Digressions&Impressions

Bambi meets Godzilla

 

Yesterday, I was reminded of the old Somerville Theatre at Davis Square. I use 'old' because it has since been renovated; it was quite shabby when I lived in the area. I encountered Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) during the animation festival. I had no idea when I first saw it, that it was already a classic and that, in fact, much of the audience anticipated its return. I did not trust my memory on this fact, but I was pleased to find this point confirmed in a report of the festival, probably the year before I attended it, published in the Harvard Crimson.* I was so astounded by the short cartoon, that I sought it out whenever it returned to town. It never failed to amaze how something could be so funny and horrid at the same time.

In looking at it again, when preparing this post, I recognized that I had somehow had effaced from memory the significant role of the rather narcissistic opening (and closing) credits in the film (including the jokes embedded in them). For reasons I cannot explain I find the credits especially jarring because they contrast with the visual simplicity of the cartoon itself.

Either way, in revisiting the cartoon, I was struck that Godzilla's foot has scales. Godzilla (who is supposed to be some kind of dinosaur, I think) is part gorilla, part whale, and Godzilla has an aquatic origin. But the scales also puzzle me because I believe whales do not have scales. Yet, in looking at the final image of Bambi flattened by Godzilla, I was reminded of Leviathan (think book of Job and Hobbes). In the famous image at the front of Hobbes's Leviathan, the people that compose the Leviathan are made to look like scales.

Bambi's mom is slaughtered by man-the-hunter. I have no idea if, at the height of the Vietnam War, Marv Newland meant to invoke the brutality of the state-leviathan, which tramples innocence along the way. But it is not far-fetched; in the original, Japanese context, Godzilla is meant to evoke the dangers of atomic warfare (this is also an unsubtle point: Godzilla flattens Japanese cities).

So far so good. But if one goes down this route, the question is whose innocence innocence is being trampled on? The flattened daisy evokes, perhaps, LBJ's famous commercial against Goldwater. I would like to think that Bambi stands for the idea of American freedom, but I am not entirely confident on this matter.

On introducing the God(s) in Bacon and Cavendish

"About twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour, it came to pass, that there was seen by the people of Renfusa...within night, (the night was cloudy, and calm,) as it might be some mile into the sea, a great pillar of light; not sharp, but in form of a column, or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up towards heaven; and on the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplendent than the body of the pillar. Upon which so strange a spectacle, the people of the city gathered apace together upon the sands, to wonder; and so after put themselves into a number of small boats, to go nearer to this marvellous sight. But when the boats were come within (about) sixty yards of the pillar, they found themselves all bound, and could go no further; yet so as they might move to go about, but might not approach nearer: so as the boats stood all as in a theatre, beholding this light as an heavenly sign.--Bacon New Atlantis.

A spectacle that introduces wonder and marvel precedes the introduction of a idiosyncratic version of the Christian religion on Bensalem (accompanied by further miracles). As commentators have noted, the reader later learns that the members of the Society of Salomon's House are fully capable of creating the recounted spectacle and other marvels. Given the docile and orderly nature -- itself a marvel -- of the citizens of Bensalem, it's hard not to infer that a properly managed and crafted religion can help pacify a population; New Atlantis shows the reader how this is done. (The previous sentence is compatible with the existence of other forms of pacification.)

A natural question to ask is what problem is the introduction of religion meant to solve on Bensalem? There are hints throughout New Atlantis, that in the remote past [recall] Bensalem had suffered some kind of civil war (or turmoil) that was only settled by King Solamona, who along with other constitutional reforms, founded Salomon's House a few hundred years before the marvelous introduction of Christianity. My own -- anachronistic, Spinozistic -- guess is that the members of the scientific society recognizes that religion is needed to offer the promise of salvation to the non-elite (i.e., the vast number of folk not members of the House of Salomon, who seem to have found the key to extending life indefinitely but don't seem intent on sharing it with the population at large).  

Anyway, I was reminded of Bacon's oblique presentation of how religion was deliberately introduced into society because I was discussing Cavendish's presentation (with Jon Shaheen) of a similar phenomenon:

With that shot off his pistoll into the breast of the chief Priest, wherewith he straight fell down dead; the noise of the pistoll, and the flash of the fire, which they never saw before, and the effect of it upon the Priest, strooke them with such a horror, and did so terrify them, as they all kneeled down imploring mercy, and forgiveness, with trembling limbs, and weeping eyes, whereupon he told them, there was no ways to avoid punishment, but first to fast two dayes from any kinde of nourishment; Next, not to open their lipps to speak, and then to obey whatsoever he shall teach them, as being sent from the Gods; bidding them go home untill their time of fasting were out; and then to return to the Temple again.--Margaret Cavendish, Assaulted and pursued Chastity.

Here the lead characters of Cavendish's short story overawe a native/savage population. What's central in the episode is not the murder of the chief Priest (who was about the sacrifice and cannibalize the heroine,who is disguised as a man, and her/his adopted father) as such, but rather the fact that it is done with unknown technology, which, due to unfamiliarity and surprise, generates awe-inspiring effects (sound, fire, death). This becomes the occasion of the introduction of a new (Deistic) religion, after the two days of enforced fasting, by a (self-appointed) prophet who abolishes human sacrifice. 

That is, Cavendish (whose more familiar Blazing World plays with and rejects themes from New Atlantis) and Bacon both show how technology can be marshaled to create marvelous appearances that are taken as divine signs and, thereby, used to create political power. While it may be tempting to read in these stories a kind of retrospective unmasking of the great monotheistic prophets-legislators, one may also see in them a kind of prophecy (inspired, say, by the Spanish Conquest) of the European, imperial projects. 

 

On the Significance of a Pre-history to Feminism

While studying women is not new,studying them from the perspective of their own experiences so that women can understand themselves and the world can claim virtually no history at all. It is also novel to study gender. The idea of a systematic social construction of masculinity and femininity that is little, if at all, constrained by biology, is very recent.”—Sandra Harding (1987) “Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology (Indiana) p. 8.

In her introduction (quoted above) to her influential reader, Harding makes some claims that may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, but we now know to be seriously overstated (not to say misleading). Scholars are increasingly recovering women's voices from many historical periods in which the role of women is studied from the perspective of their own experiences. In addition, it is pretty clear that (recall) by the eighteenth century the social construction of gender was well understood.

But here I want to note a cost of this effacement. First, there is a historical injustice that the very intellectual women who have become victims of history, and often extremely sexist history, are being victimized not just by their contemporaries and effaced by (sexist/misogynistic) successors, but also, more unintentionally, being harmed by those whose insights they had anticipated. For, while Harding does not suggest that earlier feminists are a conceptual or historical impossibility, she emphasizes in context that modern feminism is culturally situated in a distinctive way and a reader may be forgiven in thinking that earlier cultures would not have access to some such ideas.

