The most valuable experience I had in grad school (and I should say that’s a difficult choice, because I had some excellent faculty and support) was thanks to one of my professors (and friends), BH, in a sociolinguistics class. During class discussion, she noted on which side of an issue each of us fell, then assigned us to debate teams on the opposite side from our own opinions. I hated it at the time, but soon found it to be one of the best things that had happened to me in school.
Note that she separated how we felt (or believed or thought, take your pick, because which depends largely on the student) from how we argued. One’s belief, or feeling, or even well-researched academic opinion is separate from the objective, distanced arguments on either side.
The value of this cannot be overstated. Being forced to argue the opposite side of an issue, when one’s grade for the debate hangs upon how well one makes one’s case, forces the student to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. In order to debate, one must step far away from his opinion and seriously weigh the arguments of the opposition.
In education, the ability to separate oneself from one’s opinion, and clearly distinguish between opinion and fact, and the subjective and objective, is crucial. Or it used to be.
About the same time as I was debating something which I felt was hogwash (but doing so effectively, I might add), I began to notice a curious, and somewhat disturbing, phenomenon. I would see someone throw out an outrageously stupid opinion, and when called upon it, would respond with, “I have a right to my opinion.” This began to happen more and more frequently, with more and more people jumping to the defense of the person with the indefensible opinion.
Also around the same time, another equally disturbing trend began to appear. Somebody would say, or imply, that what he enjoyed, say basketball (since I was in Indiana, basketball would have been a probable choice), was on the same or even higher plane as, say, Mozart or Rembrandt.
These may seem like different things, but they are, in fact, part of the same phenomenon.
In the first, we have people who cannot, or will not, distinguish between the right to have an opinion and how valid that opinion may be. These days, all opinions are equally valid, because validity is an out of date criterion.
In the second, we have people who cannot, or will not, distinguish between what they like and artistic merit (or cultural importance), because artistic merit (and cultural importance) are out of date criteria.
Both of these are party line in the educational system, from kindergarten all the way up to the university. One may now insist that his third-grade math teacher is as important as Sir Isaac Newton, simply because he believes it. And because everyone must “respect” everyone else and their opinions (also known as “narratives”), such an inane opinion must be regarded seriously, as if it were based upon anything of substance.
What is behind both of these that makes them similar? Jonah Goldberg touched on part of it here.
What does it say when the media and society generally consider common sense to be news and the existence of human nature to be a revelation?
Well, one of the things it illustrates is the degree to which modernist ideology saturates our thinking. For much of the 20th century, enlightened intellectuals argued that the past has nothing to teach us. Science and liberationist ideology conspired to teach us that the past and tradition were so much social ballast keeping us down.
Certainly, the rejection of the past has a great deal to do with this phenomenon. Many academics seem to have been born without the horse sense gene because they honestly believe that common sense does not exist, and that because they believe we must at least question everything that comes to us from the past, if not reject it outright. But that’s only part of the phenomenon.
The other crucial aspect is narcissism, the belief that the word revolves around me, my beliefs, my opinions, my feelings, and that we have the right, nay, the mandate to force our narcissism upon everyone else — again, in the name of “respect.” This “respect” (multiculturalism is more or less the same, except of course with identity politics thrown in to make it more complex) is the reason we are expected to sit with a straight face and nod when somebody utters some idiotic opinion with no basis in fact whatsoever, oh, like the Rev. Wright’s idea that the US government created AIDS to kill off blacks (note that Farrakhan has said the same many times). We need no facts, because our opinion is everything. This “respect” is also the reason that one can insist that Bobby Knight is more culturally important than, say, Beethoven, because he’d rather be at a ball game than the symphony. Past? Forget it, we have nothing to learn from them. They’re racists. They’re not enlightened. Everything is relative, everything is grey, there is no bad, no good, no right, no wrong, it’s all situational. Everything is about me, me, me, me, what I like, what I feel. And I have every right to force you, with institutional force if necessary, to be “sensitive” to my juvenile narcissism.
