Even a conservative can be right sometimes, including George Will. Although I long thought of him as a Catholic, he’s now declared himself a “low-voltage atheist”, which of course shows that he has some discriminatory power. In a piece at the Washington Post called “American higher education is a house divided,” he lauds the University of Chicago’s free-speech standards (I am SO proud of these), standards that have now been copied by six other schools, including Purdue.
Will also maintains, and I’d like to think he’s right, that scientists on academic faculties are less likely to buy into reflexive internet accusations, and more likely to promote free speech, than are their colleagues in the humanities. Admittedly, the data he gives are anecdotal, but I think that scientists’ instilled habits of doubt and questioning do put them on a straighter path than those who think that all viewpoints are equally “privileged”:
Scientists and engineers live lives governed by the reality principle: Get the variables wrong, the experiment will fail, even if this seems insensitive; do the math wrong, the equation will tell you, even if that hurts your feelings. Reality does not similarly regulate the production of Marxist interpretations of “Middlemarch” or turgid monographs on the false consciousness of Parisian street sweepers in 1714. Literature professors “deconstructing” Herman Melville cause nothing worse than excruciating boredom in their students. If engineers ignore reality, reality deconstructs their bridges.
. . . In their scalding 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson plausibly argue that Duke’s disgrace — a fictional rape; hysterical academics trashing due process — was driven by the faculty Group of 88. Signatories of its manifesto included “only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. . . . More than 84 percent described their research interests as related to race, class or gender (or all three). The Group of 88 was disproportionately concentrated in the humanities and some social science departments. Fully 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty members signed the statement, followed by women’s studies (72.2 percent) and cultural anthropology (60 percent).”
Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.
Them’s fighting words, and humanities scholars will object, but there’s food for thought there. And no, not all humanities scholars oppose freedom of expression; that’s a bit of an exaggeration!
I love the humanities—or at least the objects they study—but the way I was taught literature and art was to try to understand it as an aesthetic object rather than to deconstruct it in a postmodern way, relating it to various ideological viewpoints or social movements. One of my friends, in fact, resigned as head of an English department in a major university because the faculty, rather than teaching literature in a way that would get students to both enjoy it and develop the habit of reading it, regarded it as a corpse to be dissected with Marxist tools, postmodern tools, Darwinian tools, and so on. Give me the New Criticism any day!
h/t: Diane G.
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This, from Middlemarch, which Will mentions: ‘Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive’. x
George Will? Really? …a “low voltage atheist”…? I guess it just goes to show that even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while, although philosophically it sounds like he is finally moving in the direction of the sensible side!
He’s been an atheist for a long time, he just doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He’s got a bit of a weird attitude, sort of like he doesn’t like being an atheist.
I think that Will describes himself as an agnostic who for all purposes is a practicing atheist.
Actually he self-labels as an athiest, not as an agnostic. He just doesn’t think atheism merits much attention so he seldom says anything about his atheism.
That’s a perfectly respectable position to take. Not everyone has to choose the same ground to do battle on.
cr
Ha. How do you ‘practice’ atheism. Is it like practicing not stamp collecting? 😉
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Love the closing paragraph. It’s exactly right: works of art should be understood primarily on aesthetic terms.
Always thought George Will was a bit smarter than the average republican even back before the party went south. I don’t see how he can deal with the reality of where his party has gone. If he truly sees himself as going atheist he is on his way out of that party, like it or not.
I have to say that I found the kick back from a few who viewed the video yesterday at Yale about stopping free speech and first amendment rights were ignoring reality. Must have been a trick by Fox and other thoughts/excuses. The real question from further study must be to determine if the petition signers were just ignorant or if they really could come up with a believable reason to sign such a thing.
George Will’s conservatism, both in the economic area and the role of government, is, I believe, much more important to him than his atheism. What actually may drive him out of the Republican party, at least temporarily, is Donald Trump winning the nomination.
But the role of the republicans is now much more than just conservative and the difficulties are much greater than just Trump. Any old time republican from the 50s and 60s should have jumped ship long ago.
Trump is all we think about at the moment because the media gives him all the free air time. But we have a long line of crazies, from Sara Palin, Ted Cruz, and a whole party out there that belongs to corporate America. I almost forgot, they belong to g*d too.
Good read. My only disagreement is with his coupling scientists and engineers, not that I object, but there is a difference. Successful engineers frequently avoid the scientific method for a crap shoot. While many scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been “accidental”, my career supports the view that this is more prevalent in engineering than science.
I offer the “Post It” note as an example where the engineer “failed” because his adhesive “Wouldn’t stick tight enough and never dried.”
My experience coincides with your observation. Science-oriented people tend to spend more time wondering why things operate the way they do while engineering types tend to focus on making something work the way they want it to. Hence the greater number of creationist types who are found in engineering fields than in science.
You could be right. Still, in my thirty five years in engineering I can’t recall meeting an engineer who was a creationist, but then, I don’t recall discussing religion with engineers either.
After 9/11 when they tried to develop a profile of a suicide bomber, apart from young male the only other thing that stood out statistically was the high number with an engineering background.
I am unfamiliar with that, but am not unconvinced. Fanatics come in many flavors.
Because of that result, they gave up trying to find a profile – there are just too many reasons people become radicalized, and it’s never one thing.
Well said. It could be that engineers bring a problem solving attitude to the cause. During a nice visit with the Dean of our engineering college several years ago, he showed me a study which revealed that less that 15% of engineering graduates were still in engineering positions ten years out of school, but more than 90% were in positions where problem solving was essential.
