Digressions&Impressions

On having a guild philosophy: potential advantages and disadvantages [Guest Post by Joel Katzav]

[This is a guest post by Joel Katzav.--ES]

In his 1956 presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, John Herman Randall Jr. worries about the growing sectarianism he identifies in American (academic) philosophy. More explicitly, he worries about the growing tendency in 1950s American philosophy to identify being a philosopher with having a certain approach to philosophy. This identification is still very much with us today. In order to be accepted as a philosopher one must by and large work with an approach to philosophy; though there is some leeway, mostly the approach is either analytic or continental. This choice is required in order to be given access to jobs, journal publications, conferences and more. Randall traces the beginnings of this kind of sectarianism, let us call it the beginnings of the development of guild philosophies, in American philosophy to the 1940s. He writes:

Then came the Logical Positivists, introducing a new note into what was rapidly becoming a scene of fruitful cooperation. They brought to this country the narrow sectarianism of the warring German schools. They were no longer fighting philosophical "error"; they merely dismissed it as "meaningless." Like the Epicurean school, they listed only their own writings in their bibliographies: "scientific philosophy" first arose with them. Next arrived what was at first called "Cambridge analysis"; because of the curricular set-up at Cambridge, this movement was at least interested in mathematics and mathematical logic. These logicians were soon swamped, however, in numbers and influence, by "Oxford analysis." With far greater suavity than the Viennese, the Oxford dons did not brush off what failed to interest them as "meaningless." It was just not "doing philosophy," that was all. And the next step, of course, was to insist not only that an interest in science or in history is not "philosophical," though only slightly discreditable: it was to claim such interests to be actually harmful to the philosopher, destroying the purity of his method. To "do" philosophy adequately you must definitely not "do" anything else (Talking and Looking, pp. 7-8).

Randall’s worry is striking. After all, we have lived through decades without much worry about the existence of guild philosophies. Yes, there have been worries about the analytic-continental divide, but these have not been widely shared by the mainstream, that is by analytic philosophers. More importantly, worries about the analytic-continental divide have not usually been about guild philosophy as such; most often, they have been worries about the distribution of power between guilds. Randall is, moreover, correct to worry about guild philosophy and his (admittedly somewhat exaggerated) description neatly juxtaposes guild philosophy and what may be some of its worrying effects, namely philosophical fashions and philosophers with too much confidence in their approaches to philosophy.

In a philosophical guild with a philosophy, guild and guild members are not well placed to evaluate philosophical approaches. The point here is partly that guild members are educated to favour their prospective guild’s approach and thus are less likely to be competent to fairly assess its relative merits, but also that the individual and collective material interests of guild members will counter attempts at fair evaluation. Worse, changing philosophical fashions – and Randall goes on to note a further wave from England, namely the wave of usage elucidators – may well partly be a side effect of having a guild philosophy. For when one’s guild has a philosophy, changing guild philosophy will be as easy as changing guild leadership, and changing guild leadership in a small guild controlled by the chosen ones is relatively easy. To be sure, Kuhn argued that paradigm acceptance is required for progress. I do not agree; one can, as is illustrated by the post-Einsteinian development of Newtonian physics[1], even work with a paradigm long after it is known to be off target. In any case, the quick changes of fashion Randall draws our attention to hardly look like the long-term commitment to puzzle solving which Kuhn promoted.

Of course, the gyrations Randall describes may have been perfectly reasonable, even if they took place in a context in which guild philosophy was strong. And even if Kuhn was wrong about the merits of paradigm acceptance, or his considerations in favour of paradigm acceptance do not apply to twentieth-century philosophy, having a guild philosophy is likely to have been useful for philosophy guilds. Randall recognises that the increasing sectarianism in America changed who was being discussed and cited; at most, one needed only to discuss the sufficiently important members of one’s guild. Since the job of the academic guild is to certify experts about some subject matter, it naturally involves differential treatment of those within and without the guild. This practice has at least two potential benefits for a guild. It might substantially ease the production of research that is taken to be novel since what counts as novel is what has not been proposed within the guild. In this way, for example, within the guild that was mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy, it was possible to restart debates about, e.g., Kant, justice, knowledge while ignoring the bulk of what had already been said on these topics. Even metaphysics could be revived at a time when it was alive and well. Permission to ignore non-guild members’ work has the further advantage that it allows lowering the requirements for guild membership. Getting to grips with what guild members are saying is easier than getting to grips with the tradition beyond the guild, especially if we are considering a newly established guild such as that of analytic philosophy in the 1950s.

