Bernard Lewis

bernard lewis

The great Bernard Lewis is 100! Two pieces are worth reading: his essay The New Anti-Semitism and a review of Lewis’ memoir from whence the quotes below are from. The regressive left is in denial that at most Edward Said’s Orientalism is only making a socio-psychological claim about all self-conscious cultures and not as he would have us believe that only occidental cultures are inherently imperialistic. The Chinese, Japanese and Moorish conquests are obvious counter-examples.

Academic criticism of Lewis’ work came overwhelmingly from the left, starting with Edward Said’s 1978 polemic Orientalism, “in which,” Lewis writes, “Said imputed to Orientalists a sinister role as part of the imperialist domination and exploitation of the Islamic world by the West. In particular, he imputed to me an especially sinister role as what he called the leader of the Orientalists.” With a few strokes in this present book, Lewis severs Said’s head and holds it up to show that it is empty.

. . .

His earliest writings, he concedes, betrayed a Marxist influence—what he calls his own intellectual version of “measles and chicken pox,” a juvenile disease he outgrew in time.

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Charles Bradley: Soul of America

Charles Bradley, music

Most will know of Charles Bradley (a thorough mensch) through the documentary Soul of America. I’ve been listening closely to his excellent three albums No Time For Dreaming, Victim of Love, and Changes but have come to the view that his best is yet to come. The latest features a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” and even has Charles doing an Ozzie pose from the Black Sabbath 4 album cover. Though this great little label Daptone Records have done a superb job of, for the most part “de-James Browning” Charles, I’d like to see him move to a more psychedelic soul style for his next album. Speaking of acid funk/soul, Charles would be an ideal “replacement” for Gean West of The Relatives. At the very least it could be an interesting experiment.

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Brexit The Movie: Always allow 18 inches between chair and furniture

DEMOCRACY, liberalism

“Always allow 18 inches between chair and furniture . . .” (21:41 — 24:28: here the distinction and value between enterprise association and civil association gets profoundly disregarded). This mentality (30:53-31:50) has been institutionalized within the academy and the intelligentsia at large. From 33:28 your day begins . . . “terrified by towels”. “Trade was all about the great and the good from one country signing a treaty with the great and the good of another country . . . but real life is starting to leave that behind.”

Walker Percy Centenary

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May 28th marks the centenary of Walker Percy’s birth. Here is the first public announcement of this work-in-progress for Louisiana State University Press to commemorate Percy’s birth.

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Herbert Simon and Some Unresolved Tensions in Professional Schools

Herbert Simon

The sixteenth (and final) in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Mie Augier and Bhavna Hariharan

Organizing a professional school. Is very much like mixing oil with water: it is easy to describe the intended product, less easy to produce it. And the task is not finished when the goal has been achieved. Left to themselves, the oil and water will separate again. So also will the disciplines and the professions. Organizing, in these situations, is not a once-and-for-all activity. It is a continuing administrative responsibility, vital for the sustained success of the enterprise (Simon, 1967, p. 16).

Herbert Simon in recognized for his contributions to areas and fields such as organization theory, economics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and psychology, as well as others.[1] His paper on the business school as a problem of organizational design (1967) is, although perhaps less well known, a paper that reflects both his mind as an organization theorist and scholar, but also his awareness of the importance of some of the fundamental issues in the education of professions and in professional schools (such as business schools). As a person, he was well known for his strong mind and his insistence on going against the centripetal forces of scholarly disciplines, even if it might have been easier for him to stay within one (or two) disciplines. As he said in conversation, “if you see any discipline dominating you, you join the opposition and fight it for a while”.

The reformation of business schools and management education that Simon and colleagues became a symbol of had similarties with the changing of medical schools, which had happened a few decades earlier. Simon’s and Flexner’s visions for professional education have some similarities although there is little indication that Simon and Flexner overlapped in person. There are lessons from their work that alone – and together – may provide fruitful avenues for future research.

