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The Real Bane of the Humanities: Critical Reading
I have a BA in Philosophy and MA in Theology. The more I read in my fields, the more I find that my training is outside the norm. In both programs that I was involved in, almost all of my professors would hammer any paper they got if it didn’t adhere to the Principle of Charity. For them it was important that you assumed that the people you were studying (Locke, Plato, Sartre, Calvin, Frame, etc) were at least as smart as you, a lowly and ignorant student. If you found a supposed contradiction in their writings you had to do your best to find a way to reconcile the contradiction before attacking it. It was assumed that they were smart enough to see obvious problems and avoid them if possible. We also read the primary texts of each of these writers foremost, not commentaries.
This led to actual learning on my part. Looking so hard at a text of Rousseau (who I despise as a thinker), and trying to see what he was saying from his point of view made me understand what he was trying to say, and taught me a lot about the French Revolution, and the Romantic and Socialist thought which sprang from him. It also allowed me to be influenced and to argue better against those that agreed with him far more than I did. This goes for all the works that I read in my education.
It turns out that isn’t how most students in humanities were and are being taught. Rather, they are following the path laid out by the Higher Critics of the Bible from the 18th century. They are taught to find a supposed contradiction and amplify it without any attempt to reconcile it. (1 Kings says that 26,357 people died here and 1 Chronicles says only 26,000! The Bible is false!) When the supposed contradiction is found, you amplify it to the point where you either dismiss the entire work, or to dismiss it as authoritative in any way that challenges yourself and your preconceptions.
This is the end game of Post-Modernism, which is an outgrowth of Existentialism, which is an outgrowth of Romantic thought, which is an outgrowth of Kantianism, which is an outgrowth of Rationalism, which is an outgrowth of Nominalism, so it goes back a ways. The hope was that this would demystify texts and foster the self-discovery of the reader, to lower the text and raise the reader. But what it really does is impoverish the reader.
So many people in my circles (and it is getting worse) will have read Plato (or more likely, a commentary on him), but will have no idea what he actually said. They get to the first hard passage, superficially compare that with an earlier passage, find a simple change in what was said and then reject the whole body of his work.
They are never taught Irony, Hyperbole, Rhetorical Nuance, or anything that leads one to be a good reader. As a result, they don’t marinate in the good and the bad of Plato, and have learned nothing from him. A good reader of this type will be able to dismiss everyone that could teach them anything apart from the self and its preconceptions. As a result of this type of reading, we have very well read people that are incredibly dumb. (Dumb, not stupid or ignorant. The stupid and ignorant can still be taught, but dumb cuts them off from learning because they have the material but have rejected it so thoroughly that they can never be reached with its knowledge.)
These are our elites! They can intimidate with the long list of books and articles they have read, but they haven’t learned anything from that list. Well read imbeciles that shut down an argument by saying “you sound like Hobbes, have you read him? No? well I have so you need to shut up.” This is what Ben Sasse is talking about in his new book. They have looked at words, but they have never been taught how to read.
Published in Education
Awesome post! Wonderful point! Well done. Love it all and I may be back with a more thoughtful opinion soon. Your post gave me a lot of food for thought and I think it could explain a lot about the people I like to call “brilliant idiots”.
Outstanding post.
The arrogance of the modern intellectual wanna-be, modern student, and modern leftist is astounding. (There may be a bit of overlap between those groups…)
This is a fundamental principle that David Mamet describes when discussing his conversion from progressivism to conservatism. When forced to articulate the arguments of his conservative debaters, he found that he could not honestly do so and continue to disagree with them. Thus, he switched sides. Only someone of unusual intellect and humility could do that. And if that someone is immersed in a homogeneous echo chamber, it will never happen. He was a Jew from New York City – he said he met his first openly conservative person when he was 18 years old, I believe.
We should spend more time studying the reasoning of those who disagree with us. It’s hard, but we might learn something.
Outstanding post.
Quite true. Excellent post.
In my little world I have the exactly the opposite reaction to Ivy League docs as my patients do. My reaction is,”darn your pedigree, show me how good you are”.
Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.