Randall does worry that American philosophy is increasingly disengaged from society and other academic disciplines. The future of teaching in American colleges, he claims, depends on being able to convince, among others, scientific colleagues and university deans that philosophers have a role in examining the foundations and methods of the sciences. For, without being able to do this, there is a risk that philosophers will be found redundant in academia. Randall seems to have been wrong about the prospects of the future of American academic philosophy, at least if he was thinking about its future in the immediate decades after his paper. The withdrawal he detected coincided with very substantial growth in the profession in America. Still, perhaps Randall is close to having his finger on another advantage that guild philosophy had for mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. For being allowed to work independently of other academic disciplines and of society’s concerns reduces the demands on guild certification even further than limiting one’s discussants to guild members only.

In sum, the identification of guild and philosophy may have distinct pragmatic advantages for a philosophy guild, including minimising the demands of guild philosophy and giving novices space to develop, even if these advantages may threaten to come at the cost of being able rationally to deal with choice between philosophical approaches.

On the Court Jew in the Trump Administration

Nepotism creates more than one kind of problem in institutions. One is that those outside the family don’t get a fair chance to compete for the positions in question....But the other is the damage done to independence of judgment and decision-making.

Over the course of the Bannon-Kushner struggle, many, reportedly including Kushner himself, have noted that he “can’t be fired.” But even those of us cheered at a little loss in status for Bannon can’t be too comfortable with the idea that a 36-year-old “real-estate guy” can be in charge of half a dozen major government portfolios and can’t be removed from them because the only person with firing authority trusts family over expertise and experience.

...

People who run large organizations reasonably seek to surround themselves with people they trust—but a crucial part of their job is adjudicating among them and holding them accountable. When, inevitably, Kushner comes into conflict with government officials who have actual knowledge of the things he’s now supposed to fix—Middle-East hands in the State Department, for example—do we think Trump will listen dispassionately to both sides?

The success of open-access orders has come in part because impersonal rules improve decision making. Impersonal capital markets do a better job than the king’s advisors, who are inclined to subsidize their friends and family. Democratic elections (for all their flaws) choose better rulers than the sheer hereditary chance of monarchies. Courts make better decisions when judges can neither be the relatives of, nor take bribes from, the parties before the bench. And bureaucratic institutions with good role differentiation—for all their flaws—allow for advice and ideas to be evaluated at least partly independently of who it is that offers them. Violating these rules and norms not only corrodes trust in the institutions’ fairness; it also undermines their effectiveness.

Nepotism isn’t bribery, but it is a kind of corruption nonetheless, one that weakens institutions that depend on impartiality. An administration that seems all too ready to treat public office as a private interest isn’t going to be improved by running that private interest as a family business.--Jacob T Levy "A Government of Laws, Not Son-in-Laws"@Niskanen

Levy's piece is worth reading in full (I quoted the last bit only), and I agree with nearly all of it. That would be a reason not to blog about it, but I also felt, it left some important angles untouched. 

Let me start with a simple observation (which happens to be the one disagreement): Jared Kushner can be fired not just in the event he and Ivanka Trump were to divorce, but even in virtue of being married to Ivanka (the President's daughter). For, daughters and their husbands can fall out of favor in the musical chairs of clan politics. In particular, clan politics demands that even the most powerful members of the family are made to remember from time to time that their privileges are a function of the patriarch's will.  (Some of the best analysis of Trump's clever use of such mechanisms is, in fact, to be found in an earlier essay by Levy [here; recall also my post].) If this much is right it entails, in fact, that the intrigue and infighting in Trump's White House are not a bug, but a feature.

