Incredulity re: the VA Tech English Department
I received this by James Lewis at The American Thinker.
An extraordinarily astute and intellectually honest friend of mine was led to wonder about the VA Tech English department on the day of the murders, and pointed me to their homepage then, so I've actually been thinking about this a little bit.
Lewis's argument is rather a mess (too busy today to do the detail thing today), as you'll see. Lewis seems particularly put out by the non-standard/weird sexual themes that are common in English departments. I'm never sure which is more off-putting, the intellectual left's obsession with weird sex or the intellectual right's obsession with any sex.
Anyway, Lewis's essay is rather overwrought and under-evidenced...but the Tech English department's poem at the end is so bloody bizarre that it almost makes Lewis's screed seem reasonable.
The part where the murdered Tech students are compared to baby elephants is probably the most...um...peculiar...bit, I'd say.
One footnote:
Some liberals don't seem to want to admit this, but take it from me, there's a good bit of truth in it: the humanities and social sciences are largely overrun by second-rate intellects hawking third-rate theories. I'm in no way linking this to the shooting, and, in fact, I'm not advocating any course of action. I'm just taking the opportunity to point out that, for all the right has wrong, they're largely right about this. A university is a place where even dumb ideas ought to be tried out. But this sort of thing is getting to be a bit much. The grating, tedious mediocrity and silliness of much of what passes for serious thinking in the humanities and social sciences these days is, I'd say, one of the main forces dragging down the contemporary American university.
(Incidentally: thought the roots of much of the silliness at issue is European, I'm told that its been passe in Europe for quite some time, and survives mainly in American English departments. But I don't know whether that's true.)
I received this by James Lewis at The American Thinker.
An extraordinarily astute and intellectually honest friend of mine was led to wonder about the VA Tech English department on the day of the murders, and pointed me to their homepage then, so I've actually been thinking about this a little bit.
Lewis's argument is rather a mess (too busy today to do the detail thing today), as you'll see. Lewis seems particularly put out by the non-standard/weird sexual themes that are common in English departments. I'm never sure which is more off-putting, the intellectual left's obsession with weird sex or the intellectual right's obsession with any sex.
Anyway, Lewis's essay is rather overwrought and under-evidenced...but the Tech English department's poem at the end is so bloody bizarre that it almost makes Lewis's screed seem reasonable.
The part where the murdered Tech students are compared to baby elephants is probably the most...um...peculiar...bit, I'd say.
One footnote:
Some liberals don't seem to want to admit this, but take it from me, there's a good bit of truth in it: the humanities and social sciences are largely overrun by second-rate intellects hawking third-rate theories. I'm in no way linking this to the shooting, and, in fact, I'm not advocating any course of action. I'm just taking the opportunity to point out that, for all the right has wrong, they're largely right about this. A university is a place where even dumb ideas ought to be tried out. But this sort of thing is getting to be a bit much. The grating, tedious mediocrity and silliness of much of what passes for serious thinking in the humanities and social sciences these days is, I'd say, one of the main forces dragging down the contemporary American university.
(Incidentally: thought the roots of much of the silliness at issue is European, I'm told that its been passe in Europe for quite some time, and survives mainly in American English departments. But I don't know whether that's true.)
posted by Winston Smith at
1:06 PM
35 Comments:
That is precisely why I was saying we need to teach philosophy, ethics, and logic in middle and high school. They're dumped into that sort of a situation and this is what we get.
Who teaches our kids why it's not ok to kill? No one. I propose an actual experiment be undertaken. I'll bet that if you were to walk up to someone and ask him why it's not ok to kill someone, he or she couldn't give you a reasonable explanation 50% of the time.
That might be overkill, but I think it should be done. I think some campus needs to organize a poll where they take a statistically valid sample of students and ask them why it's not ok to kill and see what percentage of people give logically poor, easily overcome reasoning for why you shouldn't do it.
I wonder if that'd be possible - I bet the numbers would shock America.
And by "that might be overkill", I mean I'm probably wrong about the 50% thing. But even if it's 5%..that means that in a university with 20,000 students, that means 1,000 of them don't have a good reason not to go kill people.