Second, at the time, Harding explicitly understands her own enterprise, and the Feminist method(s) she and her intellectual allies advocate, as something novel rather than a recovery in a new (and undoubtedly substantially different) context.* One consequence of this, is that one can then understand oneself as being part of (historical/social/political etc.) triumphant progress; the ground zero from which this progress is understood is -- judging by the examples given by Harding -- the generation of scholars that came to age in the 1960s or so. Harding comes close to suggesting that a Kuhnian revolution has occurred or is in the process of occurring (Kuhn, is in fact, mentioned for other purposes just before), but she does not do so.

However, it is notable that, in context (see, especially p. 5), Harding is acutely aware of the dangers of the welcoming of new insights leading one to embrace a progressive, teleological understanding of the very existence of feminist thought being part of the forward march of history. She explicitly notes (p.5) that one can say with equal justice that statistics of abuse reveal a "barbaric" state of affairs. Of course, a new social scientific (reflexive) paradigm is compatible with such a paradigm revealing a bad state of affairs.

If one recognizes that modern feminism is, in some measure, a recovery and reviving of earlier insights (while allowing that it is also a great transformation), that is, in fact, one of the great permanent possibilities of human existence, would that change much of anything? I think so, because it encourages us to look at the mechanisms of silencing and displacement. It is worth understanding how the pre-history of feminist ideas was effaced during the long nineteenth century not just to do justice to our predecessors, but also to better understand the ways in which the professionalization of philosophy relied on emphasizing some philosophical virtues that came at the expense of proto-feminist insights and arguments.

 

10 Reasons Why this is Not a Golden Age for Philosophy

If I am right, philosophy now is vastly richer than classical Greece, the age of reason, or any other golden age we care to name: far more (and more able) philosophers with much greater ability to collaborate and learn from one another, a wider understanding of the world around us, a long history of our predecessors who have cleared the way before us, and much else besides. Many, perhaps most, universities boast a philosophy department that puts the Lyceum or the Academy to shame. Although our chances of becoming a ‘great philosopher’ have fallen, our chances of getting to the truth have risen. Gregory Lewis @Dailynous [HT Liam Kofi Bright]

Let me stipulate that (i) this is a great age for professional philosophy, and (ii) the intellectual division of labor has genuine benefits, especially in areas of formal philosophy. It does not follow it is a Golden Age for Philosophy

1. I am responding to a pseudo-statistical-population argument with (bogus) assumptions like this, "Let’s pretend that philosophical greatness is a function of philosophical ability, and let’s pretend that philosophical ability is wholly innate. Thus you’d expect philosophical greatness to be a natural lottery..."* So, let me just say something about population and political economy (#2). As Lewis notes, there is a ‘field dilution effect;’ would-be-philosophical-greats (oh bleh!), have a lot of other potential outlets for their 'abilities'; lots of other academic disciplines compete for the winners (bleh) in the (more bleh) 'natural lottery.' But I think he underestimates the effect: outside the academy, lots of would be philosophical talent is payed highly and wasted in consulting, tax-accounting/evasion, tax-lawyers (evasion, etc.), marketing, and large-scale bureaucracies that pay tax-free Euros/dollars for talent, etc. To put it simply, the price of economic progress, has been enormous competition for smarts. Not to mention that professional philosophy has done a terrible job at attracting non-males (fill in your favorite sordid fact, etc.).
2. Philosophers in the past had leisure (bought by slave-labor and feudal-property arrangements as well as lack of diversions)--again Lewis notes this. But he does not note that the vast number of today's professional philosophers lack leisure. They are kept busy (by administrators, by grant agencies, by excessive publication expectations, etc.) or keep themselves busy (I love conference planning and hopping, but I wouldn't call it conducive to leisurely thought). To say this, is not to deny that there are quite a few professional philosophers working today in circumstances that from a historical point of view are near-ideal, but the vast majority today do not; our purportedly superior demographics does not automatically translate into better philosophers.   
3. Professional philosophy is by definition scholastic. While I am no basher of scholasticism, it is worth noting that our scholasticism is not conducive to philosophical splendidness. (Here's a bad argument: only 2, Aquinas & Kant, out of the 10 on the top-10-list-greats are the product of a scholastic environment, and Kant benefited greatly from coming on the tail end of the anti-scholastic Enlightenment. So, let me try this:) while the Islamic and Christian scholastics had the benefit of shared background commitments (about providence, a source of value, etc.) that allowed a framework in which progress is possible, our scholastics are completely un-moored; this entails that we are extremely vulnerable to (i) fashion (I dare you to deny this) and (ii) the suggestiveness of professional power (i-ii are connected, of course). [I love contemporary metaphysics, by the way.]
4. The common background commitments that Scholastic had also helps explain why they were good at systematicity, and we suck at it (and are still rediscovering the ways in which various fundamental commitments entail/constrain each other). There is a related reason why we suck at systematicity: we simply don't do and lack time to explore second-hand, most of the other sciences. To give an example I am familiar with: until very recently, the vast majority of contemporary political philosophers were largely clueless about demographics, political economy, education, or military affairs--it didn't matter, they thought. But the earlier technical familiarity with all these areas allowed earlier generations to think more systematically about political philosophy. 
5. In addition, there was also something at stake for the Islamic and Christian scholastics -- you know, salvation, damnation, affinity with the infinite intellect -- that is probably more conducive to philosophical truth than, say, being-in-a-top-10-department.
6. Professional philosophers do not know how to read (unless the text is composed of declarative sentences that lack all ambiguity--the kind of thing a four year old gets to read) and write. (I suspect this is due to our lack of poetic or Scriptural culture, which generates sensitivity to polysemy, metaphor, and other pathways into multi-dimensional landscapes.)  This means that the vast majority of the stuff we produce lacks durability. More subtly, it means we also inflict a kind of mental tedium on each other. (Evidence: if reading each other's work were uplifting, then refereeing would not feel like 'service.') This has predictable effect: people don't read widely and this means lots of fantastic would be interesting ideas are gathering digital dust on JStor.
7. There is enormous amount of conformity and narrowness due to professionalization and the incentives that accompany it. For example, it was great news recently that the new editors at one of the top journals, Mind, publicly announced that it was broadening its remit. This means that for over a century (!) it refused to publish stuff outside its rather narrow mission: leaving aside non-analytic philosophy, value theory broadly conceived and history were less-than-welcome there. If value is unwelcome you are systematically ignoring not just stuff that really matters, but also not exploring a fundamental metaphysical option (it's value all the way down). If history and non-Western philosophy are systematically unwelcome it means that there is no arbitrage on good, overlooked ideas.
8. We often think and tell each other that as a profession, we are pursuing all the truth-conducive projects, but when you step back a bit it is noticeable how much parroting there is that seems primarily designed to ensure a minimum number of publications with the least amount of hassle without being at the tail-end of some fashion. (To be at the tail end of a fashion can be career destroying if you are N-th year PhD.)
9. The gospel of progress is wearing thin: I love economic growth, but we will be lucky if we avoid Environmental catastrophe and (accidental) nuclear holocaust during the  next century. Meanwhile, daily our species practices massive, industrial cruelty on animals, and during the last century there has been at least four genocides. I have no idea what the cultural preconditions are for philosophy to thrive, and I am willing to grant that science, logical, and mathematics, and the internet are swell, but if you read the fashionable philosophies of a scholarly generation ago almost all of it fails to prepare us to think our way through (to use pompous language) humanity's existential needs for philosophy. To paraphrase Nietzsche, professional philosophy keeps our intellects focused on small problems, while we must have faith that as a by-product the big problems are being solved--that's just incredible. 
10. If you are so great, why do you constantly recycle Memes about your fantastic progress? <--That's a rhetorical question.  (Yeah, I know Nietzsche is a great bragger.) In fact, all the repetitive and thoughtless rhetoric of progress reveals is your anxiety.

