piece about that, and I'd like to once again express my gratitude to those whose insightful comments helped to considerably enrich my Philopolis talk.) One of the important lines of discussion that followed after my talk was about freedom of speech: should blasphemy be allowed, and more specifically, should we accept blasphemy when it comes from outside the culture, when the one contradicting sacred rules is not a believer in those rules? A good friend of mine suggested that freedom of speech is an important mark and pillar of a healthy democracy, which sounded right to me. However, I pointed out, Canada seems a healthy enough democracy to me (at least, pre-Harperland), and we have laws that restrict free speech, specifically outlawing hate speech.
Rational and critical dialogue among citizens is indeed an important part of democracy, and freedom of speech guarantees that we all have access to that dialogue (though, of course, some have far greater access than others, but let's put that massively important issue aside for now). However, as I mentioned in the first part of this post, we have a responsibility as parties to a dialogue to protect the integrity of that dialogue, to neither abandon it prematurely nor offend our interlocutor(s) so much as to force them to abandon it. In this sense, I see anti-hate speech laws not as impediments to free speech, but rather as complements to it, because they serve to legally underpin the need to refrain from premature offense. If free speech is instrumental to the intrinsic good of rational and critical dialogue, then anti-hate speech laws are instrumental to that same good.
So what do we say about the Danish cartoons, and movies like The Innocence of Muslims, that clearly controvert the religious laws of Islam? Should we allow this kind of criticism of Islamic culture? That will have to wait for next time.
Almost two weeks ago now, some of my Guelph cohort and I ran the second Philopolis Guelph philosophy festival, at which over 20 activities were offered. One of the presentations that I attended, about politics, had a strange atmosphere about it, and it soon became clear that the presenter had quite a strange political view indeed. In order to avoid out-Heroding Herod, I shan't get into the details of what was said, but the outcome was that someone was so offended that she walked out of the presentation. The presenter was disappointed, but also extremely surprised. He shouldn't have been. His hypothesis was indeed very offensive, even to me. However, I felt it a better move to stay and talk to him than to abandon the situation.
After arguing quite conclusively that his hypothesis was drastically thin on substance (I really rolled up my sleeves on that one and didn't let him off the hook), I started to talk to him about understanding one another as a joint responsibility. He was shocked and disappointed that the lady had walked out of his presentation before he had had a chance to make his point more fully, or defend it appropriately (which ultimately he was unable to do anyway). I stressed that while she definitely does have a responsibility to stay and listen, to allow him to make his point, he also has a responsibility not to be so abrasive and offensive that she feels that walking away is the only course of action left open to her. The listener has a responsibility to try to understand the speaker's point, and to understand it in the most charitable manner possible before taking issue with specific issues; but the speaker has a responsibility to respect the listener and not make the process of understanding unduly difficult, specifically in this instance a responsibility to present ideas in a non-offensive way (though in this case that likely wasn't possible).
It was an interesting discussion, and arguing that understanding through dialogue is a joint responsibility allowed me to keep him from relinquishing any responsibility for his actions. I hope that he took seriously what we talked about. (And as a good philosopher, I suggested some things that he might find helpful to read in this context: it was Charles Taylor, for those keeping score at home.)
This whole discussion came back several hours later when I gave my own talk. My talk was about Cassirer's phenomenology of myth and how we can use it to understand the Islamic injunction against iconographic depictions of the sacred. (As regular readers of this blog know, I've already written a piece about that, and I'd like to once again express my gratitude to those whose insightful comments helped to considerably enrich my Philopolis talk.) One of the important lines of discussion that followed after my talk was about freedom of speech: should blasphemy be allowed, and more specifically, should we accept blasphemy when it comes from outside the culture, when the one contradicting sacred rules is not a believer in those rules? A good friend of mine suggested that freedom of speech is an important mark and pillar of a healthy democracy, which sounded right to me. However, I pointed out, Canada seems a healthy enough democracy to me (at least, pre-Harperland), and we have laws that restrict free speech, specifically outlawing hate speech.
Rational and critical dialogue among citizens is indeed an important part of democracy, and freedom of speech guarantees that we all have access to that dialogue (though, of course, some have far greater access than others, but let's put that massively important issue aside for now). However, as I mentioned in the first part of this post, we have a responsibility as parties to a dialogue to protect the integrity of that dialogue, to neither abandon it prematurely nor offend our interlocutor(s) so much as to force them to abandon it. In this sense, I see anti-hate speech laws not as impediments to free speech, but rather as complements to it, because they serve to legally underpin the need to refrain from premature offense. If free speech is instrumental to the intrinsic good of rational and critical dialogue, then anti-hate speech laws are instrumental to that same good.
So what do we say about the Danish cartoons, and movies like The Innocence of Muslims, that clearly controvert the religious laws of Islam? Should we allow this kind of criticism of Islamic culture? That will have to wait for next time.
Saturday 29 September 2012
Sophia, my love: renaming philosophy?
In an article published in March of this year, Colin McGinn argues that we should change the name of (academic) philosophy. Names are important things, and they provide a wealth of material for first impressions. A rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, but you may very well never get near enough to smell it if I said it was called a "splurk." It seems indeed that critically reflecting upon the name of our practice is a wise thing to do, although I never really feel that critical reflection needs further motivation; it's good in itself.
Anyway, let's have a brief run-down of what McGinn has to say on the matter. He opens the piece by drumming up a scenario that is sickeningly familiar to anyone who works in/around philosophy, or (heaven forbid) calls themselves a philosopher. Any association with the word seems to bring up, to those unaffiliated with the field, images of old sages, replete with wisdom to share on a wealth of topics spanning the known and unknown universes. This association with self-help peddlers McGinn sees as a problem, because it not only demeans the discipline, but also leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.
He then goes on to explore the etymological heritage of the word "philosophy," which, as I've told a thousand undergrads if I've told one, comes from the Greek words "philos" and "sophia", meaning "love" and "wisdom," respectively. So philosophers, by definition, are supposed to be lovers of knowledge. However, there are plenty of lovers of knowledge that don't identify as philosophers. As a matter of fact, we need only look at our brethren in other academic fields to find some. (Though of course we must not look at their degrees, which suggest that they are indeed doctors of philosophy even if they would be ashamed to be so called. This situation makes me think of a child reticent to be associated with her parents, but whose surname just sticks to her like her shadow and refuses to cooperate and leave already.)
"Philosophy" does indeed pick out more than just the people we find working in philosophy departments, or seeking desperately and vainly to do so. However, an additional problem is that it also doesn't describe all of the people one finds in those very departments. There are some people who work in philosophy that are in fact quite fatuous and unbearable for the very reason that they just don't really care about philosophy. They can play the game, they've worked their way in through the system, but they're not very committed to their work or their ideas, and they really see philosophy as a job rather than a vocation.
Coming back to an idea I touched on briefly in my allusion to the child who just can't bear her parents, McGinn mentions that in fact much of what was once considered philosophy has since matured, left home, and become a respectable discipline of its own. Look no further than "natural philosophy," better known to contemporary audiences as good, old-fashioned, home-cooked science. All those disciplines have taken on new names, and ones that seem to pertain to their subject matter; philosophy ought to stop being such a square, take off those no-longer-fasionable togs (or togas) and keep up with the young upstart crowd.
So calling ourselves "lovers of knowledge" gets us confused for motivational speakers spouting pseudo-profound vagaries, it describes some people outside of philosophy very well in addition to describing some people in philosophy very badly, and it really doesn't say anything substantive about the subject matter of the discipline. But if we don't call ourselves philosophers, what should we call ourselves? McGinn suggests adopting the term "ontics" to describe our practice, which gives us nice words like "onticist" to describe ourselves and "ontical" as the adjectival form.
The word "ontic" by the way also comes from the Greek word meaning "being." That link to being also prompts McGinn to consider options such as "beology," which sounds positively revolting. One need not even mention the fact that such a ludicrous name only kindles the spark into flame—if people suspected we were shamans and wizards before, a name like "beology" would remove all doubt. What self-respecting discipline draws on English words to name itself anyway?
McGinn also says that ontics has a faint echo of physics about it, which he takes to be a virtue. McGinn, you see, believes that philosophy is a scientific, not a humanistic, endeavour. What is it to be a science? The author uses the following definition: "a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject." (This definition, by the way, is drawn from The Dictionary, which I find somewhat quaint. I only have Webster's dictionary, but not THE dictionary. Clearly my library is lacking. But I digress, parenthetically.) An organized body of knowledge seems a compelling definition of science, and in fact rings nicely with the German word for an analogous idea: "Wissenschaft." "Wissen" is the verb "to know" and "–schaft" is a suffix that qualifies the root as a collection or totality.
However, is science the only systematically organized body of knowledge? The Germans don't think so, which is why they use the term "Naturwissenschaft" to refer to natural science and "Geisteswissenschaft" to refer to humanistic science. (Note that the word "Geist" does not mean human, but lest the humanities be incriminated on the basis of too short a discussion, I won't mention that it often gets translated as "spirit.")
So given that we shorten "natural science" to "science" and "human(istic) science" to "humanities," where should philosophy go? Is it a science of the natural world, as McGinn suggests? It seems to me that it is indeed a science of the world, but of the natural world just as much as of the human world. Philosophy, so far as I conceive of it, doesn't investigate the world in the way that either physics or history does: it doesn't seem to discover what things are in the world, it seeks to discover what it is for a thing to be in the world. Metaphysics investigates what it is to be; epistemology investigates what it is to know; phenomenology does both of those things; ethics and aesthetics investigate what it is to be valuable (in different ways). Aesthetics doesn't seek to discover what the beautiful things are, but what beauty is.
One might pitch this distinction as investigations of the world as opposed to investigations of worldhood. Of course, that kind of language (i.e.: "worldhood") instantly suggests bringing Heidegger into the debate. He distinguishes between ontic investigations, like the sciences and humanities, and ontological investigations, like philosophy. This seems to speak pretty strongly against McGinn's suggestion. Philosophy investigates the world, yes, and aims at a systematically organized body of knowledge. But it is an investigation into the fundamental structures underlying what it is to be a world, rather than an investigation into the fundamental structures that unify/govern particular objects or classes of objects in that world. (I argued last week that the natural sciences couldn't overtake all questions; this post on naming philosophy hopefully adds more detail to what I said there.)
"Ontics" was a good suggestion, and I think put us on the right track. However, I find it misleading. A better name would be "ontology," but that's already a term for a subset of philosophy, and resistance to adopting it to characterize the whole discipline would be pretty strong. (Not to say, of course, that resistance means we wouldn't be on the right track in doing so.) "Ontology" is very loaded, even if I believe that ultimately it would be a more appropriate term.
Let's go back and look over the reasons for changing philosophy's name. McGinn wants to align us more closely with the sciences, which I've tried to argue is not an accurate portrayal of what we do. He points out that we end up getting confused for sooth sayers, and thereby "demean the discipline." I actually don't think that this is such a problem, or at least not in the way that McGinn does. Academic philosophy is far too often steeped in jargon, to a fault as I've tried to argue elsewhere. Perhaps the problem with being compared to the age's sages is not that philosophy cannot offer pearls of wisdom about how to live a better life (and what that even is), but that philosophers these days have moved so far away from doing that that they've forgotten philosophy could have that power. (Check out Philopolis, an event that aims to right that wrong and bring that aspect of philosophy back to the fore.) Leaving that void in society open, philosophers have allowed a bunch of yahoos to make a tidy profit publishing books and reading palms to satisfy the needs of the masses. Philosophers often bemoan the funding situation, so why aren't we publishing those books? Why aren't we reading those palms?
The problem seems to me not that philosophers are thought to have insightful views to share on life, but that they've abandoned that line of work and are now being unfavourably lumped in with the (often, but not always) terrible substitute that has come in to fill the void.
Where does that leave us in the name game? I'd say we should stick with the name we've got, proudly calling ourselves philosophers. The fear of being mistaken for public intellectuals started off this whole discussion, and I don't think it's a problem, or rather I believe it's a problem with our research rather than our name. The appeal of being drawn closer to the sciences is losing its case in the court of appeals. The problem of philosophers who don't love knowledge is one to fix through tenure and promotion decisions, not The Dictionary. And what of the problem of people outside of philosophy loving knowledge as well? What a wonderful problem to have. If only we had more of it.