They just don't because they're told it's wrong and they maybe have a minor hunch that that's correct.
I wonder if we'll ever see a day again where I don't post twice consecutively to redact the previous post.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once wondered if universities should offer courses in normal psychology.
Of course, we wouldn't know where to start, since "normal" has been eradicated from the modern lexicon.
I think the problem is evident in your post - do you want Fulton Sheen defining "normal"?
jebus. I shudder to think what would be taught.
There is no retort to a sneer.
Among his many, many ludicrous beliefs and "logical" argumentation, I think this will suffice as the easiest and simplest to explain:
He believed in transubstantiation. He seriously believed that a cracker, when placed in the mouth during communion, literally turned into the flesh of Christ. He also believed the wine literally turned into his blood.
No, he did not think that it was a metaphor.
And you think it'd be cool if we were to look to him for a definition of "normal" psychology?
I think that's all that needs to be said about that one.
Sheen told a story about a young man who walked through the Louvre. He glanced at the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century paintings and quickly headed for the exit.
"There's nothing to see here," he told the guard.
"Those paintings aren't on trial here," replied the guard, "you are."
You cannot use the tools of psychology, about which you know little (especially your own) on theology, of which you know nothing. Neither can one grow wise, which is to say through philosophy, until he realizes that you can learn from those with whom you do not agree.
Fulton Sheen was a master of all three disciplines, BTW, and you would do well to learn of him and from him. Only then will you have standing to disagree with him, although never to sneer. You'll find that only the dilettantes sneer: serious men take each other seriously regardless of their disagreements, and Fulton J. Sheen was a serious man.
Neither was the Eucharist a matter of relevance here; even if you are correct that to believe in miracles or metaphysics at all is insane, the burden of proof lies on you, and scorn is no replacement for it.
And since your definition of sanity is narrow and largely solipsistic, and since 90% or so of your fellow Americans believe in God, Whose existence would really be no less of a miracle than the Eucharist or a thousand other things, they must be insane too.
I'd rather take my chances on Fulton Sheen defining "normal." For one thing, he would be more open-minded, and probably not return the favor by calling you insane. (Probably.)
Perhaps you're the only "normal," sane man among us, Mr. Mystic, a Nietzsche in internet pseudonymity's clothing. I remain open to that possibility, altho I'm not ready to concede that because that I also remain open to transubstantiation, miracles, and God that I'm somehow abnormal. If believing I am more than the sum of my atoms qualifies me as insane, so be it.
Cheers, and I hope you caught the link and the Solzhenitsyn quote a few posts back. (His own state used the language of psychology to subdue its philosophical and spiritual enemies, as you're no doubt aware. So forgive me if I remain wary of your triumphalist materialism.)
Y'know, I used to think that I rolled out of bed with the wisdom of the ages an intrinsic part of my unique genetic makeup, but after trying my stubby wings a bit, I learned that this philosophy thing ain't as easy as it looks. And it was humbling to learn some folks understood what I was trying to say better than I did myself. They'd been there, done that.
That's not to say you (or I) don't have some boldness or clarity to add to the human discussion. But to do so, one must admit that he stands on the shoulders of giants, and first he must know where those shoulders are. Any better understanding of the human condition will not be invented from whole cloth, especially in the utterings of those who just rolled out of bed. After missing class.
Been there, done that. ;-)
...k
It doesn't seem like it's probably wrong to you to believe that a cracker actually turns into jesus?
I'm not saying I'm "good" at anything. All I'm saying is that transubstantiation seems a little counter-intuitive. Especially when you take into account that the entire belief began because a book said something that was probably meant metaphorically that people tried to make literal.
Also, for someone who speaks down to me so frequently, I'd like to point out a few glaring errors in your writing:
1) "even if you are correct that to believe in miracles or metaphysics at all is insane, the burden of proof lies on you, and scorn is no replacement for it"
What? I was not "scorning". I am not "sneering". I never said that to believe in miracles or metaphysics at all is insane (where do you get this stuff?). You are saying all of this. I am not. All I have said is that transubstantiation seems to be clearly wrong and that someone who believes it solely because a book tells him to might not be the best candidate to define "normal". Not because he is insane - not because he is stupid - but because I think it's likely that he is putting his faith above logic, which can be a dangerous scenario.