I want to connect this last point with a topic I feel some trepidation writing about: the significance of the fact that Kushner is a very visible, modern orthodox Jew in a White House that is simultaneously explicitly pro-Zionist and not-too-subtly comfortable with a revival of American antisemitism and white nationalism [recall this post; and this one]--these latter forces are represented by Kushner's apparent rival, Steve Bannon and his allies. This creates the unfortunate dynamic that supporters of Bannon in the media and in the public have in Kushner a natural target of their frustrated resentment (because the head of the clan is untouchable) one that fits their preconceptions about Jewish, Cosmopolitan nefarious moneyed influence. (Kushner did not obtain his wealth through Trump.)

Here it may be useful to recall the role the court Jew played in Europe's history. It is a long established principle of political theory and practice, that a dynastic ruler needs to be surrounded by people whose loyalty is unquestioned. It turns out -- as a moment's reflection reveals -- that family members are on the whole unsuited for this role. For, a family member can, if s/he wishes depose the patriarch and aim to rule in his stead. (Siblings and children do that kind of thing.) So, able servants are needed that have (i) no hope of every ruling: slaves, eunuchs, foreigners, or people of the wrong religion/caste, etc. This lack of hope can be reinforced if (ii) they are despised by the people. (This mechanism has been well described by people as dissimilar as Ibn Khaldun and Ernest Gellner.) In democratic Athens, key functions of the state bureaucracy were, thus, held by slaves. Jews played versions of this role (as financiers and state bureaucrats) until -- due to a mixture of the Christian rejection of usury and the widespread Christian belief in Jewish deicide -- as late as the nineteenth century (in On the Origin of Totalitarianism, Arendt turns Walther Rathenau into the last of the Court Jews).

Thus, the court Jew is at the mercy of the patriarch, who provides the court Jew with protection from the populace that can be taken away at any time, and simultaneously the court Jew is a useful buffer between the patriarch and the population by  implementing the ruler's (less popular) policies. The point is familiar enough from the biblical book, Esther, which deals explicitly with the circumstances of court Jew, power politics and its genocidal implications. (Recall that Yoram Hazony has given it a recent interpretation in God and Politics in Esther.) But arguably the perils and opportunities of this kind of polity are central to the Biblical narrative of the linked stories of Joseph and Moses (the contrasting exemplary ur-Models of court Jews).

Arendt, who is more critical of court Jews than I would be, emphasizes in her narrative that court Jews were most interested in developing "privileges and special liberties" not general principles of equality (or even solidarity with fellow, less fortunate Jews). That is to say, connections to power are made to work for those that will aid the entrenchment of power. This is entirely rational in a world perceived to be zero-sum. In my interpretation, that the world is zero-sum is the core (perhaps only) intellectual commitment of Trump and his most loyal supporters (recall here and here).

As I noted above (with a nod to classical Athens) the role of the court Jew is not incompatible with democracy. The existence of the type is, in fact, a characteristic of systems in which political elites mistrust each other. As nepotistic sabotage of the rule of law, "independence of judgment and decision-making" grows, we should expect more such characters.

 

 

 

When Moral Philosophers become Apologists for "Most People's" Warmongering

In this new book, Larry May develops and defends what he claims is a special and new outlook on war: "contingent" pacifism. Pacifists hold that all war is unjustified. Contingent pacifists do not; they agree that it is at least possible for war to be justified. But they also think that very few wars are just and, in particular, that probably no current war or war in the recent past was, nor will any foreseeable future wars be, just. In these latter claims, they seem to disagree with what I shall lamely call "most people." To us it seems obvious that our participation in some wars is justified, presumably a good many more than contingent pacifists think.--Jan Narveson (2015) reviewing Contingent Pacifism: Revisiting Just War Theory @NDPR

Narveson's review of May's book has been bugging me since it first appeared a year and a half ago.* Because I am not an expert on these matters, I hesitated to write about it. But the irritation has not left, so I'll to try to articulate the source of my annoyance, while remaining agnostic on the merits of May's position. This agnosticism is, in part, due to the fact that I still have not gotten around to reading the book. But it is primarily due to the fact that what I object to, in part, is that it seems that in his review Narveson never gets around to grappling with May's position.

