How angry should you be at the economic system? Is economic discrimination as outrageous as racism?

Last night I Watched DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” and was impressed by its grappling with the politics of being a black writer in early 1950s New York.  In the end, Sisko, as Bennie the black science fiction writer, has a breakdown, after seeing a black friend killed by the police for breaking into a car, and then being beaten himself to within an inch of his life, for daring to express outrage at the police brutality.  Later, he is fired from his job for daring to write a science fiction story about a black space captain in the future, and so this all comes together to provoke his mental breakdown, during which he repats:  ”I am a human being!”  The implication that his ideas deserve just as much recognition as anyone else’s:  his story was good, so who cares if it is about black men in positions of authority?  Why do whites need to fear this, or suppress the idea?

The episode was filmed in the late 90s, and since that time the arrival of Obama has made the issues feel much less ‘present-day’ poignant, though of course anyone with humanity can still sympathize in the historical context.  While in the late 90s, the notion of a black man in charge was still a futuristic dream, less so than in the 50s of course by  a longshot, but it was still unfulfilled… today, that sort of poignancy can never be as acute, thanks to Obama.  One of the epic healing salves of the entire American and indeed western culture was his election.  And yet it is striking, one of course has to sympathize with the notion of being discriminated against, being fired, being beaten up, having your friends die, simply b/c you are not the same color as the in-group.  In a paroxyism of rage, anger, and helplessness, which was still mitigated against by his stories which dared to dream of a better future, Bennie collapses on the office floor, and is carried out in an ambulance.

It struck me, that since this was filmed in about 1998, the race issue has been more healed than perhaps ever before, but that the economic issues underlying the episode have if anything gotten much worse.   Management and administration has everywhere not only gotten stronger, but implemented a policy of systematically squeezing, downsizing, piling on work, reducing salaries, reducing benefits, making every job part-time and short-duration which used to be stable and full time and long term.

And it struck me, that all of us are Sisko/Bennie.

We are all daily subject to indignities, to discrimination, to hierarchical control, dehumanization, prejudice, and institutionalized brutality.  And it is called your job.

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And what if all labour laws were uniform, and fair?

We’ve had a post about the “UN as a stepping stone to world government.”  I’ve noted that the American right seems quite paranoid about the notion of a ‘world government’ (and the UN)… and if the American right is paranoid about something, one can bet that this reflects the paranoias of the corporate elite… since, need I spell this out… the American right is basically the world’s best mouthpiece for global capitalism, i.e., the interests of the main global corporations.  (Like microsoft, who took over skype, forced you to accept multiple downloads per day, and then when you go to contact skype customer service, are directed to the microsoft website, which has ‘support options’ for about 16 different ‘products’, none of which is skype!!!)

Well, one reason why the American right (and thus the global corporate elite) is paranoid about any notion of world government is that it represents the possibility of having uniform global labour laws.  Now, friends, global corporations thrive, and make most of their dough, on exploiting legal loopholes which arise between different countries.  It’s interesting, because while feudalism thrived on having many local legislations, capitalism is seen as having broken down this feudal mentality.  But now we see that the global companies are actually happy with the current fragmented world system, insofar as it gives them major tax shelters, and also, employment loopholes.

Thus, when unions in the developed world got too strong, they moved to the third world, where they can exploit the workers much more handily, for much less dinero paid.

Some day, however, it is more or less inevitable that we will come up with some global labour laws – kind of like global bills of rights.  This is simply too logical, too scientific, for it not to happen;

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How does education work? Why is college useful?

It’s a pretty taboo idea, these days, to suggest that someone in the US is a better person than someone else.  This has come about for very good reasons:  in general, society works best, and everyone feels most happy, when most people do not discriminate against other people, and tend to view them as the Declaration of Independence loftily put it, as being essentially equal.  In the past 30 years we have made great strides towards finally creating a society in which people who aren’t white males are not seen as inherently inferior; and the tendency throughout history has been so much in favour of the dominant male caste, that we are understandibly loathe to create distinctions between people.  However, in the process, we can forget how to talk about things which could arguably improve many, if not most people, such as education. 

In other words, it is one thing to say that people are inherently dumber than other people, or that some are uglier than others.  These things are facts which cannot be changed, and so it is best and most humane, until we can genetically engineer people to all be smart and good-looking, not to dwell on them.  But education, on the other hand, can be applied to improve almost everyone, even if the end results will vary widely based on one’s natural traits.