The whole point was that people have such disagreements and therefore it is really hard to have an accepted definition of "normal". You appeared to me to be indicating that it was an obvious thing that society has just decided to discard. If I'm wrong, sorry.
2) "And since your definition of sanity is narrow and largely solipsistic".
When did I give a definition? You just try so hard to find something with which you can belittle me that you start insulting me over things I haven't even done!
3) "and probably not return the favor by calling you insane."
Did I call him insane? No. Do I think he's wrong? Yes. You seem to do this frequently - accuse me of doing things I never did (starting some sort of gay joke, calling him insane, giving a definition of sanity, etc.) when it's plainly clear to anyone who can read that I never did these things.
Why do you do that?
4) "and since 90% or so of your fellow Americans believe in God, Whose existence would really be no less of a miracle than the Eucharist or a thousand other things, they must be insane too."
This is ridiculous on a lot of levels. First, I doubt that the existence of "god" (unless you're restricting that to the christian definition) is necessarily a "miracle". I also doubt that it's on the same level as the eucharist. I see no reason to take either of those to be true, and it'd take more time than we have here to prove that either is the case, so why write it? Why write something that would involve so much thought to prove especially for the sole purpose of making the argument that I must think everyone who believes in "God" is insane?
The lengths you go to to make me look bad are borderline malicious.
5) "because that I also remain open to transubstantiation, miracles, and God that I'm somehow abnormal"
There's a difference between "remaining open" as in holding that one could be wrong about it (which I do, obviously) and asserting that it is absolutely positively true when it's a huge stretch to make it so. Do you think Sheen would be "open" to anything about Catholicism being wrong? I doubt it.
So if you're saying I'm not open to being wrong - maybe I didn't make it clear despite the many times I've said it before (and I think that any rational person knows he could always be wrong), or maybe this is just another one of your libelous attempts to make me appear foolish, but either way, just so you know - I know I could be wrong.
6) "So forgive me if I remain wary of your triumphalist materialism"
What?
7) "Y'know, I used to think that I rolled out of bed with the wisdom of the ages an intrinsic part of my unique genetic makeup, but after trying my stubby wings a bit, I learned that this philosophy thing ain't as easy as it looks. And it was humbling to learn some folks understood what I was trying to say better than I did myself. They'd been there, done that."
Sorry you feel that I'm so beneath you?
So that's 7 points where you're either pointlessly insulting me, blatantly making things up, or saying things that are far from obvious in order to link together an argument for my foolishness.
Why? Why do you hate me so? If you're so far ahead of me in this philosophy thing - so far above me as you seem to be claiming (since you are clearly using an analogy of your past state of existence to where you believe I am now), then why do you insist on making so many ridiculous assertions for the sole purpose of character assassination, which you frequently claim that you hate (even when someone just makes a joke, like 'argumentum ad ignoramus')?
Why?
Sometimes people get off together on the wrong foot. But we obviously enjoy dancing together, so let's stop the music and wait for the next number.
I do hope you'll read the Solzhenitsyn and the link on the non-duality of good. Perhaps you'll understand me better. I was trying to get with your good foot in our little dance, not my own.
Hate you? Not at all, and neither would Fulton Sheen. You are the only reason why he bothered at all.
Well..ok. Maybe I'll just let you lead next time and go from there. You seem predisposed to getting mad at me and stepping on my feet.
I don't see this link you're talking about. Is it in another thread?
Tom, read over your posts again. You seem very concerned about appearing smart but fail to pay much attention to what you're actually typing...
Perhaps. Perhaps you're, what's the term? Ah, projecting. I wrote pretty carefully, so mebbe the carelessness is in the reading.
Perhaps we're acquainted, anonymous, I dunno. But since I was speaking to one specific person, and don't know who you might be, you have me at a disadvantage.
