In his last post in the thread devoted to Matusevich's article, Nathan made a statement about the lack of professional historians in the Tea Party movement. I see it as an opening line for a topic that he suggested earlier: Why liberal arts are so liberal?
I would be happy to talk about it. The fact that this issue came up in Nathan's mind is admission of the fact that liberal art academia is indeed significantly tilted to the left (whatever it means). I found only two guys with professional historian credentials looking at history from conservative point of view: Larry Schweikart and Burton Folsom Jr. Thus, it is do not sound as much as a conspiracy theory to me, when conservatives including Tea Partiers complain about history being presented and taught from the left wing perspective. History is a tricky thing, and pursuit of truth in history has often been marred by ideological inclinations. You know how they say: the history is always written by the victors. Is there an objective truth in history, which has to be pursued? Is it a fair question, or I am judging history from withing a wrong framework? This is Nathan's turf, and I feel myself as an intruder. Still, let's talk, and I will try to behave.
Thus, to begin I have a question for Nathan's as a professional historian. Nathan, what will you say, as a professional historian, about this
article ?. What is wrong with it from the point of view of historical truth?
I have two comments on the liberalism of liberal arts - one raises a question and the other offers an explanation.
ReplyDeleteFirswt, although I think it's fair to say that the liberal arts in American academia have moved left in the last thirty years,[the Reagan administration had radical repercussions for University economics] it's important to be clear about what you mean when you refer to the political leanings of a research institution. Fifteen year ago I taught freshmen at Stanford. To get to my office every day I passed the Hoover Institution --hardly a bastion of liberalism. The people in that building -- researchers in history, political science, economics, and media, most of them right-leaning - commanded a lot of money and influence on policy makers. On the other hand, adjunct lecturers I and my colleagues spent a lot more time exposing impressionable, potentially influential 18-year olds to our (generally liberal) views. So what was the dominant political temper of Stanford? From the students' point of view, it was liberal, but in the corridors of power, it wasn't. NOw I teach at an urban public university, where the dominant fields are education, health, criminal justice, and other fields which feed and are fed by government bureaucracies. The humanities faculty are liberal leaning in our own politics, but we find ourselves applying the critical thinking we are bound to teach to liberal canards as to conservative ones. I am much more concerned about the decline of student curiosity than I am about anyone's political leanings.
Why the people in front of the blackboards lean left has a lot of different explanations, many of them going back to university activism and the establishment of academic counter-culture in the 1960's. It's also fair to point out that academics make much less money relative to other professionals than they did forty years ago. Academic institutions get far, far less research money for the liberal arts than they used to back when old war brain trust investments raised all boats. As a class, well educated people with not much money do tend to be more liberal than, say, less educated people with less money, or well educated people with more money. [This is the observation of a literature professor, by the way - no hard data here]. For what it's worth then: liberal culture has been the province of the academic humanities for a long time, partly because just the right amount of money was available, and continued to be available, for Conservative thinkers who want to teach maintain a low profile.
EH has made some very good points about the liberal inclinations of academics. I would only add that like liberals among Russian immigrants, conservatives among humanities professors are rare but not unknown--we have at least two in my department. More importantly, I would heartily second the point that our business is to teach the habits and methods of critical thinking, not to inculcate a political program. It may well be, however, that a methodology which emphasizes drawing distinctions, weighing multiple perspectives, uncovering implicit assumptions and hidden agendas, etc. finds a warmer reception on the liberal side of the spectrum. Still, as EH notes, critically minded intellectuals tend to like to puncture dogmas wherever they appear--left or right.
ReplyDeleteNathan, have you just implied that people not in liberal arts (natural sciences and economics, for instance) are less predisposed to critical thinking, drawing conclusions, weighting multiple perspectives, uncovering implicit assumptions and puncturing dogmas?
ReplyDeleteAlso, are you implying that liberal art people are immune to dogmatic thinking? You know, puncturing somebody else dogmas is often made from position of another dogma.