I guess it’s a question of what one sees as a problem. A low coefficient of egalitarianism could be a contributor.
“… in my thirty five years in engineering I can’t recall meeting an engineer who was a creationist …”
I suspect that you never asked or said anything that contradicted biblical fables. In my 45 professional years I would estimate that at least half of the engineers that I have worked with were creationists. The IEEE for example is at teast a 50% hotbed of creationists and AGW denialists.
Why bring it up if it’s not part of a project or seen as an essential? Someone’s religion is none of my business and vice versa unless one of us believes we have the only answer. I spent my career on the bleeding edge of scientific computation and digital communication. I have, however, experienced hard core atheists who are drawn to berating the religious, but that’s another story.
I’ve run into quite a number if engineers who are crationists because they “see the design” in the world around them. I haven’t run into this in Software Engineering, which doesn’t even formally qualify as engineering. But here too, I see a lot of subpar engineers just seeing what sticks when it comes to devising a solution. The better software engineers are more scientifically minded in my experience.
It could be my career in electronics, mainly computers and the Internet kept me in company with the more scientifically grounded… or that we were so engaged in ones and zeroes that religious views never became topical.
Scientifically grounded – we used to call them “technical”.
Probably a better term.
Poor sw engineers. Always dissed by the hw guys. 🙂
I actually think most disciplines are better with the scientifically minded. At least those that require problem solving.
I was working as a sw engineer and my partner on a sub-component was a hardware guy. We worked on the design together and I’d draw circles and data flow on the white board. By the end of the day he had redrawn all the circles as rectangles and all the data flow as a wiring diagram.
I’ve never heard of, e.g., a civil engineer referring to gravity as “just a theory” when it comes to constructing, e.g., bridges and tall buildings. But I gather that at least, if not more than, a few of them say that about evolution, a fairly frequent comment being, “I’m an engineer, and I recognize design (when I see it).”
Since my career was spent in electronics, I cannot speak to other disciplines, although we tried to be civil except at POETS Club meetings every Friday during Happy Hour.
Ah, I take it that’s the POETS Club as defined in the Urban Dictionary, then. 😀 New one on me.
You decoded the encrypted message… have another… 😉
Well, in New Zealand, most people don’t talk about religion much, but I still remember being surprised – almost shocked – when I found out one of my fellow engineers was a christian.
Mind you, most civil and mechanical engineering would work exactly as well whether there was a G*d or not. There’s no incompatibility between it and religion. (Religion is simply irrelevant, not incompatible). So this could be why more engineers than scientists seem to be religious.
cr
Right. It’s the social engineers you have to watch out for.
Literature is much more than aesthetics. Understanding the context of George Orwell or the female characters of Heinlein moves society forward. It makes us think and analyze. It’s not there to say, “oh that’s lovely” and to forget about it.
Literature studies are a great way to perfect analytical skills as well as the skills of evidence and argument. It’s not surprising many Humanities graduates become lawyers.
I didn’t mean to imply that the content was purely aesthetic; of course good literature helps us reflect on the human condition.
Likewise, in art nothing exists in a vacuum. There’s a context, history and vocabularies of symbols. Awareness of these is invaluable to the understanding and appreciation of art. Losing touch with that, either through just not bothering to learn or it being lost to time can cause you to end up in weird places. Like thinking the U.S. seal indicates a world wide conspiracy for a one world government.
Indeed and the symbols used in art is the vocabulary to tell the observer something. The “crab claw” bangs of The Julio Claudian emperors said “I’m related to Caesar and Augustus and therefore I am legitimate and worthy”. The “blessing” gesture of saints was stolen from the iconography of “speaking” by Romans who liked to show themselves addressing their troops (which often looks like hailing a taxi to me).
But I fear this will all be lost. Humanities academics are the worst when it comes to promoting their work and a utilitarian public grows tired of them, seeing them as esoteric intellectuals (and intellectuals are never goo because what can they really do for us).
We don’t need a Nuremberg book burning. We have done it to ourselves without lighting a match and the more “us vs them” articles written by Republicans who, in other facets of their life, eschew logic and reason, only appeal to those who eagerly desire to seal the fate of the Humanities. It will be gone, I am afraid, within a generation.
Your statement about symbols is most interesting. I have several books of symbols that once were easily recognized, but that have lost all meaning for us. When people couldn’t read, how items were depicted told you if they were saints, sinners or emperors. Watermarks on paper are more symbols the meanings of which have been lost. Words change meanings over time and many previous meanings are no longer understood or relevant.
Science is more rigorous than the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also changes over time as some theories prove untenable and others are proven more likely. Everything evolves.
I don’t know that it is more rigourous rather its evidence is often more absolute. At least when you are at the undergraduate level. String theory and such may be considered to have larger error bars.
It’s probably why many humanities folk get along with physicists and math people. Their families also can’t figure out what they are doing or why they do it.
Note that Will was not protesting against the traditional humanities that you defend so eloquently. Rather, he’s decrying the same po-mo incursions and cultural relativity that we routinely complain about here. He says, “In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.” Note the distinction between “actual” vs. “faux” scholars.
From experience, most draw no distinction. Their minds were made up long before pomo and many would have a hard time telling you why the Humanities grads are stupid. The distaste for humanities happened long ago and I’m honestly tired of it. I don’t even think the world deserves what moronic eloquence I might muster with my little amygdala of a brain and I’m frankly tired of being ashamed and attacked. Articles like Will’s only fuel the frenzy.
Ditto with history. You can’t understand it without understanding the people who make it. However, I do think I’m better at analysing history since I became an atheist.