 End of rant.

On the Inner, Intellectual Life

The intellectual life as portrayed in this film [“The Hedgehog”--ES] has four central features:

1) It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection.

2) As such it is withdrawn from the world, where ‘the world' is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status.

3) It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by Renee's low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past child-bearing age.

4) It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.

Of these four features of intellectual life, it is the notion of withdrawal that is centrally important. It is removal of intellectual life from the world that accounts for its true inwardness—an inwardness distinct from the narcissistic inner tracking of one's social standing. It is the withdrawn person's independence from contests over wealth or status that provides or reveals a dignity that can't be ranked or traded. This dignity, along with the universality of the objects of the intellect—that is, that they are available to everyone—is what opens up space for real communion.--Zena Hitz "Freedom and the Intellectual Life," First Things.  [HT Rachena Kamtekar on Facebook]

In her important essay, Zena Hitz addresses the "crisis of confidence among ourselves [that is, Humanists--ES], a crisis caused by a failure of self-understanding. We are haunted by a sense that what we do is somehow inadequate or pointless." Hitz, whose integrity is exemplary, goes on to criticize the instrumental defenses of the Humanities (sometimes she uses 'Liberal Arts'), which she usefully distinguishes between (i) the effective acquisition of wealth, and (ii) those who think they promote social and political goods.

To be sure, in her evident distaste of these instrumental defenses, Hitz ignores the possibility that at least some of these goods may be (foreseeable or occasional) byproducts of a society in which the intellectual life is allowed to flourish. More seriously, she also seems to think that having a rich inner intellectual life is somehow incompatible with a life of social and political activism. This strikes me as prejudice: while it's true that few of us have large enough souls to combine multiple ways of being in the world, it is my experience -- in observing the genuine political activists among us -- that those most devoted to social change also tend to have rich inner, intellectual lives (percolating in the shadows of all that visible activity) that are, in some sense, at odds with the public engagement. Of course, the nature of this inner world can be transformed, even radically transformed, during the vita activa. Hitz also seems to think (but I am less confident about this) that it's only the intellectual life that can generate (and here she echoes the way I read Seneca [recall]) an axiology of respect and communion that is orthogonal to the life of the market-place. But while this may be true, it needs to be argued because it is not obvious--for, it may be also true of other passionately engaged, shared human activities or play outside the trades and public life.

The previous paragraph is no criticism of Hitz's underlying insight that the intellectual life can facilitate an inner life, one that is sometimes withdrawn from the world, even (to use one of her key terms) ascetic. She is right to emphasize this, for it connects to the ways in which reading books and poems, and engaging with the arts, are an escape, even a life-line within the loneliness and other circumstances of one's life. This sense of escape, which is simultaneously a possible connection to others [to stick with reading, reading allows intimacy with an other's mind], was my original path into the life of the mind with a flashlight reading books under the blankets late at night as a child trying to escape the emotional turmoil that surrounded me; it sustains me, even after decades of being disciplined, as a professional philosopher. In order to avoid confusion, the life of a professional (which is governed, in part, by a credit/gift economy, and differences in status and power) is distinct from the inner life. These Impressions are my attempt to make visible that which is caught in the form of limitation between inner sanctum and outer professional.

The question is, of course, if the respect and communion (I would have said, 'friendship') that flows from the existence of an inner life (a) vindicates the intellectual life as such and (b) vindicates it to a skeptical outside world (or hypothetical taxpayer). It is pretty clear that some of Hitz's (named) targets, who offer an instrumental defense of the humanities, are primarily focused on (b). While I share some of her misgivings about these defenses, Hitz is insufficiently generous to them because she understands (with an appeal to Republic 496d--about which  more below) the true or exemplary (Socrates) philosopher "as someone who retreats from public life." (Elsewhere, with a nod to Republic 592ab I have offered a less quietist interpretation of Socrates.) But unless one has some kind of providentialist belief in the survival of good activities, then Hitz's stance engenders fatalism about the survival of the humanities as an institutionalized or corporate (in the medieval sense) way of life as such.

In fact, the examples that Hitz draws from Augustine, Robert Campin Fra Filippo Lippi all presuppose an institutional structure -- a Church committed to the understanding of the word of God – in which the “affinity between the intellectual and spiritual lives” can be taken for granted. Undoubtedly some such affinity still exists for many individuals and some (but as she notes by no means all) Christian universities; but these do not require any new, public vindication of the intellectual life. Once one accepts the need of disciplined engagement with sacred texts, the Humanities are home-free. Of course, it’s the very doubt about that is the central underlying the cause of the idea that the intellectual life is “inadequate or pointless.” To put it too simply (recall): the Humanities have been the victim of their own (debunking) scientific success.

As an aside, like all good essayists, Hitz invites us to re-visit works she discusses, and so I want to go see “The Hedgehog” again. Even so, “The Hedgehog” also comments on its own activity in a way that is ignored by Hitz—the young, bourgeois girl, who is at the center of the narrative, Paloma films her surroundings with her family camera. That is to say, the movie acknowledges the material pre-conditions that make her own activity possible; it does so by reinforcing the implicit contract with the movie’s audience which pretends to sustain the noble ideals of the intellectual life during the performance (and is flattered by the movie that it can partake in it), while not threatening the institutions which prevent the affirmation of those ideals outside the theatre. Paloma’s transformation during the film leaves the “empty bubble that surrounds them” untouched because to do so would be self-defeating (from the perspective of the continued existence of this art).