Regardless, it's not about me. If you decide to judge me, which apparently you've decided to, I'm flawed, and therefore plead guilty to all charges. So let's move on from there. You inject yourself uninvited into this colloquy, but welcome anyway.
My name's Tom. Pleased to meet you.
Yes, Mr. Mystic, it was in the thread with 30-some comments, were we grew to know each other a bit. It was an offered hand. The "been there, done that" was an acknowledgement that I am you and you are me and we are all together.
So, again, cheers.
And since there's nobody around except for us chickens and the occasional anonymous, you made me think about transubstantiation, which, even as a (putative) Catholic, has always been a matter of supreme indifference to me, along the lines of how many angels fit on the head of a pin.
But theology doesn't concede that God isn't real, that He's some sort of proposition or theory, and that's the core point. If you look at essence, esse in the Latin, the belief is simply that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is as real as the reality of the words you're reading now. It is, and they are, quite real.
We can't take the whole deal literally, that's to say materialistically (and more precisely mechanically), or else if you bit into the Eucharist, blood must come squirting out.
Ick.
(So, thank you for making me think about it. That's what it's all about, or else we're each just taking shooting practice.)
In case anyone wants the opinion of someone very intelligent who actually checked the VT English department website carefully:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/04/lower_than_dirt.html
And as an added bonus, it's actually relevant to the topic of Winston's post.
Actually, the standard issue Catholic belief is (situated within the Aristotelian framework of substance and accident) that the substance of the bread changes to the body of Christ, while the accidents remain the same.
Basically, they think it's a Jesus cracker. It's Jesus, but in cracker format.
No joke. Read the catechism.
And what do you think about Anonymous' post, WS?
BTW, Winston, I'm curious as to what constitutes a *third rate theory*. Some would say your own department might be inhabited by some very intelligent people subscribing to a third rate theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism
Interesting choice for a topic in philosophy to insinuate as being "third-rate", anonymous. That theory tends to stand up to some pretty harsh criticism remarkably well in what I've read (which isn't a lot, but it seems likely that it's more than you).
You might look into it a little more closely before considering it to be on par with some english department theories.
Maybe you see something no one else has - maybe you can write a book definitively defeating Lewis's theory and become famous. Do it! Enlighten all the ignorant ones!
Well, I don't have any very settled views about modal realism, so I'm not really the person to ask about that particular *ad hominem.* Besides, you'll note that I didn't say anything laudatory about philosophy departments. Philosophy has its own problems. But, significant though those problems may be, they're notably less severe than those had by English.
What kinds of theories are bad theories? If I had anything like an algorithm for spitting out an answer to that I'd be famous.
There are a lot of bad theories in philosophy, and maybe a lot in all of the humanities, and maybe the social sciences, too. English departments (including literary criticism), speech communications departments, sociology departments and anthropology departments seem to be particularly suceptible to them, though.
And, of course, it's famously difficult to tell good theories from bad ones in the humanities.
The paradigm example, I suppose, is "relativism." The sad saga of that sorry excuse for a philosophical position would take up more than a whole book. People who advocate versions of that position usually actually hold a mish-mash of several ill-formed positions. It's common, for example, to conflate skepticism, fallibilism, various versions of what sometimes gets called pluralism, nihilism, and conventionalism into one, big, dopey soup and calle it 'relativism.'
Almost always such positions rest on really, really simple errors, but there's such an incoherent mush of different weird views smooshed together that it's almost impossible to pull out a single coherent thread to argue against.
So there's one third-rate theory, by way of example.
I'm pretty familiar with Lewis, as well as Stalnaker, Kripke, Shoemaker and others. And I've looked at the theory extremely closely, having taken a semester-long seminar on ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS.
My point was a more sarcastic one. Namely that just because someone can, in an offhand way, dismiss certain theories doesn't necessarily make them truly worthy of scorn. And though I greatly respect Winston's opinion, his statement that "it's famously difficult to tell good theories from bad ones in the humanities" is about as definitive as Justice Stewart's description of obscenity as "I know it when I see it".