Now, to be fair, a lot of those Ivy League guys are great. They really are. But you can’t tell by looking at the degree.
A friend of mine is a cardiothoracic surgeon. He graduated #2 in his class at Dartmouth medical school. He is black. After one too many glasses of wine (which, for him, is about a glass and a half…), he asked me if I knew why he hated affirmative action so much. I answered, “Because I did pretty well at a state school and you did awesome at Dartmouth, and everyone will always presume I’m a better doctor than you because you probably got in on affirmative action.” He said I was exactly right, and then he went off on a tirade that I can’t repeat here. He’s a brilliant physician. He’s right to be pissed off – he can never be equal to me, in public opinion.
Before he refers to a black physician, he calls me and asks if I know whether they’re any good – because he also presumes they got in on affirmative action. It’s all so screwed up.
The point being, you can’t just look at the degree. You have to know their work.
This is nihilism, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ve heard this before but it sums things up pretty well: Modernism is relativism and Post-modernism is nihilism. That’s all that’s going on.
Really, this is because they know already everything they will need to get through life: join the progressives, get a sinecure and buy a nice house in the Hamptons. Stay with the progressives through thick and thin and they will protect you for as long as you live. They have no love of knowledge or gnosis either one. They are jaded and uninspired and uninspiring and boring.
The most interesting thing is that there is a confusion about what being a progressive means — it means that you do nothing yourself to bring progress to society but rather claim all progress that others make as your own. The Soviet Union collapsed do to lack of interest — they became boring. The only question to deal with is how many deaths and how much destruction will be caused before they collapse.
Plato and Rousseau are dead white guys who were like for sure racists. “Irony, Hyperbole, Rhetorical Nuance” and “Critical thinking” are just code for white privilege and the whole ‘actual meaning’ thing devalues or excludes diverse points of view, much like non-intersectional math. Therefore your whole post is really just a metaphor for the rape of women of color and capitalism.
And worse: he’s just making excuses for having such complicated ideas in the first place.
Not really, it doesn’t even rise to nihilism. Nihilist need to think about value before they either reject or adopt it (some nihilists hold everything as valuable, they call themselves positive-nihilists). These people don’t even think about value, they take a value that has been spoon fed to them from Sesame Street and never challenge it. They have values, but because they lack and critical understanding, they don’t know how to balance or recognize others. They are three year-olds trying to figure out if leaving a burning room is ok because mother told them to stay in there.
Calling it that is a great way to dismiss it so the poor things don’t have to read it and be challenged. I was listening to the Area 45 interview of @peterrobinson and was reminded this started a long time ago because it was racist to teach Western Civilization classes in the middle of Western Civilization.
I have the same reaction to Ivy League lawyers, and I is one.
It’s a conceit of scholars to find fault in other works. It helps them feel superior. These folks deeply suspect that they themselves are frauds. They each completed a doctoral thesis, supposedly a profound work that brings some novel and significant insight within their field of study. Most such work though, outside of STEM arenas, is just derivative regurgitation, academic legerdemain, laced together quotations from other academics and nuanced hoopla. No one other than another pathetic aspiring PhD will ever read their work, and then only to scan for a snippet to support their own unfinished thesis in a circle of unending nonsense. Add a little social justice and feminism and you have a winner winner chicken dinner; give that man er woman a cigar and a PhD!.
So to prop themselves up and justify their positions, they double down on leftist dogma and point out the flaws in real works of thought and scholarship. They diminish the classics and figures in history for failure to embrace modern concepts of progressive-think. Everyone’s contribution to history, philosophy, literature and art must first pass through a filter of political correctness. It’s a pass/fail system.
So next time you speak to one of these blowhards, inquire of their doctoral thesis. Ask them to explain its contribution to their chosen field of knowledge. If you get BS, press them to explain. Why is it significant?
Make them sweat.
Ban outgrowths!