Anyway, let's have a brief run-down of what McGinn has to say on the matter. He opens the piece by drumming up a scenario that is sickeningly familiar to anyone who works in/around philosophy, or (heaven forbid) calls themselves a philosopher. Any association with the word seems to bring up, to those unaffiliated with the field, images of old sages, replete with wisdom to share on a wealth of topics spanning the known and unknown universes. This association with self-help peddlers McGinn sees as a problem, because it not only demeans the discipline, but also leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.
He then goes on to explore the etymological heritage of the word "philosophy," which, as I've told a thousand undergrads if I've told one, comes from the Greek words "philos" and "sophia", meaning "love" and "wisdom," respectively. So philosophers, by definition, are supposed to be lovers of knowledge. However, there are plenty of lovers of knowledge that don't identify as philosophers. As a matter of fact, we need only look at our brethren in other academic fields to find some. (Though of course we must not look at their degrees, which suggest that they are indeed doctors of philosophy even if they would be ashamed to be so called. This situation makes me think of a child reticent to be associated with her parents, but whose surname just sticks to her like her shadow and refuses to cooperate and leave already.)
"Philosophy" does indeed pick out more than just the people we find working in philosophy departments, or seeking desperately and vainly to do so. However, an additional problem is that it also doesn't describe all of the people one finds in those very departments. There are some people who work in philosophy that are in fact quite fatuous and unbearable for the very reason that they just don't really care about philosophy. They can play the game, they've worked their way in through the system, but they're not very committed to their work or their ideas, and they really see philosophy as a job rather than a vocation.
Coming back to an idea I touched on briefly in my allusion to the child who just can't bear her parents, McGinn mentions that in fact much of what was once considered philosophy has since matured, left home, and become a respectable discipline of its own. Look no further than "natural philosophy," better known to contemporary audiences as good, old-fashioned, home-cooked science. All those disciplines have taken on new names, and ones that seem to pertain to their subject matter; philosophy ought to stop being such a square, take off those no-longer-fasionable togs (or togas) and keep up with the young upstart crowd.
So calling ourselves "lovers of knowledge" gets us confused for motivational speakers spouting pseudo-profound vagaries, it describes some people outside of philosophy very well in addition to describing some people in philosophy very badly, and it really doesn't say anything substantive about the subject matter of the discipline. But if we don't call ourselves philosophers, what should we call ourselves? McGinn suggests adopting the term "ontics" to describe our practice, which gives us nice words like "onticist" to describe ourselves and "ontical" as the adjectival form.
The word "ontic" by the way also comes from the Greek word meaning "being." That link to being also prompts McGinn to consider options such as "beology," which sounds positively revolting. One need not even mention the fact that such a ludicrous name only kindles the spark into flame—if people suspected we were shamans and wizards before, a name like "beology" would remove all doubt. What self-respecting discipline draws on English words to name itself anyway?
McGinn also says that ontics has a faint echo of physics about it, which he takes to be a virtue. McGinn, you see, believes that philosophy is a scientific, not a humanistic, endeavour. What is it to be a science? The author uses the following definition: "a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject." (This definition, by the way, is drawn from The Dictionary, which I find somewhat quaint. I only have Webster's dictionary, but not THE dictionary. Clearly my library is lacking. But I digress, parenthetically.) An organized body of knowledge seems a compelling definition of science, and in fact rings nicely with the German word for an analogous idea: "Wissenschaft." "Wissen" is the verb "to know" and "–schaft" is a suffix that qualifies the root as a collection or totality.
However, is science the only systematically organized body of knowledge? The Germans don't think so, which is why they use the term "Naturwissenschaft" to refer to natural science and "Geisteswissenschaft" to refer to humanistic science. (Note that the word "Geist" does not mean human, but lest the humanities be incriminated on the basis of too short a discussion, I won't mention that it often gets translated as "spirit.")
So given that we shorten "natural science" to "science" and "human(istic) science" to "humanities," where should philosophy go? Is it a science of the natural world, as McGinn suggests? It seems to me that it is indeed a science of the world, but of the natural world just as much as of the human world. Philosophy, so far as I conceive of it, doesn't investigate the world in the way that either physics or history does: it doesn't seem to discover what things are in the world, it seeks to discover what it is for a thing to be in the world. Metaphysics investigates what it is to be; epistemology investigates what it is to know; phenomenology does both of those things; ethics and aesthetics investigate what it is to be valuable (in different ways). Aesthetics doesn't seek to discover what the beautiful things are, but what beauty is.
One might pitch this distinction as investigations of the world as opposed to investigations of worldhood. Of course, that kind of language (i.e.: "worldhood") instantly suggests bringing Heidegger into the debate. He distinguishes between ontic investigations, like the sciences and humanities, and ontological investigations, like philosophy. This seems to speak pretty strongly against McGinn's suggestion. Philosophy investigates the world, yes, and aims at a systematically organized body of knowledge. But it is an investigation into the fundamental structures underlying what it is to be a world, rather than an investigation into the fundamental structures that unify/govern particular objects or classes of objects in that world. (I argued last week that the natural sciences couldn't overtake all questions; this post on naming philosophy hopefully adds more detail to what I said there.)
"Ontics" was a good suggestion, and I think put us on the right track. However, I find it misleading. A better name would be "ontology," but that's already a term for a subset of philosophy, and resistance to adopting it to characterize the whole discipline would be pretty strong. (Not to say, of course, that resistance means we wouldn't be on the right track in doing so.) "Ontology" is very loaded, even if I believe that ultimately it would be a more appropriate term.
Let's go back and look over the reasons for changing philosophy's name. McGinn wants to align us more closely with the sciences, which I've tried to argue is not an accurate portrayal of what we do. He points out that we end up getting confused for sooth sayers, and thereby "demean the discipline." I actually don't think that this is such a problem, or at least not in the way that McGinn does. Academic philosophy is far too often steeped in jargon, to a fault as I've tried to argue elsewhere. Perhaps the problem with being compared to the age's sages is not that philosophy cannot offer pearls of wisdom about how to live a better life (and what that even is), but that philosophers these days have moved so far away from doing that that they've forgotten philosophy could have that power. (Check out Philopolis, an event that aims to right that wrong and bring that aspect of philosophy back to the fore.) Leaving that void in society open, philosophers have allowed a bunch of yahoos to make a tidy profit publishing books and reading palms to satisfy the needs of the masses. Philosophers often bemoan the funding situation, so why aren't we publishing those books? Why aren't we reading those palms?
The problem seems to me not that philosophers are thought to have insightful views to share on life, but that they've abandoned that line of work and are now being unfavourably lumped in with the (often, but not always) terrible substitute that has come in to fill the void.
Where does that leave us in the name game? I'd say we should stick with the name we've got, proudly calling ourselves philosophers. The fear of being mistaken for public intellectuals started off this whole discussion, and I don't think it's a problem, or rather I believe it's a problem with our research rather than our name. The appeal of being drawn closer to the sciences is losing its case in the court of appeals. The problem of philosophers who don't love knowledge is one to fix through tenure and promotion decisions, not The Dictionary. And what of the problem of people outside of philosophy loving knowledge as well? What a wonderful problem to have. If only we had more of it.
Saturday 22 September 2012
The Cult of the Scientific
First off, I'd like to shamelessly plug some of my ongoing efforts. The schedule for Philopolis Guelph (October 12–13) has just been released online; there are full descriptions for all the activities to be found there as well. Also, I'll be giving a talk on the Carrés Rouges movement this Tuesday (September 25), 7:00 PM at the Guelph Public Library. For all those of you who commented on that post, thanks very much. Your responses have been very helpful in honing what I'll say at the talk, even if I haven't had a chance to respond to you in writing yet.
Anyway, let's turn the page now and get on task for this week's post. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me an article chronicling a debate between a scientist and a philosopher about which discipline answers "the big questions of life." This article irritated me sufficiently to warrant a blog post, for a few reasons. The first is a cultural prevalence to believe prima facie ("on the face of it," or, at first glance) that the answer to that question is trivial, and that of course science answers all such questions. This belief often goes along with a willingness to misinterpret scientific data, and when I say "misinterpret," what I specifically mean is the willingness to conclude from an experiment far more than what the data warrants. The second irritating point (and philosophers everywhere should appreciate what's coming) is that even the question is badly posed. Why is it assumed that one of the two must answer all the big questions? The formulation itself presupposes that the big questions are all of one type (or maybe that all questions are of one type) and on that basis looks to see which methodology will address such a type of question. In good philosophical style, my first move in answering the question is to undermine the question itself. I don't believe there is only one type of question; I disagree that all the big questions fall into one type; and therefore I disagree that we need to settle the issue of which discipline answers all of the big ones.
However, let's now have a closer look at what's going on in the discussion itself. Julian Baggini's opening comment about science envy from philosophers is spot on: anyone who's written a SSHRC application trying to get funding for a PhD in philosophy knows the pressure is on not only to justify one's project within the discipline, but that the value of philosophy as a whole often has to be justified right along with it. If only I could say my project were science, then people would know it's legit and I could just get the money to go off and do it. Science has indeed worked miracles. (And humanities scholars often feel that a lot more money goes to our scientific brethren than it does to us, and with more ease. This situation probably is true, and is beautifully caricatured in Futurama when Prof. Farnsworth talks about running an upcoming research project on a machine powered by "dump trucks full of flaming grant money.") But philosophers are quick to draw on history to demonstrate that individual sciences have grown out of philosophical inquiries. And so, as the young upstarts that they are, we sharply bring them back to order. After all, even scientists get awarded PhDs: philosophical doctorates. Respect your elders. Remember where you came from. Never forget who you are. All such things, if for no other reason than to make philosophers feel better and take the pressure off us for a wee while as we try to get a little research done.
Anyway, Baggini (the philosopher) asks Krauss (his physicist interlocutor) if the imperialist ambitions of science know no bounds. In other words, should we expect science to take over all of the questions that philosophy has treated, or only some? Baggini cites the issue of morality, to which Krauss replies that science provides the basis for moral decisions. Such decisions are based on reason, and reason is gleaned from empirical evidence. "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs." The response from Krauss here suggests to me that he hasn't spent an awful lot of time thinking about this situation. (Note here that I'm adopting a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective on ethics, which is not my position at all, but which is rather the position that Krauss himself suggests by immediately looking at consequences, and I'll therefore follow him into his own territory.) One might easily divide moral questions into two parts: first, what would the desirable outcome be; second, how might I achieve that outcome? Clearly, science will play a central role, maybe even the only role, in addressing the second part of that question. Science can guide us well in trying to accomplish a great many things. However, what about the first part of the question: can science ever tell us what ought to be the case? This picks up an old problem from the history of philosophy, that of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is," or otherwise put, trying to derive a normative claim from one or more factual claims. To my knowledge, no solution has yet been advanced for this problem, at least not one that will make you feel anything but tricked by a dirty philosopher and in need of a shower.
Krauss's response might suggest that we could solve it, though. His position is that science will reduce our understanding of morality to well-defined biological constructs. However, this doesn't seem promising to me. Suppose that we accomplish what Krauss suggests will ultimately happen; suppose that we can give an evolutionary story about how our feelings about morality developed. Would such a story de facto tell us right from wrong? No, it would tell us how our feelings about morality have evolved. However, we recognise all the time that sometimes our moral intuitions are wrong. There is an appreciable gap between what people sometimes believe to be right, and what actually is right. An account of the type that Krauss foresees tells us about people's beliefs, and nothing about the moral truths that such beliefs might track more or less well.
Of course, all that we need here is a further stipulation. We need a scientific theory not about how we form all of our moral beliefs, but rather only about the ones that are actually correct. Notice here that the distinction between correct and incorrect moral beliefs will rely on a standard of judgment already presupposed in answering the question: we need to know what the moral truths are before we can know which beliefs are correct, and therefore before we can put together a science explaining how such beliefs come about. And what kind of scientific experiment could we run to test whether killing is wrong? What would that experiment look like? Science only seems to tell us what is (or was, or would be) the case, but never what ought to be the case. There is no empirical experiment that can tell us what ought to be the case, and therefore the sciences just won't have an answer for us there.
Going back to Krauss's quote more closely, he says: "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not." Notice that he's actually weaseling his way out of the question here. Krauss was asked whether science would overtake questions of morality. What he has answered here, however, is whether science plays any role in moral decisions. As he says, "'reason' alone is impotent." However, the claim being made by consequentialist philosophers is not that reason alone will solve moral quandaries. They agree that science has a role to play here. What they dispute is that science has the only role to play, and Krauss dodges that question here. It is only with auxiliary philosophical hypotheses that science has anything to say about morality.