That is not to say that I don't think there are 'third rate' theories out there. I do. Intelligent design being one of them.
The point was that a theory that so flies in the face of *common sense* is bound to be dismissed automatically by 90%+ of people who don't educate themselves adequately to judge it, or look into it carefully.
So I purposefully chose a theory that has great logical utility but that would nevertheless be judged as harebrained by most who flip through the Philosophy department's syllabi.
Mr. Mystic, "substance" is a metaphysical term here, and you're reading it mechanically. That's an error.
There's just no way to do this with Cliffs Notes. All the words are there, but not the understanding. (Not like I haven't tried to crib my way through myself. Takes one to know one.)
Christ-as-cracker is sort of funny in a street-level way. But in trying to get the better of others, you're showing your worst.
People who advocate versions of that position usually actually hold a mish-mash of several ill-formed positions. It's common, for example, to conflate skepticism, fallibilism, various versions of what sometimes gets called pluralism, nihilism, and conventionalism into one, big, dopey soup and call it 'relativism.'
WS, that's a fair description of the "reality-based" community, except for the fallibilism. I meself never have the lack of humility to claim my own view for "reality."
At least not in public. ;-)
Anonymous:
I absolutely agree that all sorts of important and interesting theories look dopey at first (or second) glance, but look interesting when given serious attention.
On the other hand, some theories are stupid all the way down, and just get stupider the more you think about them. THAT'S the kind of position I'm griping about.
Seriously: go read some of the stuff that passes for scholarship in those disciplines. Incoherent, superficial, jargon-laden nonsense peppered with gestures at Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, et. al. is alarmingly common.
And even THOSE folks can't seem to tell the good stuff from the gibberish--witness the Sokal affair.
An extremely intelligent, knowledgeable, and open-minded friend of mine once described a session at a comparative literature conference he attended like so:
*The speaker read a paper that, so far as I could tell, just didn't make any sense. Then the commenter got up and read comments that, so far as I could tell, neither made any sense nor had anything in particular to do with the paper. Then members of the audience began asking questions that, so far as I could tell, didn't make any sense, nor have anything to do with either the paper or the comments. Then people began responding to the questions in ways that didn't make anys sense and didn't have any relation to the questions that had been asked, though occasionally the participants would act as if they'd come to some kind of agreement.*
Anyway:
I'm not ridiculing ideas for running contrary to common sense, nor for sounding weird, nor through any unfamiliarity with those ideas.
What I'm saying is that many of the ideas that are extremely common in the contemporary humanities and social sciences are dumb all the way down. They sound rather sophisticated--like an intellectual is supposed to sound, I guess--but there's just no there there.
Tom,
Well, the leftier left often shades off in a relativist direction when it turns its attention to philosophy...but most of the "reality-based community" doesn't seem to really buy that stuff.
I'd actually like to see survey results on that, though.
Winston,
Although I don't have much experience with some of the more, shall we say, inventive theories out there in Comp Lit., I think I hear what you're saying.
The first philosophy course I ever took was taught by the late, and great, Norman Kretzmann, who gave us something like the following advice for writing papers:
*You should not sound deep, slippery or vague. If you find yourself sounding deep, slippery or vague, start over.*
It sounds like your friend was neck-deep in this kind of stuff, so I see your point. I guess that in whatever lit classes I took, I never strayed too far from the *traditional* cannon.
I don't know what the leftier-left as a separate entity is anymore, or how it differs from the reality-based community (a self-designation I find presumptuous, if not by definition delusional.)
3 or 6 months ago, I started making a distinction between liberal and left. This current crop of non-rightists scares the bejesus out of me, and I want my liberals back.
My more skittish, pessimistic, and easily freaked-out self clearly hears what you are saying.
The term *reality-based community* is in conscious contrast to this quote from Ron Suskind's book, by an unnamed *Senior Administration official*:
"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''"
Of course the speaker was intentionally misusing the word "reality" to taunt those who respect empirical validity, but still, he understands that this cycle of make-believe can go on for a very long time as long as the realists choose rhetoric over violence. In fact, the more obvious the lies, the more likely it is that the reality-based community will fall back on reason and logical argument to demonstrate the essential dishonesty behind the assertions.