One can actually make an opposite argument: people in quantitative sciences are in a habit of dealing with objective truths and producing logical conclusions based on a number of well defined basic truths (axioms). This predisposition leads them to accept a more conservative, at least in economics, world view
I am not sure that "liberal" is a useful descriptive term for the politics of faculty in the liberal arts, although they certainly tend to be non-conservative. Over the years I have had "liberal" colleagues of many different political stripes: out-and-out Marxists, soi-disant Trotskyites, other socialists from small but hard-line sects, democratic socialists (like me),labor organizers, moderate and blue-dog democrats. If I were to take the number of conservative colleagues I've had, they would outweigh any one of those groups. So the creation of a "liberal" class skews the balance. Also, "liberal" is a term that shifts very quickly with subjective politics. Rand Paul would see Richard Nixon as a liberal.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Digsy that the term liberal is too broad. The same is true about the term "conservative", which combines religious right, atheist libertarians of Ayn Rand school, "old school" free market liberals of Milton Freedman variety, capitalist-anarchists a la L.H. Rockwell and others. It is not always correct to use simplified dichotomous descriptions for these diverse groups, but I suggest that for the purpose of this discussion we can build a barrier between liberal-conservative groups along the line of collectivist - individualist world view.
ReplyDeleteHi Digsy!
ReplyDeleteLev, a quick response to your post above. No, I'm not saying that the people in the humanities are inherently predisposed to critical thinking or that people outside of the humanities are somehow incapable of mastering these skills. It's just the business of the humanities is to develop these skills through the practice of reading and analyzing texts. Of course not all practitioners of the humanities exercise these skills equally well, particularly when they move outside their specialized fields. Certainly there are humanists with dogmatic views. But to the extent that the humanities tend to foster a spirit of skepticism and a mistrust of absolute truths and closed systems of thought, I would expect them to provide a less than favorable medium for the spread of dogmatic fundamentalist thinking.
We could talk for a long time about the differences between the humanities and the quantitative sciences. My understanding, though, is that the inclination toward the left prevails in the hard sciences as well. It does occur to me, though, that the features you describe--deductive reasoning based on axiomatic truths--may make scientists less comfortable with the humanists' embrace of uncertainty and relativism. Then again, what about quantum physics?
Nathan, let me begin by pointing out one subtle undercurrent in your posts in this thread. May be on a pure subconscious level, but you refer to conservative mindset as something inferior to the liberal way of thinking. The former is fundamentalist, dogmatic, uncritical, while the latter is based on critical thinking, drawing conclusions, weighting multiple perspectives, uncovering implicit assumptions and puncturing dogmas. This is, in a way, your dogma, the dogma of liberal superiority.
ReplyDeletePlease, do not be offended by me saying so, because I do not think that dogma is such a dirty word you are making it out to be. Without dogmas, no preservation and development of knowledge would be possible. All methods that humans invented to compile and systematize information are based on dogmas. Natural sciences, in addition to a few implicitly held beliefs, have their own dogmas, called paradigms. Religions obviously have dogmas, and they do not even invent smart terms to hide it. I guess history as a discipline as well as literature has their own dogmas. Please, correct me, if I am wrong here. The difference between scientific and religious dogmas consists in the methods by which they change. Dogmas in natural sciences change when a bulk of empirical data obtained from multiple reproducible experiments are proven unexplainable within the current paradigm. My knowledge of religious history is rather limited, so I would appreciate any corrections, but my feeling is that religious dogmas may also change, but under an influence of one person or a small group of persons who manage to catch the spirit of the community they live in, provided the conditions are right. Usually, these changes are rather limited in scope, as they do not change an existing religion, but create a new one by splitting a group of followers from the old. What I do not know is the nature of dogmas in history or literature. Are they closer to scientific or religious ones?
Interesting points, but, I'm afraid, somewhat off the mark. First of all, I think we're getting caught up again in an overly simplistic dichotomy between liberals and conservatives. When I spoke of the humanities I certainly wasn't using the term as a synonym for liberal. Quite to the contrary there are a plenty of conservative thinkers who work in the humanities and whose ideas I respect, in some cases even more than their liberal counterparts. But just because I respect their ideas, doesn't mean I have to agree with their political views. What you take for liberal condescension, I simply see as the right to an opinion.