In fact, Krauss's own claim that science will reduce morality to a biological construct is not even an empirical claim. What he's saying can be recast as the following conditional: "If science can give an evolutionary story for our sense of right and wrong, then there isn't really something meaningfully 'right' or 'wrong.'" How could that possibly be an empirical statement (you know, the kind formulated, tested, and supported or rejected by empirical science)? If we succeed in giving that evolutionary story about our sense of right and wrong, how could we ever verify whether the consequent of that claim checks out? What object could we measure that would tell us that nothing is meaningfully right or wrong? There is no such thing. Trivially so.
As a matter of fact, that's a problem not only for morality. It's a problem for empirical science as well, because science itself rests on a set of philosophical assumptions. A well-known issue there is the problem of induction, which is the process of examining a finite amount of evidence in order to put together universal laws that apply more widely than one's evidence. It's a process that draws on knowledge of observed facts to pass judgment about unobserved facts. For instance, on the basis of the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life, I conclude that the sun will rise for all the days of my life still to come. However, how could science justify it? What test could we do that would conclusively tell us that using this kind of reasoning is okay? A very reasonable response is to say that the proof is in the pudding: after all, we've used it so many times already and it has worked, so using it in the future should be fine, too. Think about what just happened there: on the basis of the fact that past (observed) instances of induction have worked, the scientist claims that future applications of it are justified. But that was exactly the rule that we had set out for science to prove! (In fact, all past scientific theories have been false, so it's reasonable to believe that present ones are false, and that future ones will all be so as well.)
Do I want to decimate science here? Absolutely not. What I do want is to offer a harsh critique of the kind of rampant scientism that one finds in our society, the belief that science will answer any and all questions. Clearly, science is not up to that task, as I think I've just demonstrated (or at least I've pushed the burden of the argument into their camp: without a response, things look bleak at this point for science). What I want to demonstrate is the truth of the following claim: if science has all the answers, then science has no good answers because it can't justify itself scientifically. I don't see this as a problem for science. I see it as a problem for scientism. Philosophy and science work in tandem, not just on moral issues where philosophical theorisation about right and wrong are supplemented by scientific theorisation about how to achieve those ends, but also on the issues that seem to be clearly in the wheelhouse of science because science itself rests on a set of philosophical presuppositions. It would be foolish to say that science answers no questions; and that's exactly where we're headed if we say that science answers all of them.
Anyway, let's turn the page now and get on task for this week's post. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me an article chronicling a debate between a scientist and a philosopher about which discipline answers "the big questions of life." This article irritated me sufficiently to warrant a blog post, for a few reasons. The first is a cultural prevalence to believe prima facie ("on the face of it," or, at first glance) that the answer to that question is trivial, and that of course science answers all such questions. This belief often goes along with a willingness to misinterpret scientific data, and when I say "misinterpret," what I specifically mean is the willingness to conclude from an experiment far more than what the data warrants. The second irritating point (and philosophers everywhere should appreciate what's coming) is that even the question is badly posed. Why is it assumed that one of the two must answer all the big questions? The formulation itself presupposes that the big questions are all of one type (or maybe that all questions are of one type) and on that basis looks to see which methodology will address such a type of question. In good philosophical style, my first move in answering the question is to undermine the question itself. I don't believe there is only one type of question; I disagree that all the big questions fall into one type; and therefore I disagree that we need to settle the issue of which discipline answers all of the big ones.
However, let's now have a closer look at what's going on in the discussion itself. Julian Baggini's opening comment about science envy from philosophers is spot on: anyone who's written a SSHRC application trying to get funding for a PhD in philosophy knows the pressure is on not only to justify one's project within the discipline, but that the value of philosophy as a whole often has to be justified right along with it. If only I could say my project were science, then people would know it's legit and I could just get the money to go off and do it. Science has indeed worked miracles. (And humanities scholars often feel that a lot more money goes to our scientific brethren than it does to us, and with more ease. This situation probably is true, and is beautifully caricatured in Futurama when Prof. Farnsworth talks about running an upcoming research project on a machine powered by "dump trucks full of flaming grant money.") But philosophers are quick to draw on history to demonstrate that individual sciences have grown out of philosophical inquiries. And so, as the young upstarts that they are, we sharply bring them back to order. After all, even scientists get awarded PhDs: philosophical doctorates. Respect your elders. Remember where you came from. Never forget who you are. All such things, if for no other reason than to make philosophers feel better and take the pressure off us for a wee while as we try to get a little research done.
Anyway, Baggini (the philosopher) asks Krauss (his physicist interlocutor) if the imperialist ambitions of science know no bounds. In other words, should we expect science to take over all of the questions that philosophy has treated, or only some? Baggini cites the issue of morality, to which Krauss replies that science provides the basis for moral decisions. Such decisions are based on reason, and reason is gleaned from empirical evidence. "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs." The response from Krauss here suggests to me that he hasn't spent an awful lot of time thinking about this situation. (Note here that I'm adopting a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective on ethics, which is not my position at all, but which is rather the position that Krauss himself suggests by immediately looking at consequences, and I'll therefore follow him into his own territory.) One might easily divide moral questions into two parts: first, what would the desirable outcome be; second, how might I achieve that outcome? Clearly, science will play a central role, maybe even the only role, in addressing the second part of that question. Science can guide us well in trying to accomplish a great many things. However, what about the first part of the question: can science ever tell us what ought to be the case? This picks up an old problem from the history of philosophy, that of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is," or otherwise put, trying to derive a normative claim from one or more factual claims. To my knowledge, no solution has yet been advanced for this problem, at least not one that will make you feel anything but tricked by a dirty philosopher and in need of a shower.
Krauss's response might suggest that we could solve it, though. His position is that science will reduce our understanding of morality to well-defined biological constructs. However, this doesn't seem promising to me. Suppose that we accomplish what Krauss suggests will ultimately happen; suppose that we can give an evolutionary story about how our feelings about morality developed. Would such a story de facto tell us right from wrong? No, it would tell us how our feelings about morality have evolved. However, we recognise all the time that sometimes our moral intuitions are wrong. There is an appreciable gap between what people sometimes believe to be right, and what actually is right. An account of the type that Krauss foresees tells us about people's beliefs, and nothing about the moral truths that such beliefs might track more or less well.
Of course, all that we need here is a further stipulation. We need a scientific theory not about how we form all of our moral beliefs, but rather only about the ones that are actually correct. Notice here that the distinction between correct and incorrect moral beliefs will rely on a standard of judgment already presupposed in answering the question: we need to know what the moral truths are before we can know which beliefs are correct, and therefore before we can put together a science explaining how such beliefs come about. And what kind of scientific experiment could we run to test whether killing is wrong? What would that experiment look like? Science only seems to tell us what is (or was, or would be) the case, but never what ought to be the case. There is no empirical experiment that can tell us what ought to be the case, and therefore the sciences just won't have an answer for us there.
Going back to Krauss's quote more closely, he says: "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not." Notice that he's actually weaseling his way out of the question here. Krauss was asked whether science would overtake questions of morality. What he has answered here, however, is whether science plays any role in moral decisions. As he says, "'reason' alone is impotent." However, the claim being made by consequentialist philosophers is not that reason alone will solve moral quandaries. They agree that science has a role to play here. What they dispute is that science has the only role to play, and Krauss dodges that question here. It is only with auxiliary philosophical hypotheses that science has anything to say about morality.
In fact, Krauss's own claim that science will reduce morality to a biological construct is not even an empirical claim. What he's saying can be recast as the following conditional: "If science can give an evolutionary story for our sense of right and wrong, then there isn't really something meaningfully 'right' or 'wrong.'" How could that possibly be an empirical statement (you know, the kind formulated, tested, and supported or rejected by empirical science)? If we succeed in giving that evolutionary story about our sense of right and wrong, how could we ever verify whether the consequent of that claim checks out? What object could we measure that would tell us that nothing is meaningfully right or wrong? There is no such thing. Trivially so.
As a matter of fact, that's a problem not only for morality. It's a problem for empirical science as well, because science itself rests on a set of philosophical assumptions. A well-known issue there is the problem of induction, which is the process of examining a finite amount of evidence in order to put together universal laws that apply more widely than one's evidence. It's a process that draws on knowledge of observed facts to pass judgment about unobserved facts. For instance, on the basis of the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life, I conclude that the sun will rise for all the days of my life still to come. However, how could science justify it? What test could we do that would conclusively tell us that using this kind of reasoning is okay? A very reasonable response is to say that the proof is in the pudding: after all, we've used it so many times already and it has worked, so using it in the future should be fine, too. Think about what just happened there: on the basis of the fact that past (observed) instances of induction have worked, the scientist claims that future applications of it are justified. But that was exactly the rule that we had set out for science to prove! (In fact, all past scientific theories have been false, so it's reasonable to believe that present ones are false, and that future ones will all be so as well.)
Do I want to decimate science here? Absolutely not. What I do want is to offer a harsh critique of the kind of rampant scientism that one finds in our society, the belief that science will answer any and all questions. Clearly, science is not up to that task, as I think I've just demonstrated (or at least I've pushed the burden of the argument into their camp: without a response, things look bleak at this point for science). What I want to demonstrate is the truth of the following claim: if science has all the answers, then science has no good answers because it can't justify itself scientifically. I don't see this as a problem for science. I see it as a problem for scientism. Philosophy and science work in tandem, not just on moral issues where philosophical theorisation about right and wrong are supplemented by scientific theorisation about how to achieve those ends, but also on the issues that seem to be clearly in the wheelhouse of science because science itself rests on a set of philosophical presuppositions. It would be foolish to say that science answers no questions; and that's exactly where we're headed if we say that science answers all of them.
Sunday 16 September 2012
Carrés Rouges
I've written about the sad contemporary state of academia, both about who's got it good in academia these days and about the inaccessibility of research to the general public, but I haven't said much (at length, in this blog) about the situation in Quebec that's been going on for the last few months. I volunteered some time ago to give a talk on the situation at the Philosophy Goes Public lecture series at the Guelph Public Library, and so finally my arm has been twisted and I've been forced to sit down and sort out my ideas, as well as my reasons for holding those ideas. The talk will be in about ten days, and hopefully this entry will serve not only as a way to fill people in who won't be there but would like to be, but also as a way for me to get some feedback on the structure (and content) of the talk beforehand. I'm therefore looking forward, probably more than was the case with any previous blog post, to the commentary this receives. Without any further ado:
Carrés Rouges: Quebec's tuition hikes and student protests
1. History
I'll start with a quick timeline of events I consider to be salient, for which I'm heavily indebted to Cayley Sorochan. From 1963–2012, Quebec has more often than not had a tuition freeze in place for university education. These were not gifts from the government, of course, but goals achieved through the hard work of past students who demonstrated and protested when previous hikes were proposed/declared. In 2010, the Quebec Liberal Government, led by Jean Charest, proposed an increase of 75%, to take place between 2012 and 2017. This proposal, calling for students to pay their "fair share," was met with student resistance from the very beginning, and was seen to undo the hard work of many previous generations of students. In effect, it would bring Quebec tuition up to the levels of other provinces, where there is not the same history of students keeping tuition down. Requests by student groups to meet with the Charest government on this issue were denied.
After two years of getting nowhere, CLASSE, an umbrella organisation with representative democratic structure for 342 000 students, voted for a general student strike. Their counter-proposal to the Quebec government was a 0.7% tax on banks, which would effectively raise enough money not only to cover the government's perceived shortfall, but also to cover tuition fees entirely throughout the entire province. On March 22, 200 000 students demonstrated in an attempt to get the attention of the government, who still refused to meet regarding this issue.
Institutions and students against the strike filed an injunction against the protestors, prompting the institutions to hire additional security to profile students and identify them for disciplinary action. Where picket lines (composed of students as well as professors) stood strong in the face of these tactics, riot police were called in to disperse them and prevent them from entering campus buildings.
In a vote on April 22, CLASSE changed tactics, voting unanimously in favour of civil disobedience, but unanimously denouncing violence. Roads and bridges were blocked by protestors, bags of bricks were on a few occasions thrown on metro tracks to disrupt commuting, the office windows of education minister Line Beauchamp were painted red (for the red square, which was already at this point quickly becoming the symbol of this protest movement), and windows of some businesses were broken. Police often responded to this civil disobedience with violence, and violence was cited as the reason for Beauchamp refusing to meet with student groups.