This is interesting, because it’s not how STEM education works. In STEM, none of the following are expected to be done:
STEM students are frequently encouraged to be more skeptical and impertinent than they are, and if ambiguity causes an apparent contradiction, that’s the fault of the ambiguity, not uncharitability. While it’s true that nobody likes a nitpicker, and it can get annoying if some wisacre draws attention away from the main point and to some, say, minor arithmetic error in a side-example that everyone else mentally corrected rather than bothering to mention, STEM’s learning process seems considerably more adversarial than the ABCs of charity would suggest. (The same seems to happen among lawyers, though it’s harder for me to tell, since I’m not a lawyer.) Hear a new theorem? It’s natural for the first place for your mind to go to be trying to find a counterexample for it. It’s a different ethos, I guess, and, to be honest, one that seems to work rather well for STEM. I wonder how much of the Postmodernism you’re seeing might have to do with young minds being better at STEM than whatever it is the humanities are supposed to teach (my putting that way, as someone with a STEM education who isn’t illiterate of the humanities, probably speaks volumes).
@midge What you are putting your finger on is the main difference between the humanities and STEM. I have 3/4 of a civil engineering degree with a ton of science credits as well. The pretense of STEM is that the knowledge they are searching for is True (or even TRUE) knowledge, and so there is an idea that knowledge is objective and bianary. Things have a truth value of true or false.
In philosophy there are some weird people with weird thoughts (Liebnitz and monads anyone), but if they get there though an insight that helps is understand humanity a bit better you have to read carefully and charitably to glean the insight and leave the weird.
Think of it like this. You and a friend are having lunch and when you split the bill, he makes an addition mistake. There are nice ways to point out the mistake, but you don’t have to figure out what he meant by it. That is the STEM theory of knowledge. During your conversation about Dr. Who, he makes an argument for The 10th doctor being the best doctor. You are smart so you say 11 is better. You as a friend don’t castigate and look at that as the same type of mistake as the arithmetic one over the check. You seek to understand his arguments and to see what he values to enter in to the conversation. That is charity, and it is a different type of knowledge.
In another post o may talk about how philosophers and scientists in the mid 20th century split the two types of knowledge and pitted them against each other. But for right now, STEM is trying to measure and quantify, which is a type of knowledge, while those in the humanities are trying to converse.
A recent google search on the title of my book yielded a reference to it in a new book. It was by a man with a Ph.D. in the history of science from an Ivy League school who teaches at another IL university. He badly butchered his facts. I sent him an email and got a brush off. I’ve ordered the book and will read it in more detail, but it seems to me that many scholars are more interested in reinforcing their preconceptions than in searching for truth.
But you’re in a good position to write a scathing public review to set the record straight. No wonder the guy didn’t enjoy hearing from you.
One of the many reasons I was happy to leave the academy, sans PhD, was because I read an article published in a “leading journal” (whatever that means for English) whose thesis was predicated on a blatant misreading of the text in question.
And I’m not talking about something subtle–the author claimed that the author said the opposite of what he actually said. I think she used ellipses to get away with it.
Arguing with people who have committed to this system is a real waste of time.
OTOH, I don’t think it makes sense to romanticize the intellectuals of an earlier age. These idiots have always been with us. See my next post.
From Gargantua and Pantagruel
Now after he had stayed [at the University in Paris] a pretty space, and studied very well in all the seven liberal arts, he said it was a good town to live in, but not to die; for that the grave-digging rogues of St. Innocent used in frosty nights to warm their bums with dead men’s bones. In his abode there he found the library of St. Victor a very stately and magnific one, especially in some books which were there, of which followeth the Repertory and Catalogue, Et primo,
The for Godsake of Salvation.
The Codpiece of the Law.
The Slipshoe of the Decretals.
The Pomegranate of Vice.
The Clew-bottom of Theology.
The Duster or Foxtail-flap of Preachers, composed by Turlupin.
The Churning Ballock of the Valiant.
The Henbane of the Bishops.
Marmotretus de baboonis et apis, cum Commento Dorbellis.
Decretum Universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum.
The Apparition of Sancte Geltrude to a Nun of Poissy, being in travail at the bringing forth of a child.
Ars honeste fartandi in societate, per Marcum Corvinum (Ortuinum).
[I believe this means “The art of farting in society”]
The Mustard-pot of Penance.