Linguistics has always been divided between formalists and functionalists, and the latter have often been painted as squishy (in some cases, unfairly, and formalists can be pretty squishy when it suits them, too — see Chomsky). There are different degrees of squishiness, if you’ll pardon the word. All social sciences are going to fall somewhere along the squishy continuum, because no matter how hard you try, you cannot make a natural science out of a social science. Those of use who fall on the least squishy side acknowledge that, but believe that we can still use the principles of objective science and do research based on data. Those who fall on the squishiest side insist that because they believe everything is relative and subjective and grey and there is no objective truth or reality, just their opinions and feelings, they can write personal essays that have all of the validity of, well, any research anyone has ever done, or ever will do.
Thus, Maya Angelou is given the stature of William Shakespeare or Albert Einstein.
Moving back to that sociolinguistics course, because sociolinguistics is a functionalist field, and is therefore squishier than, say, syntactic theory, we have the old guard, exemplified by William Labov. His research was data-driven, and he used the principles of science. Sociolinguistics, and the social sciences in general, began to get squishier after Robin Lakoff published Language and Woman’s Place in 1975. Lakoff’s research isn’t — as research, Lakoff is horse manure from beginning to end (at least Whorf pretended to base his nonsense on data). Her book is nothing more than a long, personal essay. She neither collects nor analyzes data. Instead, she makes pronouncements — opinions — based on nothing whatsoever, and her pronouncements are accepted, even hailed, as research, and therefore, fact.
When I was in grad school, I or anyone else could have made this point in a PhD seminar. In fact, I did, and criticized a great many other studies, some better, some as bad as Lakoff (one couldn’t get worse). These days, if a grad student raised the point that Lakoff is nothing more than a string of personal essays, he would immediately be shouted down as not respecting “established research” and violating the cardinal rule of education: Opinion and fact are not distinct, because everything is an opinion, and all opinions are equally valid. He would probably also be called a misogynist, but such are the tools of the intellectually vapid that to silence critics, they call them names.
As a disclaimer: I have problems with some of Labov’s research, but it is, at least, based on data. Facts. There are any number of researchers whose work I respect a great deal that I disagree with, because the two are different issues. One of my professors from grad school, and a friend, is does some of the most impeccable research in the field, although I nearly always disagree with her conclusions. But Lakoff is not based on data, nor are the hundreds of thousands of pages of so-called “feminist research” she inspired, and none of it is due any respect whatsoever. I am singling her out, but because she made personal-essays-as-research fashionable, not because her “research” is any more a waste of paper than, say, Deborah Tannen’s nonsense (or for that matter, that guy who published Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Drivel is not a sex-specific product.)
I’m not sure why the Brooks study has suddenly been in the news lately since it came out some six months ago and was discussed to death at the time, but it’s an excellent example of what Goldberg referred to in his column (above). If you’re unfamiliar with it, Brooks, a garden-variety leftist social scientist, did a study — the empirical kind — on charity, and found that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. Common sense would tell anyone that this was probably the case. After all, liberals in general believe that it is the government’s job, and not that of the church or the private sector or the individual, to take care of othersL That’s what makes them liberals. It’s perfectly foreseeable that such people would feel less inclined to give to charity than people who believe that charity is the responsibility of the individual, and not the government. Yet, the results of the study were trumpeted as if they were surprising.
“Water is wet, research shows.”
“Balls dropped from trees drop to the ground, study finds.”
“Study: People who go to church more likely to believe in God.”
Not real studies, no more than Jonah’s list, but both utterly believable. And that’s sad — and a bit frightening.
Again moving back to that sociolinguistics course, if somebody tried to do the same thing today, angry parents and “activists” would beat down the doors, demanding that students’ beliefs and opinions be regarded with “sensitivity.” Examples abound in the news every week. Parents howling about evolution. Parents howling about Huck Finn or Lolita. Narcissistic idiocy is an equal-opportunity offender, existing along the entire political spectrum.