Let me conclude. Hitz rightly calls us back to the “zeal for Humanist learning,” which springs from an inward experience – I would say ‘joy’ --, that vivifies the intellectual life. This zeal does not need institutions of (note the elevation) higher education and may well be contaminated by them. But in the very passage that Hitz quotes from Plato’s Republic, the person, “who takes refuge” during a “storm of dust or hail driven by the wind,” does so “under a little wall.” At their very best, our universities can be such a little wall—and as we all know, somebody needs to lay the bricks and keep them from keeling over.

On Identity Politics & Criticizing Gay/LGTB Movements

[Interviewer]: Looking back, I get the sense that –correct me if this is a wrong analysis- there’s been great progress on issues of recognition in the U.S., marriage equality and so on, and even on issues of visibility, with things like having a black president. Has there been too much of that and too little emphasis on redistribution? We live at very unequal times, and that doesn’t seem to be going any better.

[Nancy Fraser]: It’s not a question of too much-too little, but that there’s not been a balance. There’s been an imbalance and a one-sidedness. For example, the gay movement, the LGBT movement, focus on marriage equality and on access for military service. Now, these would not be my first choices for places to wage the fight on. However, both of them, interestingly, do have a distributive element. The military is one of the few routes to a paid college education, for instance, so there are economic benefits to it. And to have the right to marry carries economic and social entitlements as well as symbolic ones of recognition.

[Interviewer]: What would have been alternative routes that you would have liked better?

[Nancy Fraser]: Well, I would have preferred a struggle to make basic social entitlements simply the social rights of individuals, independent of their marital status, I would have preferred a society that deemphasizes who is married and who isn’t. Instead of saying, we want to get married too! Why not say, you get your health benefits, tax and you get all kinds of other benefits just by being a person, a citizen, a resident, living in the country.--Nancy Fraser Interviewed by Álvaro Guzmán Bastida. [HT Ed Kazarian on Facebook.]

Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School, is the favorite feminist of those that dislike so-called identity politics (say, because, on the Left, they wish to see more focus on redistribution, or eliminating social hierarchy, or, on the Right, because they simply dislike identity politics). Fraser's position (and those that like her on the Left) assumes that favoring identity politics, or the politics of recognition, as a means toward emancipation displaces a focus on redistribution. In the interview from which I quote, Fraser emphasizes that "the rise of the politics of recognition coincides with the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is in effect displacing the social-democratic imaginary and in its attack on egalitarian distributive justice." While correlation is not causation (more on this below), she implies that the politics of recognition when focused on identity (especially in upper-middle class feminism) reinforces neoliberalism. In fact, Fraser treats Hilary Clinton as an exemplar of a feminism that is in cahoots with neoliberalism (presumably the reason why the interview got shared widely by others critical of HRC).

Yet, Fraser's position does not withstand scrutiny. First, there is no logical reason why identity politics (in the pejorative sense) has to be accompanied by regressive distributionist policies. After all, even Fraser has to admit that a "focus on marriage equality and on [gay] access for military service" has a welcome "distributive element." This is to be expected: few social movements focused on (social identity) recognition expect that recognition will result in a reduced economic status. Rather, it's nearly always imagined to prepare the way to economics gains, too.

Now Fraser might argue that even if there is no logical trade-off between identity politics and redistribution, there is a political trade-off; political science teaches that the salience of issues can displace issues that are not linked to it in two ways: (i) time and attention are scarce resources, so a focus on one issue or set of themes will displace other issues and themes; (ii) political coalitions may be organized around some salient issues that function as wedges/glues--issues in different dimensions may then be systematically ignored. One could grant this point about political salience, and still not be moved by Fraser's rejection of identity politics (even if one also wishes for redistributionist policies).

For, second, Fraser ignores two alternative possible interpretations of her claim that "the rise of the politics of recognition coincides with the rise of neoliberalism." (I) this may just be a matter of perception. Because she regrets the failure of a more redistributionist agenda, she may be noticing the success of the politics of recognition. For, identity politics focused on recognition of a marginalized group is not a modern phenomenon: it's rooted in the post-Herderian nineteenth century (and can be discerned in the varieties of nationalism within the cosmopolitan/Liberal Empires, in regionalism, in Catholic and Jewish emancipation, the civil rights movements, indigenous rights, etc.).* (II) even if Fraser is right to think that there has been a rise in the politics of recognition with the rise of neoliberalism, its very rise (of identity politics) may have been a response to that very neoliberalism as, say, a second-best option due to the failures of the politics of redistribution. For, under the centrifugal and disruptive forces of neoliberalism, appealing to the state's ability to confer formal and informal recognition on a group is a way to secure some of the benefits that flow from such recognition which would be unavailable otherwise. If (II) is right then it would be foolish to forego identity politics as long as the coalitions or powers that support neoliberalism are in place.

Only if Fraser could show that identity politics actually reinforces and enhances neoliberalism would her criticism of identity politics be convincing (to a friend of redistributionist policies). It's here that Fraser's criticism of Hilary Clinton matters (echoing recent criticism by fans of Bernie Sanders). For, if the kind of feminism that HRC espouses were an instance of the bad sort of identity-politics then, indeed, she would have some evidence for the claim that identity-politics props up neoliberalism (granting that the Clintons are knee-deep in neoliberalism). But Hilary Clinton was a public critic of gay-marriage as late as 2008 (and when Bill Clinton repudiated Sister Souljah, he was, in effect, repudiating a form of identity politics). So, one can be a genuine critic of Clinton's embrace of neoliberalism, while still supporting identity politics. This is even true for those -- like me --, who would prefer an ideal world without identity politics. No friend of justice should be in the business of telling historically persecuted minorities that they cannot demand recognition.

Finally, there is something awkward about Fraser's, "Instead of saying, we want to get married too! Why not say, you get your health benefits, tax and you get all kinds of other benefits just by being a person, a citizen, a resident, living in the country." It's easy to tell others (I have no idea of Fraser's sexual orientation, and I am not interested) that they should not ask for a certain form of recognition just because you think it does not produce the optimal outcome for other important projects.** In addition, Fraser is being subtly inconsistent because the focus on the "rights of individuals" at the exclusion of group rights just is neoliberal.

Let's stipulate it's true that the focus on gay marriage has helped reinforce the institution of marriage, and that this institution is problematic.+ Let's also stipulate that not all gays and lesbians will benefit from access to marriage (or the military). Yet, the focus on gay marriage has helped emancipate gays and lesbians in lots of ways and made visible that they have been subject to hatred and discrimination to a wider public. Here the politics of identity have helped educate publics of numerous societies to see the errors of their previous ways (recall) along many dimensions and also hold out the promise to produce real economic gains for gays and lesbians. That should be celebrated, not second-guessed. 

