Odds and Ends

1) In my quest to find people in mainstream media taking the lessons of non-linearity into account, I’ve still seen very little serious analysis of the financial crisis in these terms. Of course, via the Santa Fe Institute’s science blog, there is this really nice piece from The New York Times. Instead of assuming the future will be exactly like the present, the op-ed takes the changing, dynamic situation into account and uses that as its basis to advocate policy decisions. Plus, it takes seriously the notion of bottom-up economic organization – real bottom-up organization that says, “Look, a lot of this has to do with the stake homeowners have in their houses, and you won’t stave off the deepening of the crisis until you honestly take that into account.”

2) I taught a critical thinking course when I lived in Philly, and the main focus was institutional/systems analysis. The idea was, real critical thinking doesn’t flow out of idealized, rational systems, but rather from having a command of the constraints of whatever institution you find yourself within. Anyway, not in a cruel way, but in a realistic way, I would talk to the students and ask them about their economic backgrounds and what constraints that imposed on them from the outside and what the real possibilities were for their existences. Now, of course, because there are so many different trajectories, a working class or middle class economic background doesn’t bar people necessarily from the top echelons of society, but we can say it reliably does so, with the noted exceptions.

As well, my last year in grad school, I took Chuck Dyke’s complexity course. One of our assignments was a semester-long research project where we were to design a research program for examining the dynamics of the discipline of philosophy, i.e., what really drives the discipline? Without going into the specifics, what we did was to choose a number of representative departments. We then went back to the beginning of last century, to the point when philosophy departments really coalesced out of religion departments and became entities of their own and then mapped the trajectories of each person in the department for each year, from undergraduate to graduate school and every teaching position from post-doc to the end of their careers. Basically, we tried to do the American remake of Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus. We did this for three main domains: ivy league schools, schools with ivy league pretensions (I called them the petit-bourgeoisie of the academic world) and then newer schools which were just entering the system and had to figure out how to attract students. The trajectories we found we that if you start in the ivy leagues, you mostly ended up in the ivy leagues, but that if you were outside that system, it was extremely difficult to actually break into it, or if you did, your trajectory was never very stable. Thus, two of the biggest determining factors are economic background and who you know (the ivy leagues are rather incestuous).

Our study wasn’t the most rigorous, but it was nice to see this post the other day (well, not “nice”) which corroborates just how important economic background is for determining life trajectories. We’re not a meritocratic nation in any way. Of course, once you’re in a certain context, say an ivy league philosophy department, you have to take on the habitus as well, but even getting up to that point is determined in large part by economics. I’ve reproduced the chart from the post below as well:

(”view image” for the larger version)

3) Finally, something I mentioned in the last post was that I was interested in briefly looking at how non-evidenced-based our culture really is, or at least how our political and media class (classes?) rarely if ever holds anyone accountable for what they say or asks them to back up their statements with actual facts. Maybe the interpretation of the facts might be wrong or purposely misleading or whatever, but still just the act of using or asking for evidence to support a claim is crucial. This is an idee fixe of Glenn Greenwald, especially when it comes to beltway insiders supposedly speaking about “what Americans really believe”, completely disregarding polls that say the exact opposite (though as David Simon pointed out in his Bill Moyer’s interview two weeks ago:

“You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America – school test scores, crime stats, arrest stats – anything that a politician can run on [or] anything that somebody can get a promotion on, and as soon as you invent that statistical category 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is… The same game is played everywhere – nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution is supposed to do… If there’s an institution that is supposed to serve you or that you are supposed to serve, and it’s supposed to care for you and be a societal positive, it will betray you.”)

One example that really stuck with me was from two weeks ago. When Obama was releasing the torture memos, former CIA director Michael Hayden was interviewed by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, which you can see here. What bothered me more than Hayden’s point of view was that he said nearly nothing to back it up. Early on he claims, “On balance, the release of the memos harms American security.” And then further states that if “our enemies” know what our interrogation techniques are, then it moots them. The problem with his argument, if it can be called that, is that he offers absolutely no evidence that this harms American security nor that knowing an interrogation technique will negate its use. On a purely logical level, does knowing that you might be waterboarded actually negate the torture of being waterboarded? Besides the fact that as far as I know, torture doesn’t work. And I base this on scholar Darius Rejali’s interview on Democracy Now!, as well as the DOD’s own memos.

Filed by andyb at April 28th, 2009 under Uncategorized