The central issue of education is this: If there is no truth, no objective reality, no distinction between the subjective and objective, if everything is relative, if all opinions are equally valid because there is no reality, just “narratives,” then there is no reason for education. There is nothing to learn, if how I feel is the fulcrum around which the word revolves. Those who believe this narcissistic, solipsist nonsense and are paid to work in the educational system, whether kindergarten or university, are perpetrating a fraud upon the public. They defraud the parents who pay their salaries, they defraud their students, and they defraud civilization. I cannot say anything negative enough about them. It infuriates me that they receive even a penny to push this fabricated nonsense. Enough is enough. If you believe all of this relativist babble, if you believe that 200,000 years of accumulated wisdom is worth nothing and should be ignored, go get a job where you can’t do damage, like washing dishes, and get out of education. Get out of the universities, stop stealing tax money to fund your “research,” and most of all, get out of the classroom.
Now, lest you think my diatribe political, it is not. Let’s take the very selective consideration science receives on both sides of the spectrum. Leftists love science only when it supports, or seems to support, their agenda — and so do a segment of social conservatives. No, we are not going to teach that circles have corners in geometry class, we are not going to teach that there is a “scientific consensus” on global warming when there is not, and no, we are not going to teach something that is not scientifically testable in science class and call it science (creationists, that last one was aimed right at you, with both barrels at close range). The left is equally guilty. One cannot hail a scientific report, yet turn around and simultaneously believe that everything is relative. Pick one and stick with it.
Finally, I am quite sick of academics using “academic freedom” to defend absolutely every gross abuse of the university system. No, I’m sorry, academic freedom does not give you the right to claim that two and two are five, or call fiction fact and publish it as history — or write a personal essay based on no data whatsoever and call it research. Sorry. Find some other excuse, but leave academic freedom out of it.
Well, I do sound like my grandfather. Oh well. I’m a year older today, and a year grumpier.
As an epilogue, I was taken along to a faculty party a couple of years ago, a party full of librarians. As always happens, the nuttiest moonbats there gravitated toward me as soon as I walked into the room (cats do the same thing — I’m enormously allergic to cats and moonbats, and both head straight for me the moment I’m within sight). The nuttiest one there was in the “wimmin’s studies” program, and was spouting idiocy from the time she sat down next to me, and spouting it largely at me, of course, but in a very sincere and concerned tone of voice. I sat through thirty minutes of her telling me about her research which wasn’t research at all (asking people how they feel doesn’t tell you anything except how they feel, and you’d think somebody with a PhD would know that, but no, she wasn’t smart enough to get that), and I managed to keep my mouth shut. I listened to her go on and on about how terrible is was that people had to prove discrimination or rape (she had never heard of innocent until proven guilty, or had, and believed that didn’t apply to discrimination or rape cases), and I managed to keep my mouth shut. Thirty minutes of nothing but left-wing, party-line, drivel based on no facts, nothing at all, but her feelings, and I managed to keep my mouth shut.
You really have no idea how hard this was for me. For one thing, I’m not the sort to keep my mouth shut. For another, I have a very low BS tolerance (and the older I get, the less tolerance I have). And finally, there is nothing I am sicker of than hearing how somebody “feels” about something, or hearing about their “feelings,” because frankly, my or your feelings don’t amount to jack shit, and because I’m sick of biological adults who have the emotional maturity of six year-olds. I. Don’t. Care. How. You. Feel. About. Anything. But somehow, I said nothing. I didn’t nod, as if I agreed — that is entirely beyond my ability. But I didn’t tell her she was a narcissistic, self-obsessed, PC idiot, or that whoever signed her dissertation should be tarred and feathered, then stripped of their PhDs and faculty positions. I badly wanted to, but I did not.
But then, she said that we all needed to be more “sensitive” to the feelings of others, and for some reason, that pushed me over the edge. No longer able to keep silent, I turned my head, looked straight at her, and said, “No, people are far, far too damned ’sensitive,’ and ’sensitivity’ not only has no place in education, but is a fundamental violation of the educational mission of the university.” After sitting there with her mouth agape for a couple of minutes — quite literally, as in drooling on her chin — she managed to shut it, and had no response. I’m quite sure that was the first time anyone had ever challenged her horse manure, and she had no idea how to react. I haven’t seen her since, but if I ever encounter her and she recognizes me, I’m quite sure she will cross the street.
Here endeth my grumpy old coot birthday post.