Still, there are many people, including many university students, who are quite foggy on just what education does, or why it might be useful.  Most people in our business-driven society tend to view things merely in terms of “utility” that is:  I learn stuff so that I can get a better job, and earn more money.  And that’s it.  But the fact is, that the very wealthiest and most talented people in our society mostly tend not to study things which are useful:  Prince William did not major in engineering, or veterinary medicine, or in being a computer technician; rather, he spent several years studying art history.  And at Yale, the most common major is history.  Why do all of these talented and very smart people waste their time on something which is not at all useful?  The answer is, of course, that it is useful, in a way that the wealthy instinctually get, but which I am attempting to articulate here, so that the less wealthy might benefit from it.  My purpose, then, is to convince you that it is worth getting a more general education, because it will put you on a par with the wealthy, who rule our society.

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The surprising and intimate relations between the arts, the sciences, engineering, and business.

Most people in the US, including college administrators, believe that the arts and the sciences are entirely different–basically opposite–fields of study.  Why in the Hades, then, are they always lumped together in the same “college”?  Throughout the US, the standard is to have a “college of arts and sciences,” a “college of engineering” and a “college of business.”  So what gives?  Why don’t they just separte the arts and sciences, since they are so radically different?  Many people suspect that the arts people just want to keep them together so that their college doesn’t seem entirely irrelevant, so that it gets phased out altogether.

A step backwards, and a longer term point of view, however, will help us to understand the relations between these fields which tend to remain hidden to people who accept current dogmas on the subject.  Once we have understood the relation between these two general fields of study, we can then properly relate engineering and business to the arts and sciences.  But to start with the arts and sciences.  Most people come to the conclusion that the arts and sciences are entirely different because the sciences are based on math, while the arts are based on language.  That is broadly true, and it is a signficant difference (though in reality there are many crosseovers).   However, the methodology employed by both disciplines is the same:  they both employ systematic logic, that is, the scientific method.  They both accumulate knowledge based on the gathering of facts, and subject existing hypotheses to peer review, which then allows them to advance understanding further.

In this way, we can see that the arts and sciences are basically two branches of the same methodology.  In the middle ages, scholars understood this, in part because the sum of knowledge was so much less that it was easier to see the forest for the trees.  As it explains in the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, both the arts and the sciences began life during the renaissance, as two branches of philosophy:  the arts were what we today call “philosophy” and the sciences were called “natural philosophy.”

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Is the history channel educational?

The other day I heard a friend chide her husband for watching the history channel, and made fun of him for being all highbrow when he watched TV.  “I don’t watch any of that serious educational stuff,” she said.

Which struck me as, well, to be polite, funny, because in class, I make a point of calling it the “Hitler Channel,” since literally 75% of the programming is on World War II.  What the audience doesn’t seem to realize, is that there were in fact other years in history besides 1939-1945.  That was only six years.  There have been other years, sometimes.  And the other 25% of their programming is split between the Cold War, Vietnam, and maybe a bit of World War I here and there.  Was there more to the history of human civilization than the last few wars that happened to involve the US?

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On nobility in Jane Austen

I believe that there has been no better statement of ideal male behaviour than in Jane Austen’s heroes.

They are manly without being martial; their primary concern however is the smooth running of local society–and, in essence, of creating an ideal society of equals–albeit an equality of those who have money, and can thus aspire to nobility of behaviour.  Twentieth-century critics will almost universally see this as elitism:  but I ask, can it be something more than that?  It would not be so widely appealing if it were truly elitist.  What Austen means, I think, is that, ideally, everyone would have the opportunity to be a gentleman and/or gentlewoman:  that is our noblest goal.  She takes it for granted that in her society, only those who have money can have the leisure required to read, and to finish one’s manners, and learn the arts of making oneself useful and agreeable in pleasant society. 

Austen does not write as though people with titles are better than those who do not have titles; rather the opposite.  She asserts that anyone who has the social skills to become a ‘gentleman’ or ‘gentle woman’ has a full right –even more of a right than highly titled nobles who lack the appropriate character– to being called noble.

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Don’t go to graduate school in the humanities (unless you don’t need a job at the end, that is).