On Discovering a Political Philosopher (by Commenting): Cavendish & Xenophon

Sociable Letters (by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle) is described as “Primitive Letter Fiction Depicting Domestic Life,” under “Minor Fiction” in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 2; Volumes 1660-1800 edited by George Watson (Cambridge 1971), p. 976.

Last week, at a lovely conference hosted by Marcy Lascano and Andrew Janiak, I commented on a very fine paper by Sandrine Berges on Margaret Cavendish. My main, and perhaps only, qualification for the task is that Berges and I are co-editing a new translation of Sophie De Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy. (De Grouchy wrote a century-and-a-half later.) I enjoy such opportunities to expand my knowledge. Prior to preparing my comments, I was not entirely unfamiliar with Cavendish (1623-1673) because I taught her Blazing World, while being a PhD student at Chicago, ca 2001, in a survey course on 'early modern.' But Berges introduced me to many more of Cavendish's writings in political philosophy not the least of which is Sociable Letters.

As an aside, my early experience with teaching Blazing World was something of a fiasco. At the time I attributed the failure to the oddity and general implausibility of the work. But I now suspect that the failure was entirely due to my decision to simply 'slot' Cavendish into the syllabus somewhere between Hobbes and Berkeley without giving much thought to the fact that this also demanded a change in the way I framed the whole course. For, even if one doubts that Kant is the natural telos of early modern philosophy, most such surveys have a tacit, often unthought, notion of progress built into the narrative arc of the course. Cavendish does not fit such a dialectic. 

Cavendish's works in metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy are one of the central nodes of a collective effort among scholars of early modern philosophy to rediscover forgotten women of the early modern period. While a decade ago, among professional philosophers, familiarity with Cavendish's writings was restricted to a handful of expert scholars (led by indefatigable Sarah Hutton, Eileen O'Neill, Marcy Lascano, Susan James, Margareth Atherton, Karen Detlefsen, Lisa Shapiro, etc.) now all the 'young hip kids' seem up on Cavendish and articles and books are appearing in such rapid fashion that is hard to keep up. While language undoubtedly plays a role (Cavendish wrote in English), Cavendish's writings are full of funky metaphysics and so what once must have seemed like confused and false positions to those that chanced upon her works, now seem attractive starting points for philosophical exploration. In addition, because Cavendish is clearly engaging with recognizable and familiar positions in the history of philosophy, there is no obvious place to challenge her status as a philosopher. 

Despite the fact that Cavendish was close to a number of political philosophers, most prominently Hobbes, her moral and political writings are not widely really recognized as political philosophy. This is, in part, a matter of genre; she presents much of her social thought in plays, stories, and letters. But given that genre is no barrier to recognizing Plato's Dialogues, Seneca's Letters, Plutarch's Lives, Montaigne's Essays, or Lucretius poem as a species of (political) philosophy, genre cannot be the whole or most fundamental issue. (This is not to deny that with the exception of Plato, all of the authors just mentioned are not automatically recognized as political philosophers by our professional peers.) While one cannot rule out rank sexism (see the judgment of the English scholars ca 1970 above), a historically and conceptually more interesting explanation is possible (or so I suggest in what follows). Consider Letter 150 (one of the longest of the Sociable Letters): 

MY Thoughts, although not my Actions, have been so busily Imployed about Huswifry these three or four Dayes, as I could think of nothing else, for I hearing my Neighbours should say, my Waiting-Maids were Spoil'd with Idleness, having nothing to do, but to Dress, Curl, and Adorn themselves, and they Excusing themselves, laying the Blame upon me, that I did not set them to any Imployment, but whereas they were ready to Obey my Commands, I was so Slow in Commanding them, as I seldom took any Notice of them, or Spoke to them, and that the truth was, they oftener Heard of their Lady, than Heard, or Saw her themselves, I living so Studious a Life, as they did not See me above once a Week, nay, many times, not once in a Fortnight; wherefore, upon the Relation of these Complaints, I sent for the Governess of my House, and bid her give order to have Flax and Wheels Bought, for I, with my Maids, would sit and Spin. The Governess hearing me say so, Smiled, I ask'd her the Reason, she said, she Smil'd to think what Uneven Threads I would Spin, for, said she, though Nature hath made you a Spinster in Poetry, yet Education hath not made you a Spinster in Huswifry, and you will Spoil more Flax, than Get Cloth by your Spinning, as being an Art that requires Practice to Learn it; besides, said she, the Noise the Wheels make with Turning round, will be Offensive to your Hearing...Then I bid her leave me, to Consider of some other Work; and when I was by my self alone, I call'd into my Mind several Sorts of Wrought Works, most of which, though I had Will, yet I had no Skill to Work, for which I did Inwardly Complain of my Education, that my Mother did not Force me to Learn to Work with a Needle, though she found me alwayes Unapt thereto; at last I Pitch'd upon Making of Silk Flowers, for I did Remember, when I was a Girl, I saw my Sisters make Silk Flowers, and I had made some, although Ill-favour'dly; wherefore I sent for the Governess of my House again, and told her, that I would have her Buy several Coloured Silks, for I was Resolved to Imploy my Time in making Silk-Flowers; she told me, she would Obey my Commands, but, said she, Madam, neither You, nor any that Serves You, can do them so Well, as those who make it their Trade, neither can you make them so Cheap, as they will Sell them out of their Shops, wherefore you had better Buy those Toyes, if you Desire them, for it will be an Unprofitable Employment, to Wast Time, with a Double Expence of Mony. Then I told her I would Preserve, for it was Summer time, and the Fruit Fresh, and Ripe upon the Trees; she ask'd me for whom I would Preserve, for I seldom did Eat Sweet-meats my self, nor made Banquets for Strangers, unless I meant to Feed my Houshold Servants with them; besides, said she, you may keep half a score Servants with the Mony that is laid out in Sugar and Coals, which go to the Preserving only of a Few Sweet-meats, that are good for nothing, but to Breed Obstructions, and Rot the Teeth. All which when I heard, I conceived she spoke Reason;...[she said] my Maids would Complain more if they were kept to Work, than when they had liberty to Play; besides, said she, none can want Employment, as long as there are Books to be Read, and they will never Inrich your Fortunes by their Working, nor their Own, unless they made a Trade of Working, & then perchance they might get a poor Living, but not grow Rich by what they can do, whereas by Reading they will Inrich their Understandings, and Increase their Knowledges, and Quicken their Wit, all which may make their Life Happy, in being Content with any Fortune that not in their Power to Better, or in that, as to Manage a Plentiful Fortune Wisely, or to Indure a Low Fortune Patiently, and therefore they cannot Employ their Time better, than to Read, nor your Ladiship better than to Write, for any other Course of Life would be as Unpleasing, and Unnatural to you, as Writing is Delightful to you. Sociable Letters # 150,

It's easy to think that this scene of "Huswifry" merely exhibits (recall the New Cambridge Biography) "domestic life" of a very wealthy landlord. But is worth noting, first, that the "Governess" in charge of the estate is explicitly recognized as speaking "reason." This is a firm commitment to the rationality of women's thought. Second, the approved argument defends the division of labor, and offers an argument from efficiency of specialization: the idle, unskilled household labor cannot compete in quality and price with the shopkeepers and the laborers they buy from. Third, the argument defends the "liberty" of the servants in order to both play as well as develop their intellectual faculties--this is a firm commitment to Enlightenment of the non-elite. It is notable, too, that their readings are not said to be Scriptures, but (rather?) works that help cultivate their "Understandings, and Increase their Knowledges, and Quicken their Wit." The subsequent happiness of the servants is a valuable end in itself. Fourth, in addition, the argument appeals to prudence: happy servants are likely to be more loyal (and docile)--I'll offer more explicit evidence of this below. (These four features all anticipate Adam Smith.)