I think in taking courses in literature, I became more comfortable with being an atheist because of the sentiment that no idea was free from criticism and that holding back sometimes resulted in book bans and burnings. My profs were mostly atheists but there was the odd theist usually in philosophy where they often hide.
I feel about the Humanities the way Philip Roth does:
“Literature got me into this mess, and literature is going to have to get me out.”
” I do think I’m better at analysing history since I became an atheist.”
Everything is better as a atheist. Remember Hitch – religion poisons everything.
Also, the occasional M.D. is a philosophy major (and engineering, surely). I know of an engineering major who became a lawyer. I think (one of) his goal(s) was to focus in a big way on patents.
“Literature is much more than aesthetics.”
While I appreciate the simple enjoyment of just diving into literature and the arts, I concur with the utility of the humanities going far beyond appreciation of the finer aspects of life.
For my research, I’m combining science with the humanities. Right now, I’m working on three papers: two on genome-wide methylation signatures, sleep quality, and chronotype, and one analytical humanities piece that frames the policy landscape of shiftwork (working at night) with a typology. The point of the humanities piece is to provide a conceptual framework to shape the scientific research agenda so that the evidence for the harms of shiftwork can be quantified in a way that policy for minimizing shiftwork and mitigating its harmful effects can be accomplished. Without this decision-making tool, the science in the shiftwork world won’t get us far enough towards translation. So, I’m a fan of the humanities’ harness of Reason. Reason helps us frame and guide our thinking and research.
But the dark side to the humanities is one that is very difficult for those in it to see. I’m surrounded by Social Justice Warriors at the University of Washington who think they are seeing the world critically and don’t yet realize that they are contributing to censoring and intellectual stifling.
That said, some academic disciplines have less power than others: English has less power than genetics, for instance. I often see scientists dismiss scholarly work in the humanities with quick, smug superiority.
I’ve been on the end of that smugness often. I usually hide my degrees from my coworkers. You can even say I am ashamed of them. For years my family told me science grads were smarter and I therefore dumber. I had no confidence. Now, working at the university I still hide my degrees because, as the engineer told me, “anyone can do it”.
At 45 I’m admitting maybe they are right, those who told me I was stupid. Perhaps I am. I have nothing to show for my work and many at this site agree the Humanities is for fools as science is superior and its academics can easily do the job of an English professor. I’m tired of defending it. Go ahead. I’m stupid. I’m a loser. My degrees are worthless. I admit it.
@Well, Diana, we make a good team. I have a master’s in linguistics, which is poo-pooed by hard scientists. But try having a degree in theology! When I first started moving into health science, people assumed I was an idiot because of my degrees! One geneticist told me I shouldn’t tell anyone about my non-science education. Even my current mentor confused me having a degree in theology with being an unthinking moron. He didn’t realize I was an atheist. Well, he didn’t bother to ask. I’ve had other mentors autocratically strip my name of the initials from the degrees they don’t see as sciency enough. Good bye Master of Arts and Master of Theology. You don’t count! And you embarrass us!
You have a degree in theology and came out an atheist? PFFT! You obviously haven’t come to terms with what the arguments for God are, properly understood. 😉
Yeah, I figure if I ever do get around to writing an autobiography, the coming out as an atheist will make a nice, page-turning twist 🙂
I’m one of that tribe, MA English 1985.
However, if you’re teaching college freshmen to write, which is what I do, then you’re doing one of the most honorable tasks there is1 No literacy, no civilization.
Diana, we can’t let the misconceptions get us down. We’ve studied areas that aren’t as valued, but that doesn’t mean it was worthless.
Being able to communicate is the most important skill for anyone to have in terms of impact on the world, to say nothing for its worth in being able to love and nurture others. And you are quite a talented communicator.
The people I admire most are the ones who can speak and write clearly and who care enough to do so publicly. Wouldn’t it be great to be paid to this? I’m not good enough at writing, nor do I have a topic to write about. But if I could, I would. As a child, I wanted to be a novelist.
I’m 37. I have nothing to show for my life either. No books, no big publications, no impressive salary. And no kids.
But that can’t be what matters. . .
Oh I agree but it is not with arguing about. People believe what they want to believe and just as people think science only brings us atomic bombs, cancer is cured and the evil researchers won’t tell us the secret because they are getting rich, people also believe only morons do degrees in the Himanities and anyone can communicate, especially scientists because they are the smartest people of them all (I suppose they are smart AND evil). It took me ages to admit who I was on this site, having witnessed a lot of Humanities bashing. I think I’ve lost the will to persuade otherwise. It is just too exhausting and it is so much more fun for most to believe the fantasy than to deal with the reality.
Goodness. I think you both need to chill a bit. Christopher Hitchens was a literature guy. What could be worse?
You do yourselves a disservice. You have very extraordinary and unique perspective, which, I for one, value immensely. No shame…please.
Word.
You mean me and my little old mush brain. I should go back to playing dumb as I did to get boyfriends in the day when I was young. You are much more accepted when you fill the stereotypes.
Well said, rick.
(But I’d also point out that it looks different from “the other side” as well. I can recall several humanities types dissing scientists as mere utilitarian sloggers with a complete lack of esthetic appreciation, of any grasp of nuance, of the ability to appreciate the arts, of a sense of historical context, yada, yada.)
Yeah, that sort of criticism from those in the humanities sounds ignorant and tone deaf, as many scientists are quite tuned into the arts and have honed an appreciation for detail and nuance.