It is with some sadness that I feel I must write this, but, the situation has gotten so dire that people need to realize what’s going on in the humanities job market.  Although I’ve written about the value of degrees in history and english, and I’ve also written in my “Who am I?” section, about how much my wife and I have enjoyed being graduate students in the humanities, I must also say that all of those things are only fun if you know that you have a decent job waiting for you at the end of it all.  Even through the 1990s, when I entered grad school, the job market was desperate, but, still, if you were actually talented, you could expect to get a job within a year or two of graduating.  Only losers had to be ‘adjuncts’ for more than a year, and only true losers stayed being adjuncts for more than 3-4 years. 

Unfortunately, the adoption of the business efficiency model by MBA-trained administrators in universities throughout the western world, which began in the 1980s and has reached a cresendo in the mid 2000s, has meant that the ‘human’ spaces in the university job model have quite rapidly been squeezed out by professional ‘efficiency maximizers’ who have been hired to minimize cost and maximize revenue.  While that is a great idea in theory, what it means is that people, and their lives, have basically been squeezed out of the profession.  In sum, while up to 80% of university teaching was done by tenured full-time faculty through the 1970s, by the mid-2000s, something like 25% of teaching was being done by full-time tenured faculty.

Why is this? 

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A reading list in the ‘classics,’ from ancient to modern

(Note:  if you just want the list, scroll down.) 

From the middle ages through the 1960s, undergraduates began their studies with the liberal arts:  especially with grammar, rhetoric, and logic, that is, the thorough use of language in a scientific and logical way.  In the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution, there came a need for lots of highly specialized and educated people, whose main field was science and math.  Since the knowledge in these fields now exploded, to the point that no one man could master more than a very narrow amount of these fields, it now became necessary to have long years of training in just these fields, in order to produce top-notch people.

This was potentially a problem, since for the first time, education for these people now threatened to become separated from the rest of the arts.  Interestingly, it took some time for this to happen.  Even at ‘engineering colleges’, which were increasingly set up from the 1860s, undergraduates were still admitted based on their proficiency in Latin and Greek through the 1930s.  It was only after WWII, with the advent of the Russian threat, and the obvious need to have top scientists in order to win the Cold War, that society accelerated its specialization of Maths and Science students, and basically began to divest these students of almost any non mathematical influence.

So before we can judge if this was good or bad, we need to understand what purpose the liberal arts had served until that time.  

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Why major in English? How could an english major possibly be useful?

I’ve written in my posts “why study history” and “why study the liberal arts” that the reason why the liberal arts are in university (and indeed have always been the core of the university curriculum up to the 1960s), is because they are, in fact, sciences.  That is, they use reason and logic to continually aim at furthering our knowledge in all those fields which have to do with human society, mentality, culture, and art.  These subjects have historically been the foundation of philosophy.  Historically, science evolved from philosophy – without philosophy, there can be no science.  Those who know the history of science know this well–unfortunately, this is not taught enough–yet.

In any event, the arts are key to understanding everything about human society, and how people interact with each other, and culture, including politics, economics, psychology, and a lot of other obviously ‘useful’ subjects.  But many will balk at studying things like “English” (or art history), because they seem to be merely studying cultural artefacts.  How useful can it be, in the case of English, to know all about a bunch of poems and stories?

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A simple critique of libertarianism.

So viewing friends of freinds’ profiles on facebook, I am reminded of the fact that there are quite a few Americans who consider themselves to be ‘libertarian.’  Many of the strongest proponents of this idea are people who have gone through a business school, and gotten a degree in any of the majors such as marketing, economics, advertising, finance, accounting, etc., that these schools offer.  In the netherlands, these are clearly understood to be vocational degrees, and so one finds no business schools at the universities.  In the US, business schools have gotten themselves attached to universities, and so business degrees have a corresponding prestige which perhaps they should not.  This is because, the average person in business school is not shown the whole range of possible approaches to their subject, (and, crucially, almost no history of their subject), but rather only those approaches which will make them a productive servant of a company.  A company’s main purpose is to sell as much product as possible, with the understanding that this will make as much profit as possible.  Thus, all vocational learning at business school is almost exclusively focused on this one end.  I should know, as my dad taught in one of the better business schools in the country for over 30 years, and I basically grew up there.

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