ReplyDeleteI think we have a slightly different understandings of the meaning of the term dogma. Dogma, for me, is not merely a type of paradigm along the lines of Thomas Kuhn's model. Rather I see dogma as a closed system of ideas, handed down a priori and impervious to any kind of empirical correction or verification. Dogma is the communist official in 1928 who wrote "If the Party demands it...I will see black where I thought I saw white and still may see it, because for me there is no life outside the Party." Likewise dogma is Christian fundamentalists who continue to believe that the world was created some six thousand years ago, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. A paradigm, on the other hand, is a model that explains the workings of nature. It has no value in and of itself; it is only as good as its explanatory power. When it is longer able to account for observed phenomena in nature, then it must either give way to a new paradigm or become enshrined as dogma. One way or another, its scientific utility is exhausted. Historians and literary scholars can certainly be dogmatic is the sense of being rigid in their thinking and ignoring or downplaying evidence contrary to their views. But I can't think of any core dogmas that one must accept a priori in order to be a historian other than the basic assumption common to all the sciences that the world is knowable. I'll admit that the line between dogma and strongly held opinion is not always so clear-cut, but I do think there's valid distinction to be made. You arrive at an opinion, you receive a dogma. Opinions are formulated, dogmas are handed down. Does this make sense?
Yes, it does make sense, and you're right about dogma being deliberately transmitted - delivered and received.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, Lev, we all function by received ideas, which humanists tend to call dogma when they are refusing to accept them, but really they're just being rude.
As a partial answer to your question about humanistic dogma, Lev, here in literature land (I DONT mean lit crit, which is only a small, rather cramped albeit self-important corner of literature) what gets passed down are texts: works which are at once evocative remnants of a particular time and place and cultural moment, and independent cultural entities which exist in and interact with successive times and places and moments, and thus undergo radical changes of status, significance,and coherence. Texts are not ideas, nor are they data, but They are taken to contain or transmit ideas, and they are treated like collections of data. The foundation of literature is not that the world is knowable, but that meaning must always be available. If something passed down - a word, a story, a metaphor - stops making sense, you have to find a new sense for it to make - because the thing remains to be passed down.
Many paradigms that no longer serves to explain the physical world become enshrined not dogma, but as myth, and thus open themselves to a whole dimension of truth and fallacy that have nothing to do with what I think Lev would call objectivity.
There's more to say about convictions that are neither dogmatically received nor rationally considered, but it's too late in the evening to risk it. And I'm getting a bit too metaphysical here, perhaps...
Thanks, Nathan and EH for your very interesting posts. Now, let me try to take us all back to the initial topic of this thread. I was able to discern two main points made by you here. EH suggested that liberal views of liberal art practitioners are due to combination of their economical standing and level of education, while Nathan implied that it is the professional habits of liberal art practitioners which make them more predisposed to the liberal views. I, brought up the discussion of dogmas trying to analyse the Nathan's point. I agree with Nathan, that metaphysically speaking, there can be drawn a distinction between paradigms in science and dogma along the lines he has suggested. I was surprised, however, of Nathan's claim that there are no paradigms in history as a scientific discipline. Really? On a practical level,however, for most people either in science or in humanities this distinction does not actualise. How often do we question the intellectual frameworks handed down to us by our professors? We of course, learn that the paradigms can and do change, but we really participate or even anticipate this change. Thus, I am not sure, if Nathan's explanation of this trend is convincing. EH's explanation, on the other hand is much broader and requires some detalization. What is it exactly in education that moves educated people to the left, but only if they are in a certain economic group? What is it in liberal policies that is beneficial to people in this income group? I hope that you do not mind me asking all these questions, but I am would like to move this thread forward.
ReplyDeleteActually, Lyova, I was speaking of core dogmas, not paradigms, and I did manage to come up with one, which, in light of EH's comments, I'm inclined to modify somewhat--I'll get to that later. Yes, of course, historians have their paradigms although I'm not sure they work in quite the same way as in the natural sciences. Historians tend to be wary of models that try to explain everything along the lines of Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology, but we certainly have our guiding intellectual frameworks. And I do think that we question the models we inherit from our professors. Certainly my own field has seen a series of dramatic generational shifts in the past 50 years. Perhaps a more relevant issue is whether we can question the intellectual frameworks that we arrive at during our formative period as scholars? Do we change with the times, or remain as relics of a particular moment? But even the dinosaurs, who remain stuck in their formative mindset, just by coming of age at a particular time, subjected to a particular set of influences, are a part of the evolution of their fields. Sure, some people are on the cutting edge, but we can never be fully removed from the zeitgeist.