Even so, one may resist my claim that this is an instance of political philosophy because an objector may claim that household-management is 'private.' If Cavendish were a (proto-)Liberal, then this objection would hold. But nobody thinks that. Her writings exhibit a fondness for social and (it must be admitted) racialized hierarchies. So, she is not a Liberal. So, all one needs to show is that she thinks that the management of a kingdom can be compared to estate-management. For if she does think that these are strictly analogous, then in the passage just quoted, she is also offering rational advice not just on the art of political rule, but on some of the key features of sound political organization. Consider, thus, this earlier passage from Sociable Letters:

A Good Master is to know How to Command, When to Command, and What to Command; also When to Bestow, What to Bestow, & How much to Bestow on a Good Servant; also to fit Servants to Imployments, and Imployments to Servants; also to know How and When to Restrain them, and when to give them Liberty; also to observe, which of his Servants be fit to be Ruled with Austerity or Severity, and which with Clemency, and to Reward and Punish them Properly, Timely and Justly; Likewise when to make them Work, and when to let them Play or Sport; as also when to Keep them at a Distance, and when to Associate Himself with them; And truly, I should sooner chuse to Associate my Self with the Company of my Servants, had they good Breeding, or were Capable to Learn and Imitate what did belong to good Behaviour, than with Strangers, for Good Servants are Friends as well as Servants, nay, Servants are a Guard to their Masters, for Good & Faithfull Servants will Dye for the Safeguard of their Masters Life, and they will indure any Torments rather than Betray their Masters; and it is the Duty of Servants so to Do, for Servants ow almost as much Duty to their Masters, as Children to their Parents, or Subjects to their Natural Prince, for Servants are not on∣ly Govern'd, but Instructed, Fed, and Main∣tain'd; and what greater Crime is there, than to be a Traitor to their Governour, Tutor, and Nourisher of their Life? And every Master, the Meanest that is, is a Father and a King in his own Family--Sociable Letters, 61.

Now, the idea that estate-management is a template for political management does not originate with Cavendish. The idea is familiar from Aristotle's Politics 1, where household management is thought intrinsic to the needs of the polity. But Cavendish's treatment is more in the spirit of Xenophon. For, Xenophon's writings leave much more space for sharing in the responsibility by males and females of running an estate (see his treatment at the end of chapter 3 of Oeconomicus).* In addition, a key thought in Xenophon's Cyropaedia is that happy soldiers make loyal and willing soldiers. So, Cavendish is artfully developing these thoughts in a modern context.

Of course, Xenophon is generally only read by philosophers in order to find other evidence on Socrates's life and is most certainly not treated as a political philosopher (for evidence, see  the entry on Ancient political philosophy at the venerable Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where he is omitted). One need not admire Cavendish's or Xenophon's politics, to learn to recognize that a political philosophy without room for reflection on the art and nature of ruling is incomplete.

Mandeville as Proto-Feminist

I thought on the Tricks made use of by the Women that would teach Children to be mannerly. When an aukward Girl, before she can either Speak or Go, begins after many Intreaties to make the first rude Essays of Curt’sying, the Nurse falls in an ecstacy of Praise There’s a delicate Curt’sy! O fine Miss! There’s a pretty Lady! Mama! Miss can make a better Curt’sy than her Sister Molly! The same is echo’d over by the Maids, whilst Mama almost hugs the Child to pieces; only Miss Molly, who being four Years older knows how to make a very handsome Curt’sy, wonders at the Perverseness of their Judgment, and swelling with Indignation, is ready to cry at the Injustice that is done her, till, being whisper’d in the Ear that it is only to please the Baby, and that she is a Woman, she grows proud at being let into the Secret, and rejoicing at the Superiority of her Understanding, repeats what has been said with large Additions, and insults over the Weakness of her Sister, whom all this while she fancies to be the only Bubble among them. These extravagant Praises would by any one, above the Capacity of an Infant, be call’d fulsome Flatteries, and, if you will, abominable Lies, yet Experience teaches us, that by the help of such gross Encomiums, young Misses will be brought to make pretty Curt’sies, and behave themselves womanly much sooner, and with less trouble, than they would without them.-- Mandeville "An Enquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue."  Fable of the Bees.

An unpublished paper on Mandeville and Emilie Du Châtelet by Jacky Taylor and Emilio Mazza raised the issue of Mandeville's feminism. (I heard a version of it in Helsinki two years ago and last week at Duke.) Marguerite Deslauriers expressed some reservations about attributing a feminist stance to Mandeville (especially because his views on chastity seem to affirm traditional gender roles). As it happens, I am in agreement with Taylor and Mazza that there are significant feminist (or proto-feminist) strains in Mandeville. Above I call attention to one such strain in the Fable of the Bees--a work that has a disreputable reputation, which is a shame because, regardless of the doctrines it settles on,  it has considerable moral animus behind it. The passage quoted is offered in the context of Sir Richard Steele, the moving spirit behind the Tattler. While my interpretation does not rely on this fact, it is worth emphasizing (as Taylor and Mazza do) that Steele's Tattler defends traditional gender roles (and is not free from misogyny).*

First, Mandeville has no doubt that gender-stereotypical behavior is the product, primarily, of social conditioning. His analysis is not just about girls; in the sentence following the quoted passage, Mandeville goes on to claim that it is "the same with boys." (I return to the significance of this below.) Second, Mandeville leaves no doubt that this conditioning is not -- as traditionalists would claim -- the cultivation of natural tendencies in accord with 'womanly' nature -- rather it is based on lies and flattery. Thus, third, Mandeville diagnoses the social conditioning of a a form of false consciousness on the part of women.