Etc. …
Sure, it’s an exaggeration, but the books the medieval scholars wrote were probably equally trivial, without the saving grace of humor.
Mr. Boethius, I am pleased you believe yourself to be superior to ‘our elites.’ I suppose you’re implying at some level that you should be ruling academia in their place: You would practice charity to students & texts alike by getting the former to read charitably the latter.
Perhaps you are superior; of course, none of us here can know: You would have to pick one of the elites & pick a quarrel with them & prove the point.
Perhaps there is another way to prove your claimed superiority: You are apparently able to understand Rousseau very well without believing him. That is a remarkable achievement, not given to most. I for one would be very interested in reading any ‘charitable reading’ of Rousseau you care to offer–presumably, it would have to be a short work for purposes of Ricochet or, more broadly speaking, the intellectual conversation an online site can foster.
I believe the opinion among educated conservatives, on Ricochet & elsewhere, is that Rousseau is a bane unto mankind & culpable in moral, political, & intellectual ways. It would be great to have that opinion enlightened, so to speak, by your expertise. & you would be actually doing a good thing for your audience instead of encouraging them to cry against elites which they do not by that cry take down.
There is probably a principle there, you could call it prudence, to complement the charity principle. We do good things for each other when we share in our knowledge, but it is not at all clear that we do any good for each other when we arouse anger in one another, even if it is a concord of anger, so to speak, aimed at common enemies.
Midge, I recall to you Aristotle’s word on wit: Educated insolence.
Brilliant stuff, people. Please don’t stop.
God, I love Ricochet…
This is the comment of the week!
I recall a conversation from my mid-twenties. I had made a perfectly valid point referencing the Communist Manifesto. (What that might have been I can no longer recall.) She didn’t like my point and pressed me on whether I had read it through. She had read it through for a course. I, to this day, have not read it through. However, I was not at the time armed with Johnson’s bit on the odd advice of reading through. She found my lack of thoroughness to be sufficient to dismiss my argument entirely.
Where I had gone over the important bits and daydreamed for hours out my window, she had run her eyes from the first word to the last. She could tell you what it was about and regurgitate it. There are individual paragraphs that I’ve been pondering regularly since that conversation 20 years ago.
As we’ve become more literate and more scientific, we’ve become more literal and fearful of paradox. This sort of modern man cannot read one of the philosophical works you describe and make a lick of sense of it. One cannot read many works of this kind in this way and not become a skeptic.
I think back to my high school educated father and my grade school educated grandfather. The closest they ever got to Plato was playing hide and seek in the Carnegie Library on the way home from school. But a sense of paradoxical truth was in them. It was in the schools. They had a balance and a charity that almost no modern college graduate has.
Today’s educated man only has answers.
Much in philosophy continues to mystify me (just ask @titustechera!). On the other hand, I’ve always loved poetry, and it seems to me that in reading poetry, part of the charity is not making an effort to leave the weird behind. Some weird inevitably gets left behind – I doubt most admirers of Yeats as a poet know all that much about his Spiritualist beliefs and practices.
I have a confession to make: in my education, I got much, much better at writing proofs than I ever got at arithmetic. My treating others’ arithmetic mistakes uncharitably would only serve to make me ridiculous, despite the potential for arithmetic mistakes to have disastrous consequences.
I was taught that trying to understand where another person is coming from is A Good Thing, and it would be strange to expect people’s arguments to be unrelated to the perspective they have (even in writing proofs, where validity does not depend on perspective, this is true). If you’re raised to think charitably of other people, it would seem strange to never think about how that applies to their arguments. On the other hand, “be charitable toward other people” isn’t specific guidance on how to be charitable toward their arguments. More than once, I’ve become friends with someone because we started by sniping at each others’ arguments. What distinguishes the impertinence of friendly sniping from impertinence that signals real disrespect for the person you’re sniping at? In my experience, at least, it’s not always clear at first – though I suspect I ought to know better than I do.
I don’t think he ever mentions being better than anyone else. It seems that he is talking about the better way to read texts and be educated by them.