In this chapter, we take as our starting point Simon’s organizational analysis of the professional school, and discuss it in the light of some of the changes that happened in other professional schools (medical schools and engineering schools), as they went through institutional and intellectual transformations.

Simon directed his energy towards creating and reforming much of the intellectual content of one type of professional school, (the business schools), by creating with colleagues, among other things, the new field of organization studies. Flexner, on the other hand directed his efforts towards the institutional and societal reform of another type of professional education – namely medical schools.[ii] Together, Simon’s and Flexner’s contribution are powerful not only for understanding some of the tensions facing professional schools as institutions, but also hold possible implications for how we think of the education of professions in the future. Discussing some of these aspects is the aim of this paper. In particular, section 2 will discuss the Simon/Flexner visions for professional schools, taking into account the tensions that exist and the concept of professionalism embedded in Simon’s and Flexner’s visions. Then we will discuss how some of the Simon/Flexner insights are embedded in the history of another professional school, the engineering school. We end with some implications and the importance of curiosity in research as emphasized by Simon.

[1] Simon preferred to see his legacy and intellectual footprints as integrating, not jumping through, the fields and different disciplines.

[ii] Simon did also work on the larger institutional issues, for instance, being involved in the initiatives leading to places such as the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Social Science (CASBSS), in particular through his involvement with the Ford Foundation. At the even larger institutional and science policy level, he was central in the national academy of science; both in creating room for the social and behavioral sciences there, and on committee work throughout the years.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 86

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Ewell McBee, he reflected as he lay prone under the Rolls, was another example of the demented and farcical times we live in. Did the growing madness have something to do with the Jews pulling out? Who said we could get along without the Jews? Watch the Jews, their mysterious comings and goings and stayings! The Jews are a sign! When the Jews pull out, the Gentiles begin to act like the crazy Jutes and Celts and Angles and redneck Saxons they are. They go back to the woods. Here we are, retired from the cities and living deep in the Southern forests and growing nuttier by the hour. The Jews are gone, the blacks are leaving, and where are we? deep in the woods, socking little balls around the mountains, rattling ice in Tanqueray, riding $35,000 German cars, watching Billy Graham and the Steelers and M*A*S*H on 45-inch Jap TV.

*****

There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeded. They were waiting. What were they waiting for?

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They had plans and the plans took up their time.

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What she feared was a breakdown in the rules of ordinary living which other people observed automatically. What if the rules broke down? Suddenly she remembered that she had once been an A student. But what if she flunked ordinary living?

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Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book. Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You’d never find it.

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The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition

t. s. eliot

The very excellent Ronald Schuchard discusses the genesis of this important and large project. Of course Valerie Eliot was vital to the realization of this task as he explains in the video. Some months ago I posted this amusing squib from VE and was reminded of one of my favorite Eliot quotes:

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance

Though this unfashionable insight is hardly original (“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”) it is an unusual formulation, reflecting the distinctive quality of TSE’s mind. TSE understood, as do a few others such as Percy, that it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist in a linear trajectory of progress, progress here taken to be coextensive with improvement – morally, socially, technologically, economically and scientifically. Epistemic humility is not something valued as an epistemological virtue, a methodological approach valuable in itself — and this oversight unfortunately informs much of our socio-cultural polarization.

For more about Valerie here are some obituaries: The Guardian — The Telegraph — The New York Times — Independent. 

I Am the Blues

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I’m very much looking forward to seeing this documentary featuring Bobby Rush, Barbara Lynn, Henry Gray, Carol Fran, Little Freddie King, Lazy Lester, Bilbo Walker, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, RL Boyce, LC Ulmer, and Lil’ Buck Sinegal. (click image for details). H/T the wonderful Holger Peterson.