Meanwhile, the Rovians have moved on to another set of lies. The whole game seems to be predicated on finding out just how long the U.S. nation can resist collapse on the momentum of the federal bureaucracy alone. It's reminiscent of the final experiment carried out at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
The problem is similar with the Rovians, but much, much harder to understand. If they truly believe that "reality" is a construction of those with political and economic power, then there is no hope for understanding; their brains are simply not properly connected.
Alternatively, if they are as malicious and genuinely evil as they must be if they are simply playing a game that leads to certain ruin, then they similarly cannot be understood by people with a conscience and some hope for the future of humanity.
"Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why?' I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"---Robert F. Kennedy [South Africa, 1966]
The neo-con staffer was far less elegant, but the sentiment was the same. There was a(n) hubris involved, but toppling Saddam and attempting to put a stake of democracy into the Islamist heart was an act of idealism.
Bad idea? Sort of looks like it. But that nonsense about Rovian and "evil" should be reserved for the true evil in Iraq and in the world, that purposely kills innocents for 50 bucks or a ticket to heaven. A leftist finds it acceptable to talk that way these days, but no true liberal would.
Just because there are people doing bad things in Iraq (the people killing innocents for 50 bucks or a ticket to heaven that you speak of) does not mean that the administration doesn't do very bad things as well.
Also, Bush is responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths - more than any suicide bomber could be. No, I don't think that any president who declares war is necessarily responsible for the deaths. For example, World War II was a necessary war - the Nazis could not be permitted to continue their domination of Europe. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not responsible for those deaths, in my eyes, because he was forced to make the choice to act defensively.
However, if you do a very bad thing which results in very bad things happening, I think you should be held responsible for all consequences of your actions. If it is true that Bush lied to start an unnecessary war, then he should be held responsible for all of the tens of thousands of deaths that have resulted.
That makes him far more bad than any suicide bomber. I think that's pretty clear. The only point of potential disagreement seems to me to be whether or not he lied to start the war.
Right? If yes, then we can talk about whether or not he lied. If you disagree with me about anything in this post other than the allegation that he lied to start the war, then we should clarify that before proceeding.
What say ye?
"There was a(n) hubris involved, but toppling Saddam and attempting to put a stake of democracy into the Islamist heart was an act of idealism."
What evidence do we have, aside from their repeated incantaion of it, that their strategy was an act of idealism? Can you point to ANY substantive ACTIONS that lead to that conclusion?
What we had in REALITY was the failure to provide security and prevent widespread looting, the failure to secure ammo dumps, the attempt to bypass popular democracy until forced into it by Sistani, the farming out of rich reconstruction contracts to politically connected US firms rather than Iraqis, the obliteration of Iraqi civil society, the support for an Iraqi hydrocarbon law that guarantees the lion's share of profits to western oil firms, the lack of oversight and accountability at Abu Ghraib (including purposely importing the sadistic bastard who had established the benchmark for cruelty at Guantanamo Bay to run it), the demand by George Bush that any Iraqi leader show his *gratitude* to the US no matter what and on and on.
But what does that mean compared to platitudes about 'freedom' and 'democracy'?
Not to mention that Saddam's Iraq was a lot of things, but *Islamist* wasn't one of them.
Sorry Mr. Mystic, we've been doing that one for years here, and I'm all talked out. Sorry you missed the fun.
Anonymous, you don't even know the number of things you don't know. I have no time for the "turnip-truck" community.
Shorter Tom Van Dyke: I have no substantive response.
The points that anon raised are valid, and your non-reply is risible.
As someone who is from the Bush 'turpnip truck' brigade around here who won't or can't discuss the fact that the incompetence of Bushco led to the present lamentable state of affairs in Iraq, you've lost all credibility on this issue TVD, but go ahead and use profanity in your reply, that'll really show us "Anti-American leftists" what really matters.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home