The harshest criticism I’ve seen of the work bench scientists do came from physicians (whom I see as being science-humanities hybrids):
When I was choosing what lab to do my doctoral research in, I asked my physician mentors back at the NIH for advice. They told me “Anyone can pipette. Working in a lab is easy. Don’t waste your time. You can pay people to do the bench work.”
In other words, basic science was viewed as something that could be outsourced. Why spend years doing that when you can pay someone else who’s spent years becoming an expert in the technique? Same with statistics. Basic science and statistics can be viewed as technical careers – and the real thinkers are the ones who are smart enough to know this.
That view should be offensive to most viewers on this site but comports, I think, with smugness that could be metered out by those in the humanities. The difference is that those in the humanities don’t have the power that physicians do, and well, I have to admit that I find most physicians to be smarter on average than most I meet in the humanities.
“I find most physicians to be smarter on average than most I meet in the humanities.”
Notorious counterexample: Ben Carson.
@rickflick: Indeed!! And it embarrasses me that he’s associated with Hopkins, where I started my formal scientific endeavors. (I got my MPH in epidemiology in my early 30’s, and it makes me cringe every time I hear him speak.)
Though it is uncomfortable to be in graduate school at my age, I don’t regret having chosen to go back and do this, but I don’t think that doing so proves I’m smarter. It does open up more doors for me, but I still have to deal with smugness, for I’ve chosen a field that values the humanities as much as science. So, I don’t put myself in winning races when it comes to what society gives power to. The only thing I could possibly do to rectify this would be to go to medical school after this PhD. That’s another way of combining science and the humanities, though, except that people don’t usually dis on doctors. Well, researchers do. They criticize doctors who memorize and don’t think for themselves.
Should you get fed up enough with the belief that science is superior and decide that going after something in science would make your life more meaningful, you can. It would not be that difficult for you just to get a master’s in some something sciency.
But there’s a lot of hype. Most scientists are technicians and most don’t have a huge impact on the world. Those who are able to write amazingly for the public are in the minority.
The question is is there anything in science that you’d like to go after? If not, then more school just to have the degree may be fairly unsatisfying. And, in the end, most everyone retires and most everyone just wants to enjoy their life. I don’t know where I’m going to end up after my PhD. I could work in the humanities or science! Whatever happens, I want to do what gives me joy and hope I can find a position that hits that sweet spot.
I think people can be strongly compelled toward one occupation, or they can be propelled a bit haphazardly, taking opportunities as they arise. This is what you’d expect based on all the contingencies at work in choosing a career. Luck is important, as well as the ability to make the most out of what you are confronted with.
Oh yeah? If they’re so smart and we’re so dumb, how come the prose in most scientific journals reads like crap? I’ve found the best science writers, certainly the best popularizers (people like Dawkins and Jerry and Sean Carroll), also have a strong background in literature.
Signed,
A Proud Humanities Guy
(PS – Now I feel like a member of that “Professional Organization of English Majors” recurring spoof that Garrison Keillor does on A Prairie Home Companion — even if English was only my minor.)
Keep the faith, Diana. And screw ’em if they can’t take a trope.
Hey the both of you. What rickflick said – chill out.
You’re under-rating yourselves.
As an engineer, I distinctly recall ongoing laments from fellow engineers about how we were under-rated. These days it seems an engineering degree counts for nothing beside an MBA (don’t get me started on MBAs!!)
I also recall people in atheist circles commenting on the number of engineers who happen to be Goddists. Can’t help it, shit happens.
But Charleen, with respect, a degree in theology really does invite the conclusion that you’re religious. People will jump to that conclusion the same way they’ll assume someone named ‘Mohamed’ is a Muslim or that I, being a male in NZ, must be interested in rugby football.
I will never bash the humanities as a whole, but I will certainly regard po-mo philosophers with derision. In no way do I think that extends to other humanities subjects (whether I feel the need to give a disclaimer or not).
cr
@infiniteimprobabilit:
“But Charleen, with respect, a degree in theology really does invite the conclusion that you’re religious. People will jump to that conclusion the same way they’ll assume someone named ‘Mohamed’ is a Muslim or that I, being a male in NZ, must be interested in rugby football.”
Yes. And that was one of the most useful lessons I learned being a chaplain. I’d go to a room because I was called by a nurse to do so. I’d show up and then people would project a tizzy of their histories and own beliefs onto me. Don’t try convincing an angry former born-again that you aren’t there to proselytize. Or an elderly hispanic Catholic that you aren’t a nun. Or an ultra-orthodox Jew that you aren’t in some way tref. It was one of the most striking lessons of my life that people do that. My role as chaplain was to work with whatever projection they had. It didn’t matter that they got it wrong about me. I was there for them and for dealing with whatever their mind spit out. But it is very difficult to relax with some projections. It’s uncomfortable to be faced with views of you that have nothing to do with you! But that’s how people’s minds work. So let the game begin. I’d have to decide on the spot how to play my hand. What would be useful for them? Sometimes I was at a complete loss. But sometimes it was clear: let them yell at me and tell me to get out of their room, as being able to order me around was one of the only things they could control hooked up to machines and dying.
Anyway, I don’t always do a good job dealing with the assumptions that come my way when people find out I went to divinity school. It was, in many ways, easier when I was a chaplain, because then I had the formal role to lean on. The training never goes away, but most of the time, I don’t put myself in the mindset that realizes that most of what gets said to me is about the other person in some way.
Hi Charleen
It is sometimes useful to remember that most of what people say to you is actually about them. Part of a chaplain’s job description, I think.