On April 25, Beauchamp finally agreed to meet with students, but only to discuss loans and bursaries, not the hike. At this meeting, the Liberals proposed to raise tuition at a slower rate over seven years instead of five, but ultimately this worked out to more than the 75% increase that was initially proposed. After some subsequent meetings, Beauchamp believed that she has nothing left to contribute to the resolution of this issue, and resigned as minister of education.
The government still claimed that it was willing to negotiate in good faith, but on May 16 proposed Bill 78: the content of this bill illegalises any demonstration that does not submit its route to police at least eight hours ahead of time, or any demonstration within 50 metres of an education institution. Fines are stipulated for offending students, student leaders and student groups. In the case of an infraction of the bill, institutions are free to stop collecting and passing along fees to the student groups in question, and these penalties apply not only to offending groups, but also groups that are judged not to have done enough to prevent their members from acting. On the same day, the city of Montreal passed a bill outlawing the wearing of masks during public demonstrations.
On May 18, Bill 78 passed into law. A massive, peaceful demonstration that night was met with rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police. Those who were arrested were not charged under Bill 78, but rather fined for illegal assembly. The outcome of this is that the legal contestation of of these charges could not serve as a venue to examine the legality of Bill 78 in court. May 22 saw the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, as an estimated 400 000 people demonstrated in defiance of Bill 78. Though no arrests were made that night, 500 people were arrested the following day in a kettling operation by police. Once again, a change of tactics came about. On May 26, rather than marching in a single large demonstration, thousands of protestors demonstrated in dozens of small groups through Montreal, walking through the streets at night and banging pots and pans. These demonstrations inspired solidarity marches across Canada and the world.
On May 28, the Quebec government made a new proposal to the students. However, the offer was retracted despite the fact that the student groups were willing to negotiate and compromise. One of the big problems throughout these negotiations was that while the government delegates representatives to negotiate with the students, the student groups have a representative democracy: their representatives are just the mouthpiece that passes along the will of the students as expressed through a vote. They have no power to make decisions on the students' behalf.
In June, Bill 78 was upheld in Quebec lower court. In July, the Quebec Human Rights Commission denounced Bill 78 as undermining the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Bill is set to be heard in Quebec Supreme Court in the fall of 2012. September 4 saw the Liberal government voted out of office in a provincial election, with Jean Charest losing the seat in his home riding of Sherbrooke. He subsequently stepped down as head of the Quebec Liberals. Pauline Marois, whose Parti Québecois promised to abolish the hike, became the new premier of Quebec. However, it is a minority government, and so it remains to be seen how this situation will play itself out. (Added in an edit on Sept. 24, 2012: The PQ has actually followed through on their promise and abolished the proposed hike.)
2. Value of education
Having laid out the historical groundwork, I now want to raise three sets of issues. The first is about the value of education. During times such as these, one I think has to reflect on whether education is a luxury good or an important social good. Clearly individuals benefit economically from being educated, but it seems that society as a whole benefits as well, and not only in economic terms.
Conceiving of education as a luxury good alone is a non-starter in virtue of those social benefits that come from having an educated populace. Certainly in Quebec, people have long been party to the idea that education is emancipatory, that it is the key to freedom. The philosopher John Dewey would certainly have agreed, as he claimed that education should not be conceived solely as creating human capital for the workforce. Rather, education should be teaching us to learn and to solve problems, not simply to hone a craft and send us out into the economic market. That doesn't even make good business sense considering the pace with which markets change and old skills become antiquated: we need to learn not only what will be successful today, but the skills we'll need to learn and innovate what will be successful tomorrow.
When education becomes financially inaccessible, we limit not only the quality of our workforce: more importantly, we limit access to intellectual freedom (from persuasion) and thus ultimately limit access to political equality. Pricing education out of the range of the masses therefore undermines its very value as emancipatory because the playing field can only be equalled among those who can afford it financially. (This take on education undermines the claim that students can boycott but not strike, likening the students to customers who withhold their patronage from a certain business.)
3. Accessibility
Taking up the conception of education as emancipatory, we then have to ask about the second of three issues: accessibility. Specifically, what is the "fair share" for a student to pay? Of course, whatever isn't covered through tuition must be covered by the government, which collects money from the people and industry through taxation; so perhaps a good way to reformulate this question is to ask what would constitute a fair distribution between student tuition and social contribution through taxation. According to the commodity view of education, many will claim that the students are gaining financially from their degrees, thereby justifying a larger portion of costs being covered by students.
However, society as a whole also benefits greatly from having an educated populace: middle-classers typically contribute huge amounts to the public coffers, not to mention the fact that the velocity of money in a society greatly increases as disparity falls. Furthermore, the private sector gains an awful lot from public research funded by the government, and the great number of university graduates in society makes the bargaining position of businesses that much better at the negotiating table because they know that their (prospective) employees don't have a plethora of other offers on the table, whereas the employers have many eager beavers knocking at their doors. The market is flooded with educated workers, not with jobs requiring that education. So yes, there certainly is an economic benefit for the students that might translate into a reasonable expectation that they cover some of the cost. However, there are also benefits for society at large as well as private corporations, and those benefits should translate the same way.
Everything gets more expensive over time when money is inflating, and so it seems reasonable to expect education contributions to go up as well, not just for students but across the board. From 1985–2005, the proportion of Canadian university costs covered by tuition went from 14% to 30%. In Quebec, to cover tuition costs alone required 4 weeks of full-time work in 1978, 2.8 weeks in 1989, 6 weeks in 2000, 6.7 in 2012, and is estimated at 8.8 weeks of work by 2015. Life is indeed getting more expensive, but why is the burden being shifted proportionately more and more onto tuition?
CLASSE proposed a 0.7% bank tax in Quebec, which would cover all tuition costs (including the proposed raise) for the entire province. The Big Five banks in Canada declared $21.8 billion in profits in 2011. By contrast, the federal government owns $14.5 billion in student debt; the average student debt in the Maritimes rose from $21 000 to $28 000 between 1999 and 2004 (a 33% increase in 5 years); Quebec has the lowest average in the country at $13 000; estimates vary between 7 000 and 30 000 when trying to anticipate how many Quebec students would lose access to higher education as a result of the proposed increase; in 1963, corporate taxation represented 55% of the federal tax collected, whereas in 2011 the corresponding figure had plummeted to 18%. Life gets more expensive because of inflation, but why so much more expensive for some and not for others?
Specifically, the increase in tuition hits people at a terrible time in life, financially speaking. Paying this increase through taxation later in life, when financial matters are more stable for most people, means that we end up paying drastically less in interest to the banks that offer these loans. Furthermore, it allows us to distribute the burden according to one's means (one of the main benefits of differential taxation). Though on average there is an advantage, not everyone who goes to university will be financially successful. Paying for education through taxation allows us to shelter those who would otherwise live under the yoke of their student debt. We do the same thing with health care in Canada. Increasing tuition is a simple way to inject money into the education system, but we should not therefore come to the conclusion that it is the best way to do so simply because it is the simplest.
Another reason that is often given for increased tuition being reasonable is that it would bring Quebec more into line with the tuition levels of the other provinces, which are of course far lower than the levels one finds in the United States. However, while we're on the topic of financial matters, it makes sense to ask whether these systems fit into a wider financial situation that we see as enviable. Does the debt situation in the US seem all that appealing? Is that really the road down which we want to go? The rest of Canada rightly points out that Quebec's financial matters are not in great shape, particularly Alberta, the source of much transfer payment money.
However, is that to say that the kind of social democracy towards which Quebec strives is untenable? The Scandinavian countries stand as an obvious counter-example to that claim. Denmark has no tuition fees, and they manage to run a pretty successful shop, economically speaking. Their social services are incredible: the difference is that their level of taxation is completely different from ours. For instance, there is a 100% tax rate on automobiles, much of which certainly fills the coffers of public transit systems, offered as the green alternative to private transit. Such nations have among the highest standards of living, with great records of social parity. By contrast, the United States has an attrocious record when it comes to wealth disparity and environmental matters. When choosing one's reference class for comparison, how do we (Quebecers, Canadians) really see ourselves proceeding in the future: towards the American or the Scandinavian model?
Other comparisons are historical: many Baby Boomers criticize current students for wanting everything handed to them on a silver platter, when the Boomers see themselves as having had to work for what they have. While undoubtedly that is true, the Baby Boomers lived in a period of great economic prosperity: the figures cited earlier about the number of weeks of full-time work required to cover tuition demonstrate that what students these days are asking for is actually a situation comparable to what previous generations actually enjoyed (and not "unfairly" enjoyed, those previous generations seem to say).
Students are fighting for the opportunity their forebears had, and the declining contribution of the wealthiest segment of society explains why they have to fight. In times of booming economy, Canadians lived well. Money flowed through the economy, with taxes taking a slice at every turn, providing the funds necessary to support the social programs of the era. Those same generations were not saying at the time that they ought to cut back for the future, nor are they rushing to give back their wonderful benefits now that we're in an economically trying present. Who was the last MP who refused their indexed pension claiming that the economy just couldn't afford it?
It is claimed that the education system in Quebec, as it is presently organized, cannot sustainably run on its current levels of funding. The simple solution to this is just to throw more money at the system, and the simplest way to do that is just to raise tuition for the people who use the service that that system provides. Just as one may ask whether other sources of funding are more appropriate, so too may someone ask whether the structuring of the system needs revision. After all, Quebec already spends more on higher education per student than any other province, though only marginally so. Why, then, is the money falling short there in particular? In the Quebec education system (in general, not specifically in higher education), 10 cents of every $1 spent goes to administration. Whereas Denmark has 50 administrators/1 000 000 students, Quebec has 5 000 administrators for that same number (figures from 1988). If the Scandinavian model is informing our ideal of social democracy, perhaps we should be following their streamlined administrative practices rather than moving further and further from their tuition-free funding structure.
In the two decades from 1988–2008, administration costs rose from 12% to 20% of total spending at Canada's 25 biggest universities. Teaching costs dropped from 65% to 58% of the total over that same period. In Quebec, university administration fees jumped 83% from 1997-2004. Additionally, we have seen a trend away from expensive tenured professorships towards relatively cheaper sessional positions, in addition to larger class sizes. We now expect academics to teach more students for less money, while the administration eats up the surplus generated thereby, all the while crying poor and requesting more money of the university's students. All this in the face of growing pressure to form partnerships with private industry, SSHRC and NSERC money going to the development of ideas for private profit.
The quality of education suffers from large classes, as well as overburdened teaching staff who are remunerated less and less. Furthermore, administrative costs are eating up more and more the budget, leading to an untenable funding situation where students are being asked to pay more to support a system that invests less and less in their education and ever more in private interests. Those interests, however, are being taxed less and less for the benefit that they receive from this research. This picture of universities as economic stimulators does not sit well with the emancipation model of education; it furthermore raises some very troubling questions about the degree to which public money ends up in private pockets.
4. Wider democratic issues
What do the actions of the Quebec government tell us about our democracy? First off, raising tuition suggests that money is lacking in the higher education system, which as discussed earlier is an important institution for emancipation and democratic practice. Money really is lacking, and one need only look at the state of repair of buildings on university campuses to see it. However, raising tuition suggests that they are exploring the simplest option to close the gap. Refusing to negotiate with students suggests that the structure of university funding is not open for discussion: the government knows what's best on this matter and will dictate it to their public rather than working with them (or for them, horror!). It suggests not only that the financing of higher education is off limits for conversation, but also that the same is true of the structuring of higher education. The government will not discuss the social values that underlie these decisions.
What about Bill 78? This is a much more troubling point, and really what turned an education issue into a full-blown social issue, touching everyone in the province (and many, many beyond), leaving no one indifferent. The fact that the government claimed to be negotiating in good faith with the students when they introduced Bill 78 suggests that they have no scruples about duplicity. Furthermore, they will not hesitate very long before applying pressure while refusing to sustain nearly any applied to themselves. (Remember that CLASSE voted in favour of peaceful civil disobedience, and that in most cases it is the police who are believed to have sparked the small number of violent outbursts. In fact, the very small amount of violence and low cost of damages for such a large movement, and one so prolonged, suggests that these protests were actually quite orderly and civilized.)
Our politicians are far too ready to dictate values to us, and far too reticent to have any discussion on the matter with the general public: to ban peaceful protest and general assembly is to silence the voice of the public. Ultimately, it should raise serious questions for us about the role of our politicians. Namely, are they not in place (ideally) in order to help us translate our values into the structuring of our society? And how should we respond to the paternalistic attitude that they have our best interests in mind and will protect us from ourselves?