It is a peculiar fact that Narveson turns himself into a spokesperson for most people. We are not told the source of his authority or his epistemic access to their thoughts.  We do learn that he thinks his words are representative of most people's views (thoughts, opinions, beliefs--do we know how to really characterize most people's sensibilities toward just war theory?---) because he uses first person plural (us); we may, in fact, understand him as identifying with most people. (We ignore the possibility that they may ask him, who asked you to speak on our behalf?) He never tells us who is included in most people, but from contextual cues one gets the sense that for Narveson most people are (North) Americans that are not Jihadists. Given that Americans make up a small minority of the world's population at a given time (and from the vantage point of (to quote Narveson (see below): "several millennia") it is simply false that Narveson speaks for most people simpliciter. In fact, he ignores the perspectives of the vast majority of human beings to have lived.

Now, I do not mean to suggest that all philosophers have to turn themselves into public gadflies challenging their people's commitments; quite a few respectable philosophers have turned themselves into spokespeople for common sense for a long time. But common sense has two advantages not available to Narveson: (i) one can be committed to common sense while recognizing that few other people embrace it consciously; because (ii) common sense is a philosopher's construct. While there is an interesting, complex relationship between common sense and what most people think, (iii) common sense is not a person or a people, and  so cannot be held accountable (in the same way as people can). To be sure, I am not here arguing against philosophers turning themselves into spokespeople of others by being in their service (say as Dotson does [recall]; see also here on public philosophy). Of course, because philosophy is not a democratic contest, it is possible that Narveson and (forgive the locution) his people are right. So, let me turn to Narveson's central challenge to May:

The fundamental [problem] is this: all of us, I would hope, are "against war." What I mean by that is that we all think that war is a bad thing; we would prefer a world in which what we call "war" doesn't happen -- that international and internal political disagreements are never resolved by force of arms. Unfortunately, to say that is pretty unhelpful in almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied for several millennia.

More to the point is what, I should think, most of us mean: that in every war, somebody started it, and that that party shouldn't have. That somebody, we think, was/is an aggressor: he is trying to extract some political benefit by the use of lethal force against harmless people, and it is morally wrong to do that. So all wars are wrong in the sense that they happen only because somebody is committing wrongful, unjust actions. This, however, implies nothing in the way of pacifisms. For we also think that if A is attacked, and is innocent, then A has the right to defend himself. What is to be justified is not starting a war, but deciding to use military force to defend those who are attacked by the aggressive party. Is May disputing that? He makes many well-enough-taken points about the dangers of implementing this principle, but he doesn't seem to be fundamentally disputing it, as the out-and-out pacifist would.

Let's agree that this bifurcation is prima facie simplistic. Sometimes it is difficult to say who or what is "being aggressive." But suppose, as most of us surely think, that often it is decidable.

Let's grant, for the sake of argument, that (a) what really matters morally is who started the war and is, thereby, the aggressor;** and that (b) there are facts of the matter that may well determine who started it. But for (b) to work in practice we need an impartial, resourceful outsider/tribunal to establish them. In order to establish (b) we can't rely on our press because they may be well be influenced by nationalism or the government or commercial considerations (not to mention production of so-called fake news]; we also can't rely on our own government, which (when it is the hegemonic power) may well be an interested party (leaving aside the possibility that the government is controlled by commercial or military or foreign interest). I have no idea if most of us would agree that it is best not to be a judge in your own case, but considerations of (well) fairness suggest it. So, in moments of crisis it is by no means obvious that there is mechanism that can decide the matter impartially and fairly in real time (at limited cost, etc.). I am no fan of 'surely,' but surely if we are going to be resolutely realist about the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied then we should not ignore the non-trivial obstacles to the implementation of certain principles.