It’s also comforting to remember that if (like me) you’ve just made some faux pas in a crowded room – with any luck 99% of the people around are too absorbed in their own affairs to notice. (And the other 1% will pretend nothing happened anyway). I’ve just realised that comment was mostly about me and not you anyway 😉
I think you would learn a lot about human nature being a chaplain – some of it the hard way.
cr
Ah, you mirrored me 🙂
Yes, I learned a Jedi-mind trick from being a chaplain. (It never gets old, either.)
I spy the MBA thing 🙂 Heehehe
Adjunct English Prof. here. I opted out of a PhD because graduate studies in English cured me of it. What a load.
In my writing classes, I catch a lot of flak for teaching Darwin, Dawkins, etc., as well as how to critically evaluate claims in the media, especially about food–GMOs, organic, vegan, etc.
I still love Faulkner, but there’s too much interesting science lit. to read now. Love Jerry’s book on evolution, as well as Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett, Prothero, and host of other writers.
Now that’s Literature.
I’m reminded of Dawkins’s response to Keats (IIRC in “Unweaving the Rainbow”).
Also am a big fan of Keats’s contemporary, Shelley. Memorized his “Love’s Philosophy,” but only because it was set to a beautiful melody (recorded by The King’s Singers).
Poor Shelley. I wish he never went out on that lake.
Because of a pernicious Wordsworth influence?
Among that group at the Lake, those old opium eaters Coleridge and Dequincy have always held a special spot for me.
Spellcheck for some reason took it upon itself to redo my “De Quincey.”
Opium eaters reminds me of The Lotus Eaters
The allusion I was aiming for is De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater — the ur-text of drug lit.
The Lotus Eaters would work great for Tennyson, though. 🙂
Dawkins is an extremely good writer. He knows how to present a technical subject clearly and understandably and make it compelling reading. David Attenborough is another.
In terms of reading enjoyment, I’d as soon read either of them, as my favourite novelists.
cr
I pretty much ignore Mr. Will. Nice that he’s lauding science and reality in this situation, but has he called out his Party’s deniers of climate and biologic science? Or doesn’t that fit his political agenda?
Actually, he has.
He has called them out on evolution denial but not climate change denial. Will has pitched his tent in the climate change denial camp. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-climate-changes-instructive-past/2015/01/07/2ae70ee6-95d2-11e4-aabd-d0b93ff613d5_story.html and http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/08/3609346/george-will-climate-backwards/
He’s a complete idiot on global warming. He claims that since 20 or 100 million years ago there was a jump in CO2 that the effects of the industrial revolution can be ignored. He’s utterly ignorant and tragically wrong on this.
But, I don’t think he’s getting payed by the Oil and Coal lobbyists to take this stand. We need an alternative explanation as to why an admittedly quite intelligent human being can fail so miserably. Can’t he just Google and see the evidence and testimony out there and come up with a better understanding? What is it about George Will that impels him as if jet propelled, with a white, green house gas emitting contrail, into such a methane enriched opinion? Please help me out here. Anyone?
He’s probably a Humanities grad. You know how reason so alludes us.
If it weren’t for my science-addled brain, I’d have thought you meant “eludes,” there… 😉
I did. I’m a Humanities grad remember? We can’t spell even. So mush brained. How do I even go on living without inadvertently killing myself out of sheer stupidity?
… and Christopher Hitchens thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.
We all make mistakes.
cr
“We all make mistakes.”
Speak for yourself! 😉
Most likely due to his political ideology. There seems to be a strong correlation between conservatism or anti-government ideology (which is often associated in some way with a conservative or libertarian political viewpoint) and climate change denialism. Rejection is often perpetuated as a result of the echo chamber effect, which appears to be particularly prevalent within the ranks of conservatives. See http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/27/3662739/climate-change-echo-chambers/
Also is some evidence to suggest there may even be a causal relationship. A little lite reading on the subject: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-conservative-white-maes-are-more-likely-climate-skeptics/
Usually, Will’s writing is much more cogent than this, even if I disagree with him. Is he serious with this? “And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity?”
Well, George, the same way we accommodate evidence that cancer existed before cigarettes, death existed before drunk driving, and murder existed before guns…
Well put sir. I wish George would read that comment.
+1
“Give me the New Criticism any day!”
I’d become suspicious about ‘new’ anything, until New Atheism came on the scene. But, looking up New Criticism, I can appreciate that one too. I’m sure postmodernism will continue to slide into the dust bin of history, but I’m more than a little impatient to see it die.
So, the question of the day seems to be, can the humanities recover from it’s current tragic condition?
There is a public perception that university educations are a waste because they typically don’t lead directly to employment. Humanities suffers the worst because there is no perceived value in learning about Ancient History or William Blake. Further, there is a perception that graduates are stupid. As a colleague said to me last week, “we engineers look down on science grads, the science grads look down on the social sciences and, sorry Diana, everyone thinks Humanities is easy.”
So, no. I don’t think it will recover and I wonder what will fill the void.
We’re kind of strange in our public perception of what university educations are for. In many other countries, education leading to jobs is separated early on from university educations. If anything, I would like to see more diversity in universities combining science, humanities, social sciences, etc.
We have an engineer friend who is an amazing trouble shooter. His scientific education is first rate, but I think that he is more adept at solving problems by having humanities in his educational quiver.
The more we know and understand from varieties of sources, the more likely we are to arrive at solutions.
Yes, I too would like to see the breaking down of academic silos but they seem sadly entrenched so I don’t expect to see this happening soon unless universities decide to respond to decreasing enrolment with vigour (and avoid the increasing of tuition as the obvious response). Unfortunately, I don’t see universities responding to market demands as quickly as say corporations who come and go with such responses.