Carrés Rouges: Quebec's tuition hikes and student protests
1. History
I'll start with a quick timeline of events I consider to be salient, for which I'm heavily indebted to Cayley Sorochan. From 1963–2012, Quebec has more often than not had a tuition freeze in place for university education. These were not gifts from the government, of course, but goals achieved through the hard work of past students who demonstrated and protested when previous hikes were proposed/declared. In 2010, the Quebec Liberal Government, led by Jean Charest, proposed an increase of 75%, to take place between 2012 and 2017. This proposal, calling for students to pay their "fair share," was met with student resistance from the very beginning, and was seen to undo the hard work of many previous generations of students. In effect, it would bring Quebec tuition up to the levels of other provinces, where there is not the same history of students keeping tuition down. Requests by student groups to meet with the Charest government on this issue were denied.
After two years of getting nowhere, CLASSE, an umbrella organisation with representative democratic structure for 342 000 students, voted for a general student strike. Their counter-proposal to the Quebec government was a 0.7% tax on banks, which would effectively raise enough money not only to cover the government's perceived shortfall, but also to cover tuition fees entirely throughout the entire province. On March 22, 200 000 students demonstrated in an attempt to get the attention of the government, who still refused to meet regarding this issue.
Institutions and students against the strike filed an injunction against the protestors, prompting the institutions to hire additional security to profile students and identify them for disciplinary action. Where picket lines (composed of students as well as professors) stood strong in the face of these tactics, riot police were called in to disperse them and prevent them from entering campus buildings.
In a vote on April 22, CLASSE changed tactics, voting unanimously in favour of civil disobedience, but unanimously denouncing violence. Roads and bridges were blocked by protestors, bags of bricks were on a few occasions thrown on metro tracks to disrupt commuting, the office windows of education minister Line Beauchamp were painted red (for the red square, which was already at this point quickly becoming the symbol of this protest movement), and windows of some businesses were broken. Police often responded to this civil disobedience with violence, and violence was cited as the reason for Beauchamp refusing to meet with student groups.
On April 25, Beauchamp finally agreed to meet with students, but only to discuss loans and bursaries, not the hike. At this meeting, the Liberals proposed to raise tuition at a slower rate over seven years instead of five, but ultimately this worked out to more than the 75% increase that was initially proposed. After some subsequent meetings, Beauchamp believed that she has nothing left to contribute to the resolution of this issue, and resigned as minister of education.
The government still claimed that it was willing to negotiate in good faith, but on May 16 proposed Bill 78: the content of this bill illegalises any demonstration that does not submit its route to police at least eight hours ahead of time, or any demonstration within 50 metres of an education institution. Fines are stipulated for offending students, student leaders and student groups. In the case of an infraction of the bill, institutions are free to stop collecting and passing along fees to the student groups in question, and these penalties apply not only to offending groups, but also groups that are judged not to have done enough to prevent their members from acting. On the same day, the city of Montreal passed a bill outlawing the wearing of masks during public demonstrations.
On May 18, Bill 78 passed into law. A massive, peaceful demonstration that night was met with rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police. Those who were arrested were not charged under Bill 78, but rather fined for illegal assembly. The outcome of this is that the legal contestation of of these charges could not serve as a venue to examine the legality of Bill 78 in court. May 22 saw the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, as an estimated 400 000 people demonstrated in defiance of Bill 78. Though no arrests were made that night, 500 people were arrested the following day in a kettling operation by police. Once again, a change of tactics came about. On May 26, rather than marching in a single large demonstration, thousands of protestors demonstrated in dozens of small groups through Montreal, walking through the streets at night and banging pots and pans. These demonstrations inspired solidarity marches across Canada and the world.
On May 28, the Quebec government made a new proposal to the students. However, the offer was retracted despite the fact that the student groups were willing to negotiate and compromise. One of the big problems throughout these negotiations was that while the government delegates representatives to negotiate with the students, the student groups have a representative democracy: their representatives are just the mouthpiece that passes along the will of the students as expressed through a vote. They have no power to make decisions on the students' behalf.
In June, Bill 78 was upheld in Quebec lower court. In July, the Quebec Human Rights Commission denounced Bill 78 as undermining the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Bill is set to be heard in Quebec Supreme Court in the fall of 2012. September 4 saw the Liberal government voted out of office in a provincial election, with Jean Charest losing the seat in his home riding of Sherbrooke. He subsequently stepped down as head of the Quebec Liberals. Pauline Marois, whose Parti Québecois promised to abolish the hike, became the new premier of Quebec. However, it is a minority government, and so it remains to be seen how this situation will play itself out. (Added in an edit on Sept. 24, 2012: The PQ has actually followed through on their promise and abolished the proposed hike.)
2. Value of education
Having laid out the historical groundwork, I now want to raise three sets of issues. The first is about the value of education. During times such as these, one I think has to reflect on whether education is a luxury good or an important social good. Clearly individuals benefit economically from being educated, but it seems that society as a whole benefits as well, and not only in economic terms.
Conceiving of education as a luxury good alone is a non-starter in virtue of those social benefits that come from having an educated populace. Certainly in Quebec, people have long been party to the idea that education is emancipatory, that it is the key to freedom. The philosopher John Dewey would certainly have agreed, as he claimed that education should not be conceived solely as creating human capital for the workforce. Rather, education should be teaching us to learn and to solve problems, not simply to hone a craft and send us out into the economic market. That doesn't even make good business sense considering the pace with which markets change and old skills become antiquated: we need to learn not only what will be successful today, but the skills we'll need to learn and innovate what will be successful tomorrow.
When education becomes financially inaccessible, we limit not only the quality of our workforce: more importantly, we limit access to intellectual freedom (from persuasion) and thus ultimately limit access to political equality. Pricing education out of the range of the masses therefore undermines its very value as emancipatory because the playing field can only be equalled among those who can afford it financially. (This take on education undermines the claim that students can boycott but not strike, likening the students to customers who withhold their patronage from a certain business.)
3. Accessibility
Taking up the conception of education as emancipatory, we then have to ask about the second of three issues: accessibility. Specifically, what is the "fair share" for a student to pay? Of course, whatever isn't covered through tuition must be covered by the government, which collects money from the people and industry through taxation; so perhaps a good way to reformulate this question is to ask what would constitute a fair distribution between student tuition and social contribution through taxation. According to the commodity view of education, many will claim that the students are gaining financially from their degrees, thereby justifying a larger portion of costs being covered by students.
However, society as a whole also benefits greatly from having an educated populace: middle-classers typically contribute huge amounts to the public coffers, not to mention the fact that the velocity of money in a society greatly increases as disparity falls. Furthermore, the private sector gains an awful lot from public research funded by the government, and the great number of university graduates in society makes the bargaining position of businesses that much better at the negotiating table because they know that their (prospective) employees don't have a plethora of other offers on the table, whereas the employers have many eager beavers knocking at their doors. The market is flooded with educated workers, not with jobs requiring that education. So yes, there certainly is an economic benefit for the students that might translate into a reasonable expectation that they cover some of the cost. However, there are also benefits for society at large as well as private corporations, and those benefits should translate the same way.
Everything gets more expensive over time when money is inflating, and so it seems reasonable to expect education contributions to go up as well, not just for students but across the board. From 1985–2005, the proportion of Canadian university costs covered by tuition went from 14% to 30%. In Quebec, to cover tuition costs alone required 4 weeks of full-time work in 1978, 2.8 weeks in 1989, 6 weeks in 2000, 6.7 in 2012, and is estimated at 8.8 weeks of work by 2015. Life is indeed getting more expensive, but why is the burden being shifted proportionately more and more onto tuition?
CLASSE proposed a 0.7% bank tax in Quebec, which would cover all tuition costs (including the proposed raise) for the entire province. The Big Five banks in Canada declared $21.8 billion in profits in 2011. By contrast, the federal government owns $14.5 billion in student debt; the average student debt in the Maritimes rose from $21 000 to $28 000 between 1999 and 2004 (a 33% increase in 5 years); Quebec has the lowest average in the country at $13 000; estimates vary between 7 000 and 30 000 when trying to anticipate how many Quebec students would lose access to higher education as a result of the proposed increase; in 1963, corporate taxation represented 55% of the federal tax collected, whereas in 2011 the corresponding figure had plummeted to 18%. Life gets more expensive because of inflation, but why so much more expensive for some and not for others?
Specifically, the increase in tuition hits people at a terrible time in life, financially speaking. Paying this increase through taxation later in life, when financial matters are more stable for most people, means that we end up paying drastically less in interest to the banks that offer these loans. Furthermore, it allows us to distribute the burden according to one's means (one of the main benefits of differential taxation). Though on average there is an advantage, not everyone who goes to university will be financially successful. Paying for education through taxation allows us to shelter those who would otherwise live under the yoke of their student debt. We do the same thing with health care in Canada. Increasing tuition is a simple way to inject money into the education system, but we should not therefore come to the conclusion that it is the best way to do so simply because it is the simplest.
Another reason that is often given for increased tuition being reasonable is that it would bring Quebec more into line with the tuition levels of the other provinces, which are of course far lower than the levels one finds in the United States. However, while we're on the topic of financial matters, it makes sense to ask whether these systems fit into a wider financial situation that we see as enviable. Does the debt situation in the US seem all that appealing? Is that really the road down which we want to go? The rest of Canada rightly points out that Quebec's financial matters are not in great shape, particularly Alberta, the source of much transfer payment money.
However, is that to say that the kind of social democracy towards which Quebec strives is untenable? The Scandinavian countries stand as an obvious counter-example to that claim. Denmark has no tuition fees, and they manage to run a pretty successful shop, economically speaking. Their social services are incredible: the difference is that their level of taxation is completely different from ours. For instance, there is a 100% tax rate on automobiles, much of which certainly fills the coffers of public transit systems, offered as the green alternative to private transit. Such nations have among the highest standards of living, with great records of social parity. By contrast, the United States has an attrocious record when it comes to wealth disparity and environmental matters. When choosing one's reference class for comparison, how do we (Quebecers, Canadians) really see ourselves proceeding in the future: towards the American or the Scandinavian model?
Other comparisons are historical: many Baby Boomers criticize current students for wanting everything handed to them on a silver platter, when the Boomers see themselves as having had to work for what they have. While undoubtedly that is true, the Baby Boomers lived in a period of great economic prosperity: the figures cited earlier about the number of weeks of full-time work required to cover tuition demonstrate that what students these days are asking for is actually a situation comparable to what previous generations actually enjoyed (and not "unfairly" enjoyed, those previous generations seem to say).
Students are fighting for the opportunity their forebears had, and the declining contribution of the wealthiest segment of society explains why they have to fight. In times of booming economy, Canadians lived well. Money flowed through the economy, with taxes taking a slice at every turn, providing the funds necessary to support the social programs of the era. Those same generations were not saying at the time that they ought to cut back for the future, nor are they rushing to give back their wonderful benefits now that we're in an economically trying present. Who was the last MP who refused their indexed pension claiming that the economy just couldn't afford it?
It is claimed that the education system in Quebec, as it is presently organized, cannot sustainably run on its current levels of funding. The simple solution to this is just to throw more money at the system, and the simplest way to do that is just to raise tuition for the people who use the service that that system provides. Just as one may ask whether other sources of funding are more appropriate, so too may someone ask whether the structuring of the system needs revision. After all, Quebec already spends more on higher education per student than any other province, though only marginally so. Why, then, is the money falling short there in particular? In the Quebec education system (in general, not specifically in higher education), 10 cents of every $1 spent goes to administration. Whereas Denmark has 50 administrators/1 000 000 students, Quebec has 5 000 administrators for that same number (figures from 1988). If the Scandinavian model is informing our ideal of social democracy, perhaps we should be following their streamlined administrative practices rather than moving further and further from their tuition-free funding structure.
In the two decades from 1988–2008, administration costs rose from 12% to 20% of total spending at Canada's 25 biggest universities. Teaching costs dropped from 65% to 58% of the total over that same period. In Quebec, university administration fees jumped 83% from 1997-2004. Additionally, we have seen a trend away from expensive tenured professorships towards relatively cheaper sessional positions, in addition to larger class sizes. We now expect academics to teach more students for less money, while the administration eats up the surplus generated thereby, all the while crying poor and requesting more money of the university's students. All this in the face of growing pressure to form partnerships with private industry, SSHRC and NSERC money going to the development of ideas for private profit.