ReplyDeleteThe economic argument, to which EH referred, is very simple. Conservative young people contemplating a career are simply not that attracted to academia. Part of this may be the way academia is perceived--as a nature reserve for creatures of the left. But a good part of the disincentive is economic. Not only do academics have to live a marginal existence for 5-10 years while getting their degrees only to face an often brutal job market, they don't even make that much money once they get settled. Young conservatives tend to have other priorities.
The economics argument is not actually that simple. Basically, you are saying that people who are interested in "making money" tend to be conservative, and people who value other things tend to be liberal. The former are pragmatic and pursue their self-interest getting educated just as much as is needed to achieve their main goal. The latter are "idealistic", they are interested in education for a sake of knowledge and finding "truths" and they value freedoms of academic life. This argument, however, can be turned around in such a way that would say that people who are not capable of making money find their solace in becoming "idealistic" and liberal. They despise the money making pragmatics and rationalize this feeling in terms of love for truth or for common good and need to care for those who are less "fortunate. Essentially, these are people who hide in their universities as in "ivory towers" refusing to recognise those who make it all possible.
ReplyDeleteIn reality, of course, I think there are liberal art academics belonging to both groups that I described. This just shows that the framing this question in purely economic terms is also not that straightforward.
Even in the view of the above, I am still not persuaded by the education/economic argument. While I can agree that people choosing academic carrier consciously give up certain financial advantages in exchange for non-monetary benefits, it still does not mean that those who already have liberal orientation value non- monetary rewards more than people with conservative inclination. People can and do have conservative mindset on a purely intellectual basis and not because they pursue goals of personal enrichment. The question is, of course, one of the proportions, but I am not convinced that people of more liberal persuasion naturally more inclined to value pursuit of knowledge, or reversing this argument, that obtaining knowledge automatically predispose people to have liberal views. However, I could argue that the way knowledge is structured and taught can have a significant impact on people's views. This brings me to the following suggestion explaining liberal bias in liberal arts . Is it possible that some historical fluctuation, which occurred in the 70th, (here I am using the idea of ET), put sufficient number of liberally minded professors in liberal art departments so that they were able to create a self-reproducing system of likely minded colleagues?
ReplyDeleteLev, there may be some truth to your suggestion that liberal professors create liberal students, but I think it is vastly overemphasized. After all, if professors had this magical power to shape the ideological predilections of their students, why aren't all college educated American overwhelmingly liberal? You could say it is only the liberal ones who choose to go on to advanced degrees and become professors themselves. But then something else must have made them liberal, so we're back at square one.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I would argue, most professors have neither the ability nor even the desire to significantly influence the political views of their students. It's challenge enough to teach them the subject matter, let alone brainwash them. Students are far more likely to be influenced by parents, siblings, peers and the mass media. This notion of a conspiracy of radical professors out to indoctrinate naive students simply doesn't hold water in my view. Certainly, professors have some influence, and there may be a few who actually do try to propagate their beliefs, but they are just as likely to be on the right as on the left. Of course if you believe that global warming, evolution and the standard version of US History are leftist propaganda, then the entire educational enterprise is going to look very problematic. Your problem in this case is not radicals but reality.
Nathan, I believe you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I do not believe in conspiracy theories of any kind and I was not saying that professors of humanities try to indoctrinate their students. What I was saying or at least tried to say was that the way the subject matter in humanitarian disciplines (history, political science, literature, etc) is structured and presented might reflect the ideological bias of the leading authorities in respective disciplines who set up the direction and the tone of the discourse. Inclination of likely minded "rank and file" professors to reproduce, may be unwittingly, this bias in their teaching is quite natural. Again, let me reiterate, I do not assume any conspiracy here. This is just a normal process of handing down to students generally accepted, at the present, views. All what I am saying is that in humanities these views might reflect the bias, which just happened to be liberal rather than conservative, of those figures who formulated them. It is not surprising then, that this bias propagates mostly among those students who prepare to become humanity academics themselves and is reflected to a much lesser extent in general student population.