Mandeville's position is not ad hoc but are an application of important elements of his thought. (I am not claiming these elements are original with Mandeville; he is clearly indebted to Hobbes and French Augustinians.) Recall the following three theoretical positions on human nature:

1. Differentiated human nature; the differences also reflect axiological hierarchy. This seems to be Aristotle's position (say on natural slavery) in Book 1 of The Politics, and is revived regularly by modern Eugenicists and has a new instantiation by contemporary epistemocrats (e.g. Jason Brennan).
2. Differentiated human nature, but without (axiological) hierarchy among the differences. This seems to be Socrates's position in the true city (or 'city of pigs') of Book 2 of the Republic [recall] and Elizabeth Anderson's position in (1995) "Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology." [recall]
3. Methodological Analytic Egalitarianism (MAE): the positing of homogeneous human nature such that we're equal for theoretical (including moral) purposes. Observed differences are due to cultural, educational, institutional factors.*

Throughout the Fable, Mandeville adopts a version of 3: Methodological Analytical Egalitarianism (MEA). MEA can be characterized by the following commitments:

• [1] Naturally all people are (motivationally) equal, and most salient differences are the product of institutions (law, education, culture, etc.).
• [A] This includes the philosophical/economist-expert.
• [B] Even if [1] is not quite literally true, (nearly) all people consider themselves to be (at least as) equal when it matters to them. As Mandeville writes, “as well as we think of our selves, so ill we often think of our Neighbour with equal Injustice;”—Fable 1 (remark N). He asserts this while allowing that it is possible that our inward ‘constitution’ is different and influenced by sex-differences (Fable 1, Remark R).
• [2] From [1A] it follows that the expert should be put inside the model or conceptual framework. As I have noted elsewhere, Mandeville treats experts from within his analysis (recall here and here).
• [3] From [1B] we learn that human affairs are (at least) in part intentional systems. (That is, we can't have a fully extensional model.) That is, beliefs and language matter.

Mandeville's commitment to 1A is clear in the following passage:

That the most Knowing are not the most Religious, will be evident if we make a Trial between People of different Abilities even in this Juncture, where going to Church is not made such an Obligation on the Poor and Illiterate, as it might be. Let us pitch upon a hundred Poor Men, the first we can light on, that are above forty, and were brought up to hard Labour from their Infancy, such as never went to School at all, and always lived remote from Knowledge and great Towns: Let us compare to these an equal number of very good Scholars, that shall all have had University Education; and be, if you will, half of them Divines, well versed in Philology and Polemick Learning; then let us impartially examine into the Lives and Conversations of both, and I dare engage that among the first who can neither Read nor Write, we shall meet with more Union and Neighbourly Love, less Wickedness and Attachment to the World, more Content of Mind, more Innocence, Sincerity, and other good Qualities that conduce to the Publick Peace and real Felicity, than we shall find among the latter, where on the contrary, [354]we may be assured of the height of Pride and Insolence, eternal Quarrels and Dissensions, Irreconcilable Hatreds, Strife, Envy, Calumny and other Vices destructive to mutual Concord, which the illiterate labouring Poor are hardly ever tainted with to any considerable Degree. (“Essay on Charity Schools”)

Here Mandeville proposes a natural experiment in which the attitudes of two populations (one expert and one folk) are compared. His proposed experiment only makes sense if one can assume that observed differences are entirely due to differences in education, geographical factors, incentives, and institutional environment. I am not asserting here that Mandeville is entitled to such commitment; I am just diagnosing it.

So, in conclusion, because of Mandeville's commitment to some version of MEA, he is committed to explaining, in the first instance, observed differences among boys and girls to their conditioning. Of course, Mandeville was not ignorant of biological differences between boys and girls -- he was a practicing physician, who exhibited great commitment to women's intelligence in his medical works --, but his methodological stance leads him to downplay those.

On Mathiness in Economics

Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision, whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words that are analytical and precise.
Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only social process that does. Consensus forms around theoretical and empirical statements that are true. Tight links between words from natural language and symbols from the formal language of mathematics encourage the use of words that are analytical and precise.

For the last two decades, growth theory has made no scientific progress toward a consensus. The challenge is how to model the scale effects introduced by nonrival ideas...The question posed here is why the methods of science have failed to resolve the disagreement between these two groups.
Economists usually stick to science. Robert Solow (1956) was engaged in science when he developed his mathematical theory of growth. But they can get drawn into academic politics. Joan Robinson (1956) was engaged in academic  politics when she waged her campaign against capital and the aggregate production function.
Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it. The style that I am calling mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content. Paul M. Romer (2015) "Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth" American Economic Review.

Last week I discussed a recent instance of the recurring complaint about mathematical economics (and more indirectly here.) Romer's piece was cited in a recent Aeon blog post. On, reading Romer's piece, I learned that Romer is not against mathematical economics as such (he is a leading practitioner), but rather against certain abuses of mathematics. In particular, his is a call to reduce the abuse in order to "make faster scientific progress if we can continue to rely on the clarity and precision that math brings to our shared vocabulary, and if, in our analysis of data and observations, we keep using and refining the powerful abstractions that mathematical theory highlights—abstractions like physical capital human capital, and nonrivalry." (90) Regular readers know that I am very interested in the distinction between science, politics, and academic politics and I return to it below. But first I want to set the stage

The abuse he has in mind is [i] the "ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content." In what follows I am going to pretend as if such slippage is avoidable when one is using abstractions in theory, despite the fact that there is considerable work in the philosophy of scientific (including the philosophy of mathematical economics [see here]) practice that suggests some such slippage is always a live possibility. We can charitably suggest on Romer's behalf that in mathematical economics we want to avoid slippage that facilitates what he calls "academic politics.”

It is not always clear if we can blame “academic politics” for the slippage. For example, elsewhere in his piece, Romer describes yet another abuse: [i*] “Because incentives in these models motivate neither discovery nor diffusion, agents exchange ideas in the same way that gas molecules exchange energy—involuntarily, through random encounters. Given the sharp limits imposed by the mathematics of their formal framework, it is no surprise that traditionalists were attracted to the extra degrees of freedom that come from letting the words slip free of the math.” (91) Let’s stipulate Romer is right here about what drives the ‘traditionalists’ in ‘growth theory.’ What he describes is compatible with a move in academic politics, but need not be so. Some such ‘extra degrees of freedom’ may be thought an advantage on legitimate scientific grounds—it may facilitate (for example) finding solutions (to solving equations) or the search for empirical instantiations (when working with aggregations). To be sure, as regular readers of my blogging posts about the treatment of uncertainty in economics know, I am no fan of the widespread use of devices that purport to model mathematical randomness within mathematical economics. Because these mathematical devices have lots of tacit assumptions about distributions built into them, even superb practitioners tend to miss that they are making non-trivial bets on the structure of modal reality (leaving aside the fact that humans are intentional agents not merely extensional objects).  