The quality of education suffers from large classes, as well as overburdened teaching staff who are remunerated less and less. Furthermore, administrative costs are eating up more and more the budget, leading to an untenable funding situation where students are being asked to pay more to support a system that invests less and less in their education and ever more in private interests. Those interests, however, are being taxed less and less for the benefit that they receive from this research. This picture of universities as economic stimulators does not sit well with the emancipation model of education; it furthermore raises some very troubling questions about the degree to which public money ends up in private pockets.
4. Wider democratic issues
What do the actions of the Quebec government tell us about our democracy? First off, raising tuition suggests that money is lacking in the higher education system, which as discussed earlier is an important institution for emancipation and democratic practice. Money really is lacking, and one need only look at the state of repair of buildings on university campuses to see it. However, raising tuition suggests that they are exploring the simplest option to close the gap. Refusing to negotiate with students suggests that the structure of university funding is not open for discussion: the government knows what's best on this matter and will dictate it to their public rather than working with them (or for them, horror!). It suggests not only that the financing of higher education is off limits for conversation, but also that the same is true of the structuring of higher education. The government will not discuss the social values that underlie these decisions.
What about Bill 78? This is a much more troubling point, and really what turned an education issue into a full-blown social issue, touching everyone in the province (and many, many beyond), leaving no one indifferent. The fact that the government claimed to be negotiating in good faith with the students when they introduced Bill 78 suggests that they have no scruples about duplicity. Furthermore, they will not hesitate very long before applying pressure while refusing to sustain nearly any applied to themselves. (Remember that CLASSE voted in favour of peaceful civil disobedience, and that in most cases it is the police who are believed to have sparked the small number of violent outbursts. In fact, the very small amount of violence and low cost of damages for such a large movement, and one so prolonged, suggests that these protests were actually quite orderly and civilized.)
Our politicians are far too ready to dictate values to us, and far too reticent to have any discussion on the matter with the general public: to ban peaceful protest and general assembly is to silence the voice of the public. Ultimately, it should raise serious questions for us about the role of our politicians. Namely, are they not in place (ideally) in order to help us translate our values into the structuring of our society? And how should we respond to the paternalistic attitude that they have our best interests in mind and will protect us from ourselves?
Saturday 8 September 2012
Charisma, charm, and all that
With the recent elections in Quebec, in which many people were decidedly unimpressed by all of the parties, and with the recent announcement that Justin Trudeau will probably run for (and win) the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party, I've been doing a lot of thinking not only about politics, but also about our politicians. Those thoughts have also been fueled by a personal reflection on the use of police force in the state. More specifically, I was trying to figure out why it is that I feel so strongly that the introduction of Bill 78 was wrong, whereas the declaration of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis seems acceptable. (On that latter issue, I think it's that the FLQ had already resorted to and threatened further violence, whereas the student demonstrations were inherently peaceful, violent actions being condemned widely by the students in whose name some violent acts were ostensibly carried out.)
So what of these politicians, these people (mostly men) who offer to run our country, our provinces, and our cities on our behalf? One startling realisation while I was watching the leaders' debate leading up to the federal election in May of 2011 was that our politicians are doing two things: first, they talk about funds but never values; second, they do an awful lot of smearing of one another. The smear campaigns are old hat these days, as they've been going on for too long already, and we see them so widely adopted. Our democracy can't be very healthy if we're electing our leaders as the best among an overly sleazy and untrustworthy group of people that decided to run, and we can't be surprised to find that the people do not identify with or trust their political representatives when this is the case. Again, many friends of mine in Quebec declared how unhappy they were with Charest and the PLQ, but said that they didn't want any of the other parties running the show either. Surprisingly, in spite of those sentiments, a huge number of Quebecers turned out to vote this past week, which I was very glad to learn.
But my main complaint against the majority of political discourse these days is the near-total absence of the discussion of value. People drone on and on about cutting or raising taxes to the rich, expanding or contracting social programs, etc, but they never address the question head on: what responsibility do we have to our fellow community members? On this hangs answers to questions about what is fair taxation rate for upper income brackets, what is a fair amount of welfare, of tuition payment, etc, but politicians don't seem to ever talk about that. Are values simply off limits for rational discourse in our contemporary society, merely tolerant of multiculturalism but unengaged across cultural boundaries? Is this really the way that we want to run our society, refusing to engage in discourse about values simply because someone whose values differ might be offended? Of course, there is a spirit of respectful discourse that should be maintained, and discourse should be broken off when that respect is lost, but I certainly don't believe that this kind of respect is impossible across cultural lines.
And this kind of respect is exactly what we all too seldom find among our political class. Particularly in the States, we can see a polarization between the Republican and Democrat parties (the former run these days by a very strange and radically conservative group) that results not only in an impossibility of agreement, but furthermore of a hatred for one's opponents. (Bill Clinton's 2012 DNC speech both sums up that situation nicely, and shows us that not all hope for bold, charismatic and understanding leadership is lost.) Why are we lead by people who look so disdainfully on their constituents, who concern themselves so whole-heartedly with being re-elected rather than the successful governance that would earn their re-election? Why is it such a perfect joke when an "Introduction to Congress" class at Harvard is found to be rampant with cheating? Where are all the trustworthy people of our society? Where are the heroic?
Where are the people who make decisions and stand by their convictions not because it is the choice they would like to make, but because it is simply the best choice from a rather unpleasant set of options? Unfortunately, we know where people who make that kind of decision are: at the polling station.
So what of these politicians, these people (mostly men) who offer to run our country, our provinces, and our cities on our behalf? One startling realisation while I was watching the leaders' debate leading up to the federal election in May of 2011 was that our politicians are doing two things: first, they talk about funds but never values; second, they do an awful lot of smearing of one another. The smear campaigns are old hat these days, as they've been going on for too long already, and we see them so widely adopted. Our democracy can't be very healthy if we're electing our leaders as the best among an overly sleazy and untrustworthy group of people that decided to run, and we can't be surprised to find that the people do not identify with or trust their political representatives when this is the case. Again, many friends of mine in Quebec declared how unhappy they were with Charest and the PLQ, but said that they didn't want any of the other parties running the show either. Surprisingly, in spite of those sentiments, a huge number of Quebecers turned out to vote this past week, which I was very glad to learn.
But my main complaint against the majority of political discourse these days is the near-total absence of the discussion of value. People drone on and on about cutting or raising taxes to the rich, expanding or contracting social programs, etc, but they never address the question head on: what responsibility do we have to our fellow community members? On this hangs answers to questions about what is fair taxation rate for upper income brackets, what is a fair amount of welfare, of tuition payment, etc, but politicians don't seem to ever talk about that. Are values simply off limits for rational discourse in our contemporary society, merely tolerant of multiculturalism but unengaged across cultural boundaries? Is this really the way that we want to run our society, refusing to engage in discourse about values simply because someone whose values differ might be offended? Of course, there is a spirit of respectful discourse that should be maintained, and discourse should be broken off when that respect is lost, but I certainly don't believe that this kind of respect is impossible across cultural lines.
And this kind of respect is exactly what we all too seldom find among our political class. Particularly in the States, we can see a polarization between the Republican and Democrat parties (the former run these days by a very strange and radically conservative group) that results not only in an impossibility of agreement, but furthermore of a hatred for one's opponents. (Bill Clinton's 2012 DNC speech both sums up that situation nicely, and shows us that not all hope for bold, charismatic and understanding leadership is lost.) Why are we lead by people who look so disdainfully on their constituents, who concern themselves so whole-heartedly with being re-elected rather than the successful governance that would earn their re-election? Why is it such a perfect joke when an "Introduction to Congress" class at Harvard is found to be rampant with cheating? Where are all the trustworthy people of our society? Where are the heroic?
Where are the people who make decisions and stand by their convictions not because it is the choice they would like to make, but because it is simply the best choice from a rather unpleasant set of options? Unfortunately, we know where people who make that kind of decision are: at the polling station.
Saturday 1 September 2012
Violation
Hey folks, it's been a wild few weeks, what with old roommates moving out, new ones arriving, and running an intensive workshop throughout the whole endeavour. So once again, I'll fall back on the archive this week. This piece was written in October of 2011.
Violation
Violation
I
had two students plagiarise the other day. There they sat, The First and The
Second, before me. “I see you two here, having taken this course without a
grain of seriousness for the whole semester, having sat together during the
whole of our time together, neither contributing half the effort necessary for
both of you to succeed, and then these arrive on my desk.” Two sharply graded
papers are placed before them. In each appears the same argument structure, the
same examples (granted, taken straight from my own words) and unfortunately
also the same definition of a given term, nearly word for word. (An entire term
defined by such similar words.) I had not yet convicted them, I was open to
having my mind changed on the issue, though I certainly leaned heavily to one
side on the issue.
“So
what really happened?” The First had missed a class, and had naturally spoken
to his good friend, The Second, about what he had missed. The Second passed his
notes to The First, and The First copied a sentence directly from those notes
into an essay. Plagiarism. Naturally, this landed The First and The Second in
my office. After all, good friends always sit together, move together and think
together. They also hand in papers together, so The First’s paper ended up on
top of The Second’s, and so when it comes time to grade, the paper of The First
followed swiftly on the heels and the words of that of The Second. It was
copied, of that there is not doubt (even the notes are produced to demonstrate
the provenance of the words), but the question of violation is still
unanswered. Ought they to have known that this was a violation? How reasonable
is it to assume that this kind of behaviour is acceptable?
Two
pictures of plagiarism; 1: plagiarism is using the words found on pages (of the
Internet, of course, never a book) without a citation. In order to combat this
issue, all high school students learn to use quotation marks according to the
rules, they learn the form of a parenthetical reference, and they learn to make
bibliographies according to the standards of the Modern Languages Association.
These are all useful tools, but for what are they to be used? Definition 2:
plagiarism is using someone else’s ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
Whose ideas are worthy of citation? Anyone’s but one’s own. Of course, there is
the relevant issue of context here. Citation is context-dependent because there
is always a reader, an audience. If I assign a chapter of Plato as the basis
for an essay, I am the grader, I am the audience, and therefore it is
reasonable to assume that just referring to “the ideas of Plato” is oftentimes
sufficient to direct my attention to the assigned chapter without explicit citation. Referring to the notes of a friend does
not pass the test; it is not evident merely from context.
With
these two definitions of plagiarism in hand, allow us to return to the question
of The Violation: ought The First and The Second to have known that this was
plagiarism? Yes, they ought. But the issue of responsibility is a far deeper
matter. They sail through the doors of university with the first definition of
plagiarism in hand, and (allegedly) all the technical tools they need to avoid these
kinds of Violations. Such is the product of their high school education. The
second definition, however, is far beyond anything they have ever encountered
before. They have no concept of intellectual property, no concept of
intellectualism.
For
these two, and sadly they are not alone, jobs are about money, and jobs require
a degree, and a degree requires grades, and so there they sit in my classroom
waiting for the grades to be doled out so they can get on with it. This is a
completely infected notion of education, and a viral epidemic. Education is
about wisdom, knowledge and skills, and grades are merely a way to evaluate a
student’s progress in achieving these things.
The
student who focuses on taking in what is put before them rather than on their
grades knows that they must make these ideas their own, knows that their own
comprehension and subsequent ability to express these ideas to others is what’s
really going on in education. These students also don’t plagiarise. It would
never cross their minds to do so, and they have an acute ability to recognise
when an idea is their own and when it is an idea taken from someone else. (Not
always clear is when the idea falls within the implicit context of the
assignment, and this obscurity sometimes leads to unfortunate consequences for
those who truly don’t deserve them. Furthermore, those honest students are the
ones who have the most trouble with accusations of plagiarism because at stake
is not their grade but their integrity, their moral fibre, and often their
passion.)
So
what is the story at the end of the day? How do we avoid plagiarism in future?
Obviously students of the second kind, those who don’t have a merely
instrumental view of education, are better able to avoid plagiarism. So clearly
our education system has to start churning out serious intellectuals if we want
the majority of these Violations to go away, but the virus begins far before
the education system gets at these kids, and thus it falls beyond their sole
responsibility to eradicate the problem. The ever-increasing prevalence of the
instrumental attitude towards school (eruditio
instrumentalis) is a subspecies of a greater virus (tutto instrumentalis), and we need to root out the bigger problem.