Since he claimed no personal superiority I am not sure this useful but are debating skills really the best way to prove how much you learned from the text?
You can’t really refute someone or know they are a bane to man kind unless you read them sympathetically and try to understand what they are saying on their own terms. I have not studied Rousseau myself but I have read people who have and I trust they have tried to make sense of Rousseau as he wanted to be understood.
It seems to me he is rousing anger at a method of teaching the great books that does not help students understand them but to simply refute them. He proposes a better method that would lead people to have more wisdom. I don’t see him writing that we need to hate all professors, just for being professors.
Just a quick review of how I read Rousseau. He was a flawed man in all kinds of ways, but no one should reject him for the main reasons I hear. Yes he liked to be spanked by elderly school marms, yes he dropped his kids off a orphanages as soon as they were born. But you have to read him and his arguments as they are presented, not through the lens of pop psychology.
So first off the good: He was the first major thinker to challenge the idea that the state of nature was all out war all the time. His rejection of this went too far, but it was a challenge to Mercantilism for the first time, and (I believe) gave space for Adam Smith 40 years later to talk about the state of nature as one of cooperation through self interest. Second his critique of the ceremony of state is spot on. We think a man is a king because of his entourage and finery, and so give him deference. The same words uttered by a beggar and by a king are seen completely differently, when all that stands between them is the pomp. This is a constant problem in societies that we need to be reminded of. Third his ideas of self determination and expression of will are deeply flawed when he applies them to the state but are mostly correct when applied to the family and the individual. These actually give space for the “little platoons” that make society liveable when you hold them separate from the state.
Now the bad: He takes his state of nature as peaceful too far. Men are far more broken than deference to pomp and manners. His rosy picture of the noble savage is a bad place to start you anthropology, but that is where a good portion of leftist anthropology starts. Not being fundamentally broke makes us fixable, and he expresses and gives rise to the Utopian Influence that so many political thinkers after him fall into. He fails to recognize that, while there isn’t scarcity to such an extent that Hobbes and Locke would posit, that there also isn’t boundless resource. There are conflicts, and these are real conflicts, not the abnegation of ones self-will because of manners. Finally his deficient anthropology leads him to a nice sounding theory of government, but one that has been the fount of almost all murderous regimes since. It is predicated on the will of the people being expressed for the good of all. All those that don’t agree with the expressed will of the people are enemies of that will and cannot be tolerated.
The main difference is the willingness to learn from them. You can see this on twitter very, very rarely, and it is beautiful when it happens. A troll comes in and picks out a poorly chosen word and rejects the argument. Someone responds to them in an attempt to explain and engage. 5 or 6 tweets into the thread they actually start to define terms and seek to understand each others words under the assumption that both of them are rational humans. Then they have a discussion that both profit from. Like I said, its rare, but it is affirming when it happens! Most of the time both combatants close themselves off from each other under the assumption that their opponent isn’t rational and maybe not even human and so destroy possible conversation. That is my paraphrase of the Principle of Charity: Assume the person you are reading, or in dialogue with is a rational human being.
If we surmise that scholars were likely to have also spent time as scribes, it seems unlikely that medieval scholars had no sense of humor when you look at the fantastic beasties scribes left in the margins of their illuminated manuscripts. A good sense of humor? Well, maybe not…
I think it’s still normal to feel an obligation to Be Serious when you’re the author of something Important, not just a reader or copyist. As noxious as self-serious, self-important writing is, self-deprecation and impertinence doesn’t always go over well, either. Even these days, a good high school English teacher expends some effort in beating the humility and whimsy out of his students when teaching them how to write an argument.
Teacher: “If you don’t take yourself seriously, why should you expect anyone else to?”
Me: “If I take myself that seriously, how could I expect anyone else to take me seriously?”
If anyone’s curious, I’ll cite a couple of cases of GPS controversies in which I participated. Here’s a letter from the first head of the GPS Joint Program Office. The editor of the magazine allowed me to write a response of equivalent length. An article I wrote about a couple of journalists and problems with their treatment of the history of GPS is here (it’s Steven sigh). Here I take on one of the foundation myths of GPS.