I recently started working st s university and I’ve never seen such horrid cooperation. Faculties are their own fiefdoms and many staff and faculty don’t consider the big picture of how their decisions affect the university. I think this is because they never had to. They are used to defending their turf not considering the big picture and how they can help their colleagues. It is a very peculiar culture coming from an IT corporate background where we had to cooperate and really wanted to so we could learn new things and network.
Ah, but universities are corporations, now. At the moment they seem more interested in cost-cutting than anything else, especially concerning faculty, but certainly market demand is starting to take hold. Unfortunately I don’t think the market is demanding traditional humanities education.
The cost cutting is ridiculous. It only takes money to educate the next generation, and there is plenty of money. It just has to be prioritized.
I love science. Taught it for 22 years at the high school level. But I can’t imagine having not received an education in the fine arts and humanities. I think my worldview would have been lacking something important had I not first gotten a decent liberal arts education and been exposed to all that non-sciency stuff.
Given the high cost of college, it’s hard to justify a humanities degree on the basis of merely becoming a better person.
Or a physics degree or a science degree. The only justifiable degrees would be medicine and business.
Nah, lots of engineering degrees are pretty well compensated.
But the real jobs are taken by the community college graduates. We need technicians not engineers, or so goes the thinking.
I don’t know what you mean by “real jobs”. My point is that it’s profitable and rational to go to a college to get a degree in engineering because you can usually find a good job that justifies the investment of time and money. Not so with an English major (or a physics major, probably.)
As for needing technicians, it sounds like you might be referring to the conservative propaganda that we have a lot of structural unemployment, meaning a mismatch between jobs and skills. Krugman has stated that this is overblown and structural unemployment is pretty small. In other words, we have a supply of technicians that roughly matches demand at the current wage rate.
Actually, physics, math, and statistics are among the better paid and more employable degrees. Most physics majors won’t get jobs *as physicists* but they will get good jobs because they have analytical and problem solving skills.
My point is that doesn’t matter to the public. They want to see a direct link between education and job. I have worked in IT for almost 20 years and I’ve made money in the triple figures. And I’m a mush headed Humanities graduate. But that doesn’t matter. What people tell me after they find out that I am a Humanities graduate that has had some success working right along side Engineering graduates, math graduates and science graduates, is that obviously my education was a wast of time because I am not working “in my field”. I’m most likely stupid and I guess got there by sleeping with the right person.
Diana, you are being WAY too hard on yourself! Who cares what the public thinks??! I just read a post that said that 41% of Trump supporters, a major portion of the “public,” were in favor of bombing an imaginary country from a 1992 Disney cartoon! Many (perhaps most) of the public don’t comprehend what it takes to make it through college, no matter what the degree. And besides, “mush-headed?” You’re smart enough to follow WEIT! I think that the readers of this site would say that you’re doing great…!
Diana, I can’t tell whether you sincerely think you are stupid or if you are using a rhetorical device.
Richard Dawkins has been posting about intelligence this morning on Twi**er, which has me thinking about your success. It does seem to be my impression that scientists are generally smarter than those in the IT profession. But you appear to be an outlier.
When I think of the people I know with only either a bachelor’s in science or a bachelor’s in the humanities, I’m far less inclined to think that those with a bachelor’s in science are smarter. In fact, I think it is the other way around, despite the fact that those with a bachelor’s in science can easily make much more than a Humanties grad. For, as you’ve shown with your success in IT, you were able to use your intelligence to navigate the world and acquire the needed knowledge. In contrast, I know many biologists with only a bachelor’s degree who don’t have to use their heads. They work in routinized labs where they do the same procedure every day for years. It’s not that different than factory work.
Regarding your advanced training in the Humanities, yes, one can argue that a master’s degree is a waste of time in that it doesn’t typically afford one with the ability to work professionally in the Humanities. I couldn’t work in linguistics with just a master’s in it. However, my training in linguistics is what once landed me a job in genetics. My humanities training cultivated my mind and gave me an edge over people with advanced training in medicine.
For whatever all this was worth.
During college, when the rudder on my career ship was quite loose, I took two quarters of “Renaissance and Reformation” from a rather engaging and charismatic prof. Looking back, I simply wanted to hear him hold forth on Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, More, Calvin, etc. I wasn’t much keen on writing papers for a grade. I simply didn’t feel much like writing papers so as to “engage” the prof, the expert, and have him write the occasional “ugh!” in the margin while he was having a beer. (I myself would certainly need at least one beer to bear up under paper-grading.)
I was a biology major. Could I have this present mind in that body, I’d go for something in engineering, and would press on with my self-education independently with the likes of the Great Books of the Western World, Harvard Classics, Loeb Classical Library; Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, The Hitch, A.C. Grayling, Dawkins, and a host of others. (Which of course I can do now, but there’s not enough bloody time.)