Actually, if we started collectively shifting our focus away from personal
fortunes towards more intrinsic goods (such as universal human rights, dignity
and freedom) we might find that the disappearance of plagiarism went
undetected, drowned out by the march towards something far greater.
Saturday 18 August 2012
Tongue twister
Hi folks, just a short post today. I've started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, that book published a few years ago that caused a whole bunch of stir, mainly by drawing out reclusive sticklers such as myself from our grammatical-fanatical (and solitary) caves and into public society, obsessions and all. In the first chapter, Truss, the author, distinguishes the descriptive from the prescriptive (sometimes also called the "normative") stance with respect to language. A descriptive account of language seeks merely to catalogue how the language is actually used, whereas a prescriptive account makes a claim about how the language ought to be used.
Before delving into the main issue I'd like to treat here, namely the relationship between linguistic evolution and prescriptive accounts of usage, I'd like to briefly discuss the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive accounts. It seems at first glance like the distinction is a nice clean one, but further scrutiny makes the case far less clear. In assembling a descriptive account, one cannot simply dump every single usage in a pile and say, "See, that's how we use it." Every single usage, each and every data point of linguistic behaviour, is simply not available to us. What this situation forces us to do is select data that we consider to be typical or normal, and simple description there is tinged with the normative: one selects one's data points because "they are the normal ones" to which others are supposed to live up (or up to which the others are supposed to live, if one really wants to be stickly about it). The data points one doesn't select are abnormal, there's something particular about them that makes them bad choices, and the evaluation process that leads to these decisions is not a purely descriptive one. Anyway, all that's to say that descriptive accounts are not so easily distinguished from prescriptive accounts as it may seem.
On to the meat. One major criticism of prescriptive accounts of language is that they prohibit or impede the evolution of language. Whether we want language to evolve or not is another matter, and probably not even an important one because we're powerless to stop it anyway, but the question of how prescriptive accounts can leave room for linguistic evolution is, I think, an interesting one. But is the criticism appropriate, do prescriptive accounts actually impede evolution. I actually think not. Conceived one way, a prescriptive account stipulates how one must use the tools of language, point final, and such a conception of prescriptive accounts might well impede evolution of languages. However, a more nuanced understanding of such accounts might disengage the problem: I propose that we instead conceive of prescriptive accounts as offering us a set of rules not about how apostrophes (for example) must be used, but how an apostrophe, used according to such and such a rule, conveys such and such a meaning. (Some questions may arise as to whether this account is still prescriptive, or whether it has lapsed into description. My response is to just repeat that the whole distinction is messy and simply not respond to such questions at all.)
The prescriptive account gives us a set of rules about how punctuation, used "correctly," conveys sense in a particular way. However, one can intentionally deviate from the "correct" into the "incorrect," and thereby explore new ways of expressing meaning. The new usages deviate intentionally and meaningfully from the standard and appropriate usage: it is always with reference to the accepted standard that a new usage can open up a new space to articulate meaning in a novel way, or so I'm claiming here. There is no incorrect usage without reference to a standard of correctness; there is no novelty without reference to established practice.
So what does this account, if one finds it at all attractive, mean? There certainly are practical implications. It means that we do not need to abandon prescriptive accounts; instead, I'm calling for us to re-orient the way that we think about such accounts, and then to adopt them whole-heartedly. Never will I believe that correcting a child's grammar would stifle their linguistic creativity: it is only with an established familiarity with the "old" rules that anyone could go on to innovate something interestingly new.
Herein also lies the kernel of my disdain for hipsters: my understanding of hipsters is that each one is trying to innovate her or his own counter-culture. As soon as something is established, it is uncool, passé, and discarded. What seems to be missing here is twofold. The first missing element is that a new culture must evolve out of an existing culture if it is to be at all meaningful. And I don't mean that it won't be important unless it evolves out of another culture: what I'm saying is that in order for it to understandable, for it to even contain any meaning as opposed to being merely a system of empty symbols, it must evolve out of an existing culture. So the complete abandonment of any and every cultural reference point as soon as it becomes established is a quick way to make a (counter-)culture completely meaningless.
The second missing element is dialogue amongst those who are establishing the counter-culture itself. If we each have our own culture, then the meaning is entirely personal to us, and we therefore are not able to communicate it to anyone else. (We may not even be able to communicate it to ourselves, though that's a more complicated argument that I'll save for another time. If you're interested, have a read through Cassirer's The Myth of the State, or my paper "Fight, Flight, and the Frontier of the Future," in which I treat that section of Cassirer's work.) Some may not see that communication is an important part of culture, but I think that kind of position is pretty weak, especially once we get onto the topic of the specifically linguistic aspects of culture. For a language to hold no communicative potential, which would be the case if we all had our own linguistic counter-cultures, would really neuter language in some substantive and undesirable ways.
In any case, these are simply some thoughts on the matter, and with the return from the criticism of hipster culture to the issue of language, we get back to where we started, which seems an appropriate place to stop. As always, I look forward to your comments and hope you're having a wonderful weekend.
Before delving into the main issue I'd like to treat here, namely the relationship between linguistic evolution and prescriptive accounts of usage, I'd like to briefly discuss the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive accounts. It seems at first glance like the distinction is a nice clean one, but further scrutiny makes the case far less clear. In assembling a descriptive account, one cannot simply dump every single usage in a pile and say, "See, that's how we use it." Every single usage, each and every data point of linguistic behaviour, is simply not available to us. What this situation forces us to do is select data that we consider to be typical or normal, and simple description there is tinged with the normative: one selects one's data points because "they are the normal ones" to which others are supposed to live up (or up to which the others are supposed to live, if one really wants to be stickly about it). The data points one doesn't select are abnormal, there's something particular about them that makes them bad choices, and the evaluation process that leads to these decisions is not a purely descriptive one. Anyway, all that's to say that descriptive accounts are not so easily distinguished from prescriptive accounts as it may seem.
On to the meat. One major criticism of prescriptive accounts of language is that they prohibit or impede the evolution of language. Whether we want language to evolve or not is another matter, and probably not even an important one because we're powerless to stop it anyway, but the question of how prescriptive accounts can leave room for linguistic evolution is, I think, an interesting one. But is the criticism appropriate, do prescriptive accounts actually impede evolution. I actually think not. Conceived one way, a prescriptive account stipulates how one must use the tools of language, point final, and such a conception of prescriptive accounts might well impede evolution of languages. However, a more nuanced understanding of such accounts might disengage the problem: I propose that we instead conceive of prescriptive accounts as offering us a set of rules not about how apostrophes (for example) must be used, but how an apostrophe, used according to such and such a rule, conveys such and such a meaning. (Some questions may arise as to whether this account is still prescriptive, or whether it has lapsed into description. My response is to just repeat that the whole distinction is messy and simply not respond to such questions at all.)
The prescriptive account gives us a set of rules about how punctuation, used "correctly," conveys sense in a particular way. However, one can intentionally deviate from the "correct" into the "incorrect," and thereby explore new ways of expressing meaning. The new usages deviate intentionally and meaningfully from the standard and appropriate usage: it is always with reference to the accepted standard that a new usage can open up a new space to articulate meaning in a novel way, or so I'm claiming here. There is no incorrect usage without reference to a standard of correctness; there is no novelty without reference to established practice.
So what does this account, if one finds it at all attractive, mean? There certainly are practical implications. It means that we do not need to abandon prescriptive accounts; instead, I'm calling for us to re-orient the way that we think about such accounts, and then to adopt them whole-heartedly. Never will I believe that correcting a child's grammar would stifle their linguistic creativity: it is only with an established familiarity with the "old" rules that anyone could go on to innovate something interestingly new.
Herein also lies the kernel of my disdain for hipsters: my understanding of hipsters is that each one is trying to innovate her or his own counter-culture. As soon as something is established, it is uncool, passé, and discarded. What seems to be missing here is twofold. The first missing element is that a new culture must evolve out of an existing culture if it is to be at all meaningful. And I don't mean that it won't be important unless it evolves out of another culture: what I'm saying is that in order for it to understandable, for it to even contain any meaning as opposed to being merely a system of empty symbols, it must evolve out of an existing culture. So the complete abandonment of any and every cultural reference point as soon as it becomes established is a quick way to make a (counter-)culture completely meaningless.
The second missing element is dialogue amongst those who are establishing the counter-culture itself. If we each have our own culture, then the meaning is entirely personal to us, and we therefore are not able to communicate it to anyone else. (We may not even be able to communicate it to ourselves, though that's a more complicated argument that I'll save for another time. If you're interested, have a read through Cassirer's The Myth of the State, or my paper "Fight, Flight, and the Frontier of the Future," in which I treat that section of Cassirer's work.) Some may not see that communication is an important part of culture, but I think that kind of position is pretty weak, especially once we get onto the topic of the specifically linguistic aspects of culture. For a language to hold no communicative potential, which would be the case if we all had our own linguistic counter-cultures, would really neuter language in some substantive and undesirable ways.
In any case, these are simply some thoughts on the matter, and with the return from the criticism of hipster culture to the issue of language, we get back to where we started, which seems an appropriate place to stop. As always, I look forward to your comments and hope you're having a wonderful weekend.
Friday 10 August 2012
Auto-Pilot
Hey folks, a couple of week ago, I posted a piece on anonymity in the big city. Here's a quick follow up, which I actually wrote in December of 2010, so again this is a piece coming from the archives. I hope that you enjoy it, and I look forward to your comments, as always.
Auto-Pilot
Auto-Pilot
Many
years ago, a man named Henry Ford invented the car. Now cars were great things,
taking people from place to place quickly and smoothly. Of course, when I say
“people,” I mean rich people. Cars were not very affordable when they first
came out, and they still aren’t really, though there are two cars for every
three people in America these days. However, as not everyone can afford their
own car (some people have more than one, just to keep the stats up you know)
someone decided that they would invent a really big car for everyone to share. These
big public cars, affectionately known as “buses,” would drive a scheduled route
through town, picking people up in one place and dropping them off elsewhere.
In
the olden days when you wanted to get off the bus, you’d simply walk to the
front, turn to the driver and say, “I’d like to get off the bus at the next
stop, please,” and the driver would smile at you, pull the bus over and let you
off. Buses soon became very popular, picking people up all over the place and
getting absolutely packed, so much so that it wasn’t always possible to wade
through the human sea to ask the driver to let you off. In response, an
ingenious person invented the rope and bell system: when you want to get off
the bus, you need not apologetically and excusingly wade all the way to the
front and ask the driver. Rather, you can just pull one of the ropes running
along the walls of the bus and a bell will ring, indicating to the driver your
intention to dismount. Peace and order reigned, and buses everywhere functioned
smoothly. People would get on and off the bus with impunity, merrily pulling
ropes and ringing bells.
However,
buses have fallen on dark times. So often these days I get on a bus and I’m the
only one on it, or nearly so. On such occasions, there I sit at the front of a
nearly empty bus, which is invariably fullest at the back with people burying
themselves in a cell phone or a personal music player of some non-descript
description. And when those anonymous back-dwellers want to get off the bus?
There’s plenty of space for them to walk to the front and ask the driver to
(please) let them off at the next stop, but instead they usually stay at the
back and retain their anonymity by pulling the rope and getting off without a
word.
A bus driver is a person, and it’s not tout a fait égal (not all one) to the driver whether you ask them
personally to let you off or whether you just ring the bell. Sure, they’ll get
the point either way, but that’s not the point. They are strangers, but they
are people, too, and as such it makes sense to address them personally rather
than impersonally and indirectly. It’s like looking at someone when you talk to
them: it’s just common courtesy, and shows respect.
But
the rope and bell system has fundamentally altered the nature of the bus driver
in the minds of many. The driver is now a function, an automaton, as much part
of the mechanism of the bus as the gas pedal, the brake or the bell. Obviously
it doesn’t matter to the function how you input the “dismount” command, and so
why should we bother addressing the function personally?
We
patrons of the bus systems haven’t been the only ones to embrace the difference
either. When I’m on an empty bus, I sit at the front; I make no effort to isolate
myself from the unknown Other who sits nearby. In fact, I even make a point of asking
the driver to let me off. And that’s where the transformation of the bus driver
is fully realised: asking the driver to let me off gets me a very strange look
more often than not.
Not
only do the riders of the bus see the driver as part of the inhuman mechanism,
but the drivers themselves seem to also. Very odd. Less odd is that bus drivers
and patrons are frequently frustrated with one another. Any cock-ups are lost
in the ever-widening gap between them, always blamed on the other, and more out
of misunderstanding and lack of compassion than anything else.