ReplyDeleteAs a side note, I would like to voice my objection to your lumping together history with global warming and evolution. Interpretation of history, the way I see it, (please correct me if I am completely off the mark here) is unavoidably ideological. I remember our discussions of Orientalism, and you pointed out to the great role of ideology in interpretation of relationship between West and East. Both, global warming and evolution, on the other hand, belong to domain of empirical science, which is much less prone to ideological influences. There are, however, significant difference even between these two issues. Evolution is an established part of biology 150years in making. It is supported by numerous empirical evidences and explained by a number of well established theories. To consider evolution on par with creationism is an ultimate insult to human intelligence, as far as I am concerned. The science of global warming, on the other hand, and more specifically, the ideas relating it to human technological activity, are much less developed and should be the matter of legitimate scientific debate. Unfortunately, both sides of the debate have vested economical interest in its outcome, and, therefore, something that should be a pure scientific matter turned into a political circuit. I would put most of the blame for this sad situation on the "alarmist" side, who made preliminary and not completely confirmed results a matter of political debate way prematurely. To say that they did that for pure humanitarian reasons, I think, is very naive, but even if it is so, they set a very bad precedent from the point of view of integrity of scientific discourse. While I am not a climatologist, I have enough training to understand the complexity of the problem they try to model and unreliability of any results in this area.
In response to your second to last post, it seems to me that you've changed the valences but not the underlying equation. So maybe liberal professors are hapless misfits not noble idealists. Still they are motivated by non-economic factors. But later you go on to dispute the entire premise about the role of monetary incentives. I agree with you that there is always a danger of overgeneralizing these points. To the extent that this phenomenon exists it is a matter of a probability rather than destiny. Of course there are conservative intellectuals who chose the pursuit of ideas over wealth, just as there are greedy money grubbing liberals. It's just that liberals in business and conservatives in academia are relatively less common than their counterparts.
ReplyDeleteBut even if this trend can be overgeneralized, there is no reason to conclude that it doesn't exist at all, which seems to be where you're going in your comments. Perhaps the hard data is not readily available, but there is a danger in setting the bar of evidence so high that you refuse to see what is right in front of your nose. I'm all for counter-intuitive explanations, but in such cases, the burden of proof lies with those who challenge the conventional wisdom.
Nathan, what I am arguing with here is the notion, which I perceive as underlying in all your posts on the matter, that being educated in humanities by itself tilts a person toward more liberal views. The logical development of this idea would be a statement that people become conservative simply because they are not sufficiently educated. And this implied conclusion is the one that I cannot accept both for personal and intellectual reasons.
ReplyDeleteI think I need to clarify my position. I am not trying to connect level of education with political affiliation. I would certainly not agree with the proposition that conservatism is a product of insufficient knowledge. Quite to the contrary, some of the most erudite people I have ever encountered tilt toward the conservative side of the spectrum.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm trying to do here is to account for a well documented empirical phenomenon--the predominance of left leaning views within academia, and I have to admit, it's proving to be a little more complicated than I originally envisioned. One thing that might be helpful would be to look at the situation in terms of forces of attraction and repulsion. What are the forces that would draw people into academia and what would drive them away? Then we might consider how these forces are positioned within the overall ethos of American liberalism and conservatism. For example, which side might place a higher premium on economic prosperity as opposed to, say, living the life of the mind. If we accept that within the liberal ethos the life of the mind is accorded greater honor, then it would follow that more liberals would be drawn in that direction. But note that I am not saying that education makes people liberals. What I am saying is that people shaped by the ethos of liberalism would naturally tend to be drawn in greater numbers to pursue advanced education. In other words, it is the liberal ethos that fuels the drive for education rather than the other way around. The same thing could be said about the conservative tilt toward careers in business. Being a businessman doesn't necessarily make you conservative, but being a conservative may make you more naturally attracted to a career in business. Does this make more sense?
Your sidebar on science was very interesting--so much so that I'd like to address it in a separate post. I'll try to get to it in the next few days.
Happy Thanksgiving!