(I could go on a bit more, but the siren Pay-On-Demand is calling with “Mission Impossible III.” 😉 )
You’re actually gonna pay to watch that toxic sludge? Be sure to keep your popcorn inside your haz-mat suit, 🙂
The New Criticism. Even in its heyday, it was assaulted by William Empsom (probably the greatest literary critic of the 20th century) and Yvor Winters, one of the finest American critics. The problem with the New Criticism was that it set up the ‘poem’ as a symbolic object set in some symbolic space wholly removed from our actual living. Its propounders were all university men, who spent their whole lives preparing to live in and then living in the ‘safe space’ that is academia and assumed that the arts – by which I do not mean the humanities as taught in universities – were produced by people who if not fortunate enough to live in the same safe circumstances as the university men did aspired to do so… people who all essentially aspired to be university professors, with tenure (nice and safe!), and would really have behaved like Brooks and like Wimsatt, had they had the fortune to do so… The New Criticism was fundamentally a pedagogic method, one that was designed for American universities, where, perhaps because of ignorance of history, an unwillingness to wrestle with it, or a denial of it because of America’s political myth, the arts were regarded as existing somehow outside history, as not being involved in it – tell that to Marlowe, to Shakespeare, to Milton (whose birthday was mentioned here recently), to Bunyan, to Blake, to Melville, to Whitman, to Mark Twain, to Yeats, to Zamyatin, to Bulgakov, to Pinter, to Edward Bond, to Tony Kushner… The New Criticism was fundamentally an emasculation of the arts for the benefit of tenured teachers. Close reading is an excellent thing, but it was not invented by Brooks & Wimsatt. (Try acting in, or directing, a play – where close reading is required, and always has been.) It was a bloody good thing that the stultification that was the New Criticism was swept away by new brooms. Which is not to say that I like all the new brooms (I loathe many of them) or that I consider many or even most of them as being better than the New Criticism.
But I shall say this: what puzzles me often is the sort of mental dissonance or thoughtlessness that can assert that such and such a novel, say, is the ‘greatest’ novel ever written (without making the effort to give reasons why) while at the same same time suggesting that all aesthetic judgement is ‘subjective’ and therefore arbitrary, and that can simultaneously assert a love and respect for the arts while dismissing them with words that cannot but suggest a fundamental contempt for them – that they are ‘palliatives’ or ’embroidery’. But I am tired of this game, and tired of the assumption that everything important happens in universities.
+1
Thanks for the quick rundown. I feel I learn something every day. Or several things every day, as here.
My knowledge in this area is as shallow as rain puddles. But I think I can understand nostalgia for the older ism based on trends like postmodernism which lead to absurd relativism and leak over into many areas of discourse. Here’s the conclusion of Dan Dennett.
“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”
Does Will’s new affection for scientists extend to climate scientists or is he still a denier?
I doubt he. He and his cohorts Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, et. al., continue to deny climate science using the same old arguments over and over again.
That should be “I doubt it.”
Or “I douthat”? 😉
Aw … poor, earnest Ross is about as close as we come anymore to having a “Responsible Right.”
Which is, nowadays, kinda like being the tallest midget in the circus …
Will comes off as vaguely religious in his book “Statecraft as Soulcraft”. I sort of assumed after reading parts of it that he was Episcopalian which Robin Williams might likely describe as “low-voltage Catholic”.
Columns by George Will have been in every local newspaper I’ve subscribed to as I’ve moved around. He can be infuriatingly wrong (in my opinion) but over 20 years ago he wrote a column saying whales are magnificent and we should indeed save them. I’ve always respected him for that one.
Great posting . . . I, too, find illumination from George Will on occasion, despite some dogmatism for his “conservative” blog-column. And thanks for alerting me to this one. Yes, the New Criticism, but also non-dogmatic readings and sharing conversation about illuminations about individual lives and political communities in fiction, drama, and poetry.The dominant literary approaches Wills laments are in effect dogmatic and tedious and distracting from our rich literary culture in the United States
I never made Will for a Catholic. He seems like a 180-proof juniper-berry WASP to me. Maybe you took him for a Catholic because he so self-evidently fancies himself as having ascended to the conservative-intelligentsia throne vacated by a Catholic who was frequently mistaken for a WASP, William F. Buckley, Jr.
Will is the national scold. Whenever I think of him, which I try not oft to do, I recall what Mike Royko said about him: George Will is a schoolmarm who spends so much time yapping about the “national fabric” you’d think he was the goddamned national tailor.
I love tbe the juniper berry reference.
The Royko quote on Will I’ve found is actually ” … you`d think he was our national furniture upholsterer” — which is even funnier.
Sorry for stepping on your line, Mike …
One clue that Will isn’t Catholic is the bowtie. You find one once in a rare while on a lace-curtain Catholic (a Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for instance), but it’s far from the usual garb. Not many patch-sleeved Harris-tweed wearin’ pipe smokers among the Catholic rank-and-file, either.
Weird thing is, Will and Royko were both big-time Cubs fans. What Royko understood about Will is that he’s — justifiably — the kind of Cubs fan White-Sox fans love to hate, a superannuated preppy (or “yuppie scum” in the argot of the old Comiskey Park).
Nonetheless I’ve always found Will’s passion for baseball one of his redeeming characteristics. 😀
If baseball doesn’t tie the science/humanities theme in this thread together nothing will. To Diana and Charleen, I can only wish the majority computer science and engineering majors I worked with had perked up and paid a little bit of attention to humanities in school. It helps when a person can put a sentence together, both orally and in the written word. Surely, a bit more literature and study of history may have helped rather than week-long marathons involving World of Warcraft.
But to the point about baseball; today’s game has been so overtaken by the stats nerds (don’t get me wrong, I have always been one of them) that the art and beauty of the game gets lost in the fray. Sure, we can talk about OPS, WARP and ERA+ all day, but if we don’t talk about the fresh smell of leather and pine tar on a late winter day in South Florida (to say nothing of the distinct crackerjack and urine small at old Shea Stadium), we’re missing a great part of the game about which statistics have nothing to say. When I see a ball field, whether it’s a major league stadium or the Little League field at the end of my block, it brings back memories of childhood. I’d spend hours outside throwing a tennis ball against my stoop, lost in fantasy, robbing the batter of a liner down the third base line, or maybe throwing a perfect game in the World Series. (These fantasies were intermittently interrupted by my dad screaming at me to stop hitting the door with the throw hit the stairs with too much backspin). These hours outside were followed by hours inside creating my own fantasy leagues out of Lego figures, complete with fields built to scale out of blocks, score sheets and stat logs meticulously done by hand. I loved the art and I loved the science. Baseball wouldn’t be complete without either one and frankly, neither would life.