Saturday 4 August 2012
Danish cartoons
As many of you probably are aware, the central author that I'm treating in my dissertation is Ernst Cassirer. He was a fascinating man; though principally a philosopher, he was also well versed in history, art, literature, science, many languages, etc. In that respect he may have been the last true Renaissance man. One of his fields of interest, and this is what I'd like to deal with today, was mythology. Specifically, I'd like to deal with his enquiries into the phenomenological basis of myth, because I think that it provides a useful tool for understanding the outrage that Muslims felt in response to Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. So let's get into it.
The kernel of mythology is this: pars pro toto, or, "the part for the whole." Whereas in our usual way of thinking, the part might suggest the whole to us or act as an indicator towards the whole, mythical thinking actually treats the part as the whole itself. That is to say, whereas we treat a few drops of rain as just part of the storm, mythical thinking actually treats these drops as having the whole storm contained within them. This might help us to understand voodoo rituals, of which Cassirer's work is full of colourful examples: for instance, in some cultures it is believed that one can murder a man by stabbing a knife into the man's shadow. The shadow is not a representation of the man; the shadow, as a part, actually stands for the whole man, and therefore one who has power over the shadow has power over the man himself, in this instance the power to kill. (Reading this example of shadow murder the first time, I could think of nothing other than the opening of Peter Pan, when Wendy is sewing Peter's shadow back to him.) Another example: some tribes forbid women and children from washing their hands while the men are out on the hunt, which becomes easily understandable when we realize that to make the tribe's hands slippery during the hunt would allow the prey to slip through their fingers. The part of the tribe back home stands for the tribe as a whole, so if those at home wet their hands, then the prey will slip through the slippery fingers of the hunting party.
The next part of the argument is about the inclusion of words in myth, or, word magic. We can have mythical power over something by dominating any part of its being; what part that is holds no relevance, and extends as far as the names of things. While we commonly now distinguish between the thing itself and the name by which we call that thing, such a division is not yet present in mythical consciousness. This is why to mythical consciousness it is so important to pronounce rites in just the proper way. If we do not pronounce the rite properly, we will not invoke the proper power of the god, and will therefore not accomplish the goal we wish to bring about. Worse still, the god may take the mispronunciation of the name (or the misperformance of a dance; remember, language is not strictly distinguished from substance or action here) as a sleight, and therefore bring terrible wrath upon us. In some cultures, a sick man will change his name in order to trick Death into thinking that he is someone else. For examples of the mythical power of the word in our own culture, one need only think of the book of Genesis. God says, "Let there be light," (Genesis 1:3). God creates the beasts and has man name them; He gives man dominion over them. The naming and the domination are not unrelated facts, if one takes Cassirer's theory to heart.
Of course, the most important word associated with anyone or any thing is the name: the name is therefore a central way to call upon a god, and the name has power over the god. In Egyptian mythology, we hear the tale of Isis, who tricks Ra into divulging his name to her, and she thereby has dominion over him and all the gods under him. The Grimm Brothers found a similar tale in Germany, the tale of Rumpelstilzchen, who will spin straw into gold for the miller's daughter (thereby saving her life) only if she can find out his name. In the book of Exodus, God does not divulge his name to Moses at the burning bush. "If the people ask who sent you, tell them 'I am' sent you." God is pure being ("I am"), he has no definite name, as any such definitive character in name would be a delimitation of His power. Furthermore, if such a name he had, to give it to Moses would be to open himself up to subservience. (I've heard through the grapevine that if one reads about the ten plagues that befall Egypt in Exodus, this can actually be read as a mythical battle between the one God of the Hebrews and the ten most important gods of Egyptian mythology at the time.) In the times of the Roman Empire, slaves were not allowed names because they had no power. Their name needed to remain empty.
A physical part can stand for a whole, any linguistic part (such as a name) can as well, and, most importantly here, so can an image. For example, the Pythagoreans would straighten their bedding immediately upon getting up, in order to prevent that their image left in the sheets might be used against them. Tattoos in primitive cultures are not merely decorations, they're incantations and links to magical powers. And in Islam we find an injunction against producing images of the prophet Muhammad. We can now understand this injunction probably better than we did before: any such image would hold power over Muhammad, who is held to be the last and most important prophet sent by God. For someone of lesser dignity, such as ourselves, to hold power over someone so important in the eyes of God would be a travesty. Perhaps this allows us to understand the outrage in the Muslim world in response to the Danish cartoons. These cartoons were not controverting an empty law, a law for its own sake; when we start to understand the structure of myth, this Islamic law starts to make a lot of sense, and we can begin to understand why there would be such a law. (There is also a general ban on pictorial representation and icons in Islamic religion, not limited only to those of Muhammad, but I see this not as a contradiction to my interpretation here, but rather as a confirmation thereof.)
One last thing before I sign off: one of the reactions to these cartoons in the Muslim world was to produce another set of cartoons that were basically meant to tug at the sensitivities of Western world. For example, one cartoon depicted Hitler in bed with Ann Frank, smoking a postcoital cigarette while he says to her, "THAT will give you something to write about in your diary." Obviously, the idea there was just to be hurtful, but it certainly isn't a response in kind to the Danish cartoons. To produce an image of Muhammad is not just offensive, it isn't just a cultural faux-pas of making light of a travesty in someone's past: it's blasphemy, it's for the profane to claim power over the holy. A response in kind would have been some claim to power over God. Perhaps a bumper sticker like: "Jesus is just a migrant worker who picks my oranges." (Actually, there are probably many such workers named "Jesus.") Or if they really wanted to get a reaction, perhaps an attack on the real God of the West: "Money is my bitch."
Anyway, I hope that this discussion has been somewhat lucid, at least a little bit interesting, and with luck not too inflammatory. Thanks for reading, I look forward to your comments.
P.S: If you're interested in the full details of Cassirer's account, check out Language and Myth, a short and accessible read on the subject. For those who are more ambitious, have a look at The Philosophy of Symbolic forms, vol. II: Mythical Thought. And Cassirer's last book before his death, The Myth of the State, is a fantastic read treating the mythical and philosophical ingredients put together by the Nazi party to bring the German people under their influence, though his discussion of the phenomenology of myth is much more limited in that text.
P.P.S: Once more, a plug for Philopolis Guelph, which is a festival that offers activities where we explore philosophical ideas in a practical context, just as I've tried to do here. There are still spots up for grabs if you're interested in presenting, or just come out and join in the discussion. Submission deadline is August 26; event itself is October 12–14.
The kernel of mythology is this: pars pro toto, or, "the part for the whole." Whereas in our usual way of thinking, the part might suggest the whole to us or act as an indicator towards the whole, mythical thinking actually treats the part as the whole itself. That is to say, whereas we treat a few drops of rain as just part of the storm, mythical thinking actually treats these drops as having the whole storm contained within them. This might help us to understand voodoo rituals, of which Cassirer's work is full of colourful examples: for instance, in some cultures it is believed that one can murder a man by stabbing a knife into the man's shadow. The shadow is not a representation of the man; the shadow, as a part, actually stands for the whole man, and therefore one who has power over the shadow has power over the man himself, in this instance the power to kill. (Reading this example of shadow murder the first time, I could think of nothing other than the opening of Peter Pan, when Wendy is sewing Peter's shadow back to him.) Another example: some tribes forbid women and children from washing their hands while the men are out on the hunt, which becomes easily understandable when we realize that to make the tribe's hands slippery during the hunt would allow the prey to slip through their fingers. The part of the tribe back home stands for the tribe as a whole, so if those at home wet their hands, then the prey will slip through the slippery fingers of the hunting party.
The next part of the argument is about the inclusion of words in myth, or, word magic. We can have mythical power over something by dominating any part of its being; what part that is holds no relevance, and extends as far as the names of things. While we commonly now distinguish between the thing itself and the name by which we call that thing, such a division is not yet present in mythical consciousness. This is why to mythical consciousness it is so important to pronounce rites in just the proper way. If we do not pronounce the rite properly, we will not invoke the proper power of the god, and will therefore not accomplish the goal we wish to bring about. Worse still, the god may take the mispronunciation of the name (or the misperformance of a dance; remember, language is not strictly distinguished from substance or action here) as a sleight, and therefore bring terrible wrath upon us. In some cultures, a sick man will change his name in order to trick Death into thinking that he is someone else. For examples of the mythical power of the word in our own culture, one need only think of the book of Genesis. God says, "Let there be light," (Genesis 1:3). God creates the beasts and has man name them; He gives man dominion over them. The naming and the domination are not unrelated facts, if one takes Cassirer's theory to heart.
Of course, the most important word associated with anyone or any thing is the name: the name is therefore a central way to call upon a god, and the name has power over the god. In Egyptian mythology, we hear the tale of Isis, who tricks Ra into divulging his name to her, and she thereby has dominion over him and all the gods under him. The Grimm Brothers found a similar tale in Germany, the tale of Rumpelstilzchen, who will spin straw into gold for the miller's daughter (thereby saving her life) only if she can find out his name. In the book of Exodus, God does not divulge his name to Moses at the burning bush. "If the people ask who sent you, tell them 'I am' sent you." God is pure being ("I am"), he has no definite name, as any such definitive character in name would be a delimitation of His power. Furthermore, if such a name he had, to give it to Moses would be to open himself up to subservience. (I've heard through the grapevine that if one reads about the ten plagues that befall Egypt in Exodus, this can actually be read as a mythical battle between the one God of the Hebrews and the ten most important gods of Egyptian mythology at the time.) In the times of the Roman Empire, slaves were not allowed names because they had no power. Their name needed to remain empty.
A physical part can stand for a whole, any linguistic part (such as a name) can as well, and, most importantly here, so can an image. For example, the Pythagoreans would straighten their bedding immediately upon getting up, in order to prevent that their image left in the sheets might be used against them. Tattoos in primitive cultures are not merely decorations, they're incantations and links to magical powers. And in Islam we find an injunction against producing images of the prophet Muhammad. We can now understand this injunction probably better than we did before: any such image would hold power over Muhammad, who is held to be the last and most important prophet sent by God. For someone of lesser dignity, such as ourselves, to hold power over someone so important in the eyes of God would be a travesty. Perhaps this allows us to understand the outrage in the Muslim world in response to the Danish cartoons. These cartoons were not controverting an empty law, a law for its own sake; when we start to understand the structure of myth, this Islamic law starts to make a lot of sense, and we can begin to understand why there would be such a law. (There is also a general ban on pictorial representation and icons in Islamic religion, not limited only to those of Muhammad, but I see this not as a contradiction to my interpretation here, but rather as a confirmation thereof.)
One last thing before I sign off: one of the reactions to these cartoons in the Muslim world was to produce another set of cartoons that were basically meant to tug at the sensitivities of Western world. For example, one cartoon depicted Hitler in bed with Ann Frank, smoking a postcoital cigarette while he says to her, "THAT will give you something to write about in your diary." Obviously, the idea there was just to be hurtful, but it certainly isn't a response in kind to the Danish cartoons. To produce an image of Muhammad is not just offensive, it isn't just a cultural faux-pas of making light of a travesty in someone's past: it's blasphemy, it's for the profane to claim power over the holy. A response in kind would have been some claim to power over God. Perhaps a bumper sticker like: "Jesus is just a migrant worker who picks my oranges." (Actually, there are probably many such workers named "Jesus.") Or if they really wanted to get a reaction, perhaps an attack on the real God of the West: "Money is my bitch."
Anyway, I hope that this discussion has been somewhat lucid, at least a little bit interesting, and with luck not too inflammatory. Thanks for reading, I look forward to your comments.
P.S: If you're interested in the full details of Cassirer's account, check out Language and Myth, a short and accessible read on the subject. For those who are more ambitious, have a look at The Philosophy of Symbolic forms, vol. II: Mythical Thought. And Cassirer's last book before his death, The Myth of the State, is a fantastic read treating the mythical and philosophical ingredients put together by the Nazi party to bring the German people under their influence, though his discussion of the phenomenology of myth is much more limited in that text.
P.P.S: Once more, a plug for Philopolis Guelph, which is a festival that offers activities where we explore philosophical ideas in a practical context, just as I've tried to do here. There are still spots up for grabs if you're interested in presenting, or just come out and join in the discussion. Submission deadline is August 26; event itself is October 12–14.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)