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Why Concepts Creep to the Left

Jonathan Haidt

She asked for my love
and I gave her a dangerous mind
Now she’s stupid in the street
and she can’t socialise

— Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

One really has to be skeptical of the extensional and intensional adequacy of the concepts under discussion (this over and above the standard political labels of mutual reproach). Since the regressive Left now has a dearth of causes to meet the bloated managerial apparatus that’s in place (thought police have self-justificatory quotas to be met), they succumb to concept creep thereby rendering concepts at best meaningless, at worse obscure: i.e. Newspeak and associated thought control, shallow and cynical virtue signaling, products of intellectually dishonest grotesque photofit-like minds.

Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory Volume 27, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 40-45 (freely available).

Last year I cowrote an essay with Greg Lukianoff titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Lukianoff and I analyzed several new concepts that have been spreading rapidly around the academy—but almost nowhere else in American society. The two most colorful are “Trigger warnings” (warnings given to students before professors assign readings that might reactivate painful memories in survivors of trauma) and “microaggressions” (words, questions, or even facial expressions that have the effect—often unintended—of making another person feel marginalized, different, or excluded). A search for these terms on Google Trends shows that they were barely mentioned before 2012 but have been rising rapidly in popularity since late 2013.

These terms are part of a new conceptual package that includes all of the older concepts long referred to as “political correctness” but with greatly expanded notions of harm, trauma, mental illness, vulnerability, and harassment. These concepts seem to have expanded in just the way that Nick Haslam (this issue) describes—horizontally, to take in new kinds of cases (such as adding the reading of novels to the list of traumatizing activities), and vertically, to take in ever less extreme versions of older cases (as is made explicit by the prefix “micro” in the word “microaggression”). In this conceptually augmented political correctness, the central idea seems to be that many college students are so fragile that institutions and right-thinking people must all work together to protect vulnerable individuals from exposure to words and ideas that could damage them in a lasting way. If this protection requires banning certain speakers from campus, or punishing student newspapers that publish opinions that upset the dominant campus sensibility, then so be it.

But the reactions to the “Coddling” article—in essays, blog posts, and commentary on the original post—has revealed a large generational gap. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of Americans older than 40, including progressives, and including progressive professors, dislike the illiberal tendencies of the new political correctness. They do not share the view that college students must be shielded from words, books, and visiting speakers. These older progressives value freedom of speech to such an extent that they oppose efforts to shut down student newspapers or shout down professors or visiting speakers. President Obama himself recently spoke out against “coddling” and in favor of vigorous cross-partisan debate on campus (see quotes in Haidt, 2015). There has been hardly any published criticism of the “Coddling” article, but what little pushback there has been has come almost exclusively from current college students and from humanities professors younger than 35 (e.g., Manne, 2015).

Why is this? Why has this new and expansive sense of student fragility spread so rapidly, but only among millennials who are currently living or working on college campuses? Lukianoff and I tried to explain the recent spread of trigger warnings and microaggression theory by examining broad historical trends, such as increases in protective parenting that began in the 1980s, and we examined more recent changes in federal laws that pressured universities to overpolice language use on campus. But Haslam’s explanation of concept creep provides a large and crucial missing piece of the story. In this article I expand upon a point that Haslam (this issue) raised only briefly at the end of his target article: Concept creep has happened primarily to concepts related to a left-liberal moral agenda. As he noted on p. 14: The concept creep phenomenon broadens moral concern in a way that aligns with a liberal social agenda by defining new kinds of experience as harmful and new classes of people as harmed, and it identifies these people as needful of care and protection.

I position concept creep within the recent historical trend of rising political polarization, particularly “affective partisan polarization,” which refers to the increasing hostility felt by partisans toward people on the other side. I tell this story in three graphs. Together, the trends in these graphs can explain why concepts of trauma and victimhood have undergone such rapid expansion on university campuses and among psychologists. In brief, the loss of political diversity in many universities—and in psychology in particular—at a time of rising cross-partisan hostility has amplified the already powerful process of motivated reasoning. Concepts are morphing to become ever more useful to “intuitive prosecutors” (Tetlock, 2002), who are prosecuting their enemies in the culture war.

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