Yeah, I agree, Chris. But I sure loved me some Bill James when he first came along, around the time Carter handed the baton over to Reagan. A lively writer armed with the sabermetric stats to expose the received- wisdom BS that old-time “baseball men” had been thoughtlessly passing along from generation to generation.
If Bill James has taught me anything, it’s that there is no such thing as a hot hitter. Well, at least, no one has been able to show that there is. The “you can’t prove he isn’t hot” argument is sure to remind us of other discussions that frequently take place on this site…
Yes. Same thing with the “hot hand” myth concerning shooters in basketball. Although players (baseball and basketball) no doubt have this experience subjectively, hitting and shooting “streaks” are of zero predictive value for their next several shots or at-bats.
In basketball, in particular, where top players shoot at about 50%, a shooter’s streaks are almost identical to the runs of heads and tails you get when tossing a coin.
Yes, and it’s no wonder that you’ll see the All Star who makes 55% of his shots make 10 shots in a row (1/395) much more often than the guy who makes 40% of his shots (1/9536). Something the All Star will do 5-6 times per season will take the mediocre player 5-6 seasons to have a reasonable chance of doing once (and that’s neglecting the fact that he’ll naturally get fewer opportunities). On the other hand, you’ll see this same phenomenon repeat inversely when it comes to having terrible streaks.
I have wondered whether there is something to hot streaks when it comes to a player’s psyche. We’ve undoubtedly witnessed extreme cases such as when pitchers suddenly come down with Steve Blass Disease. Then again, cases like that may simply be a new mean from which we see the expected random streaks given a player’s expected performance.
Lookit you bringing the stats, Chris. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to prove George Will’s point by showing up us mushy-headed humanities majors. 🙂
Although, in fairness, it’s not like I’m a newbie, since I did take Statistics I and Statistics II forty years ago as an undergraduate — got an A-minus and a B-plus in ’em, too! (Also aced the prerequisites, Lies and Damned Lies, as independent-study courses.) You want me to average those grades for you, just say the word — mean, median, or mode.
Evocatively wonderful, chris! The pendulum can definitely swing too far at times.
Take me out to the ballgame!
(Hey, just 2 more months till spring training!)
Shades of S. Gould (and my colleague/teacher at CMU, Teddy Seidenfeld, who is a statistician, after all.)
Yeah, I agree … although I sometimes wonder if the old poseur isn’t faking the baseball enthusiasm for the literary cred.
Like his pretentions to erudition. I remember the recurring Doonesbury character T. Hamilton Tripler, the “quote boy,” George Will was rumored to keep on staff.
I don’t remember Tripler! sob!
I don’t know if it’s the “instilled habits of doubt and questioning”. I think most people who enter science fields do so because they are science-minded to begin with.
Yep, they have a sense of the numinous and, to quote Gary Cooper’s “Sergeant York,” believe that “some things aren’t for buyin’ and sellin’.”
Gary Cooper was dancing to a different buyin’-&-sellin’ piper as Howard Roark in the film version of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
Meh, or they come from families that value science. I can’t tell you how many doctoral-level scientists I’ve met who have shared that one of their parents was either a scientist or a doctor.
To add to Will’s credentials, the Odious O’Reilly recently called him a hack.
Takes one to know one. Thhppp, as Opus would say.
Sub
I’ve known for sometime now that Will is an atheist. But don’t let this fool you. He is a Big Time accommodationist. He is of the mind that society as a whole needs religion. In this regard he is a bit of an intellectual snob because while he can get along without religion he doen’t think that most people and society in general can do so.
There ain’t no “bit” about it.
Thank you for the info about George Will and atheism…and an example of a republican/conservative atheist.
I don’t think it’s mushiness versus hard-headedness that’s the main factor so much as difficulty of the subject, which in turn is a result of complexity.
There’s a gradient running from cosmology and physics, through chemistry and earth sciences, to biology and social sciences right up to the humanities. Figuring out the physical properties of a book of Shakespeare’s plays is, relatively speaking, child’s play because there aren’t as many factors to take into account. Modelling Shakespeare’s biochemical nature – trickier, but not wildly different from modelling any random person’s, since he presumably used the same endocrine systems and proteins. Modelling his living brain, an organ that’s anyway the most complicated thus far known – ridiculously tricky considering all the thoughts running through it, and also the fact that he’s dead.
Understanding his play’s effects on millions of long-dead people, each with unique brains on their own, and faced with the esoteric problems of consciousness? And considering the nature of such broad and tricky subjects as aesthetics, language, politics, and philosophy, which in turn are the chaotic products of millions of complex minds through time and space? And doing this through texts and historical leftovers?
We shouldn’t be surprised if the humanities and social sciences get hijacked by propaganda, biases, idiocies, mistakes, and ideologies, because the one thing these forces revel in is the gap of ignorance. They like to hide in the gaps, and the more difficult the subject, the more gaps there are to hide in. They did exactly the same things to biology, physics, and cosmology long ago, given the infancy of those subjects.
Kind of like modeling how Madam Bovary’s ovaries drove her to the affair with Mssr. Boulanger?
Precisely – I studied philosophy in part because I figured it was the right sort of broad challenge and an excuse to everything at once 😉