In fact, Romer’s piece also refers to other practices by other economists that fall under mathiness that come in for critical scrutiny: "The authors [McGrattan and Prescott] chose a word that had already been given a precise meaning by mathematical theories of product differentiation and economic geography, but their formal equations are completely different, so neither of those meanings carries over." (89) Here [ii] mathiness facilitates a species of equivocation by drawing on verbal familiarity with the term (not the math). It’s hard to see why this is due to mathiness; when (inspired by the economists David Levy and Sandra Peart), I use the term ‘methodological analytical egalitarianism’ as a technical term of art (as I do), I know that I risk confusion with my fellow philosophers (whose minds are trained to think of a different literature).*

In addition, ‘mathiness’ is used to refer to [iii] the practice of using words ‘that are disconnected from the formal results and a mathematical model that is not well specified.” (92) For, Romer also refers to a more general decline in standards in which ‘mathiness’ stands for [iv] “Neither colleagues who read working papers, nor reviewers, nor journal editors, are paying attention to the math,”(92) in which mathematical “theory” is “entertainment.” The earlier standards involved [this should be familiar to analytical philosophers] “clarity, precision, and rigor.” (92) I distinguish between different practices, [i-iv, including i*], not to make fun of Romer’s tendency to lump distinct phenomena under ‘mathiness.’

Now, let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that there has been a decline in standards (rather than the data-poor kind of nostalgia frequently exhibited by senior figures in a field). It is worth noting that Romer’s explanation for the decline, which is based on incentives, is very partial. For, it pretends as if some economists are driven by non-epistemic motives while others are more pure (conveniently the folk Romer agrees with). Yet, it fails to treat all the participants equally and so fails at explanation—what we would like to know [again stipulating that Romer is right about motives], is how come a group of practitioners subject to same incentives fail to main similar standards.

It is worth noting that Romer does not consider two obvious other hypotheses (again stipulating that he is right about the purported ‘decline’): (a) size of group: economics is vastly larger than half a century ago, and it is much harder to enforce a shared esprit de corps, including standards, so we should expect ‘drift’ in these standards; (b) perhaps, as suggested above, those that have embraced a new set of standards have done so because of alternative epistemic advantages that Romer is not giving sufficient credit—what looks like ‘academic politics’ is really a different understanding of what the science is about or supposed to do.  Because he fails to consider alternative hypotheses, and assumes purity on his side, he makes an inference that is by no means fair (albeit) ‘natural:” “The natural inference is that their use of mathiness signals a shift from science to academic politics, presumably because they were losing the scientific debate. If so, the paralysis and polarization in the theory of growth is not sign of a problem with science. It is the expected outcome in politics.” (90)

With that (especially (b)) in place, we can return to the three-fold distinction between science, scientific politics, and politics. In it, science is incentive free (the agents are pure truth-seekers), while scientific politics is governed by non-epistemic incentives that can generate ‘equilibrium’ (but that falls short of the one that would obtain if economists were pure truth-seekers), and politics is governed by incentives that entail non-disagreement.  The idea that science is about consensus and politics not is an idea that, within economics, goes back to Sidgwick and Keynes Sr. in the late nineteenth century; it is part of the founding narrative of the image of science that economics gave itself (see for details of the story here). It may have been taught to Romer’s generation by way of Robbins’ influential (LSE) statement about methodology at the height of the Great Depression. Within philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn articulated the most famous version of it. Of course, eventually political philosophers decided that politics could also be a site of consensus, and they (Rawls, Habermas, etc.) re-imagined the political as amenable to technocratic reinterpretation.

Because science is understood as an instance of consensus seeking, deviations from the norm are treated as ‘unscientific’ (because political). It is well known (and within economics this has been known since Stigler in the 1970s) that this conception of science exhibits lack of tolerance for dissent and disagreement. This image of science (science = consensus) is  especially surprising because economics is about agents that operate in reflexive and complex (data rich) environments. It would be astounding if only one model of reality would suffice, and if only one interpretation of that model would be available. In fact, here’s a useful heuristic: if consensus obtains about an empirically complicated topic (yes, that’s a weasel phrase) in economics, one ought to look for mechanisms (i.e., academic politics) that prevent alternatives from having their say.    

So do all Philosophers Look down on Literature Professors?

So, do all of you look down on literature professors?

There was an awkward silence while we were waiting for the train to arrive.

I hesitated. I was surprised to learn that a Dutch literature professor would have experienced the kind of disdain I associate with my philosophical daddies' bruising judgments.  

Ahhhhh, yes, but things are probably improving, I hastened to add.

Well, you probably disapprove of the way we use philosophers without understanding all of it.

In fairness, a lot of uptake of especially French philosophy was pioneered by lit. crit types. I joked that professional philosophy is a bit like the apocryphal Heine's Dutch--everything happens thirty years later.

We went on exchanging polite and mildly disparaging remarks about our own disciplines until, mercifully, the train arrived.

When, say, economists look down on sociologists (recall), we get a glimpse of the remnants of a very intense disciplinary rivalry over who would be the privileged policy science. But the philosophers' lingering contempt -- I do sincerely believe it's a lot better now than a generation ago although not as amicable as the relationship between those former deadly rivals, surgeons and barbers -- for literature scholars is odd because we rarely compete over students or topics.

Let's  allow that some of the contempt for lit.crit is really just a continuation of the analytical disdain for continental, and a general concern over the misuse of philosophical concepts. This may be all there is to say. Even so literature scholars are not professional philosophers and even if their use of philosophy (or theory) is sometimes lacking in, well, philosophical acuity or discipline, the kind of uptake in which an idea is also subtly transformed or redirected is the norm in lots of areas. (For example, the current uses of speech act theory are -- as Elijah Millgram reminded me recently -- not Austin's intended ones.)  

Even so, on the train, while we were discussing some recent novels, another hypothesis occurred to me. Perhaps, professional philosophers are jealous of the literature scholars: while we work our way through often tediously boring and dense prose (e.g.,  Kant, Hegel, Anscombe, Dewey, McDowell) they get to read works that, however challenging they may be, are also designed to entertain or distract.* Sure, some of get to specialize in Plato or an occasional Hobbes, De Gournay, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Stebbing, and, on his best days, Dennett, but the number of truly fantastic stylists that professional philosophers get to read on a day to day basis is really small. (Yes, I am familiar with the bonding practice of telling each other that some sentence by Fodor about his granny or a memorable putdown by Searle attains the heights of literary craftsmanship.)

Envy at the joy of another is a natural, albeit ignoble, response if one is doing soul-destroying work oneself. Undoubtedly, the previous sentence does not describe the lived experience of all professional philosophers; but it may help explain why some professional philosophers are moved to express superiority -- a distinctly immoral act -- often based on the flimsiest acquaintance with the practices disdained.