As an aside, when I was a student, in the early days after the cold war ended,  I was, I guess, a liberal interventionist; I believed that wars sanctioned by the UN and in accord with international law were justified, especially if they promoted humanitarian ends. American might would secure an international legal order. I had not yet fully grasped that (i) all wars tend to generate enormous amount of human suffering of innocent (and not so innocent) bystanders; (ii) that unique American hegemony entailed that all its wars of choice would also serve partial, primarily American commercial interests; (iii) that establishing an international liberal order on the basis of overwhelming force entails, in practice, open-ended (airstrike) warfare around the globe. (Leaving aside that the this warfare is accompanied by a rhetoric in which those that oppose us are savage, barbaric, etc. [recall my criticism of McMahan]) Given the existence of open-ended warfare, I have grown more realistic and, thereby, a growing sympathy for moral positions that prevent intellectuals like me from becoming spokespeople for the slaughter of innocents (as collateral damage because they were born in unsavory regimes or find themselves in a civil war we, well some of us, at least, are fueling).

Rather than confronting the shaky epistemic foundations of his own position, Narveson decides that the really important (big")"moral question here is are "we...supposed to let the bad guys win? -- on the ground that the innocent may never be sacrificed?" (He then adds a few more rhetorically charged examples.) Again, Narveson is rather quick in deploying the first person plural, but let's leave that aside. Let's think about how to answer this question; if we take the vantage point of "almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied" the answer is plainly, often yes. If the vantage point is theodicy, then the answer may well be, plainly, no (although God's ways may be opaque to us). Of course, morality may well in particular cases suggest answers  that are neither the former nor the latter. For example, one can grant others the (let's stipulate) legitimate right to self-defense and still recognize that this will entail their defeat. (This happened in several cases he discusses.) Even the invidualized morality of Narveson and his people does not impose on us an open-ended demand to sacrifice ourselves (prosperity, lives, etc.) to defend innocents and their human rights.**

That is, one may well be non-pacifist about other people's right(s) to self-defense and incline toward pacifism when one is asked about the morality of the interventions by a military hegemon. (This is not May's contingent pacificism, but it is not far removed from his spirit.) Of course, in practice the distinction is not clear-cut; NATO, for example finesses the point by treating an attack on one as an attack on all. Moreover, and more important, there may well be a-moral justifications for intervention. Throughout his piece Narveson pretends that if one inclines toward pacifist views one is thereby ipse facto willing to condemn other people's military actions (including "defending legitimate interests").

But a pacifist may well allow that morality is just one dimension from which to evaluate behavior. On the surface, Narveson agrees. He writes that "Among humane and reasonable people, all military activity is strictly subordinate to the political ends being pursued." Indeed, and the pacificist may well come to recognize that some political ends infringe on her morality. She may well decide that short of Stoic withdrawal, in our fallen world, our empire is politically preferable than the alternatives.

Strikingly enough, this position is unavailable to Narveson because he continues the sentence just quoted with "those ends must be in terms of human lives and liberties being defended and promoted  -- not only ours but also those of the citizens of other states, or other civilians involved or significantly affected by the war in question." To simplify: purported morality here becomes the only (legitimate?) political end. Not surprisingly, in practice, this particular morality offers liberal democracies a permanent-moral-get-out-of-jail-card. I don't often speak from the perspective of "almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied for several millennia," and I have no special fondness for Carl Schmitt, but from that perspective this position is only recognizable as a species of uncritical ideology.

 

 

On Not Re-reading, Pirsig

At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of 'quality'. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame. 2006 The Guardian.

In starting this piece, I remembered the amazement I felt at meeting my classmate, Julio Tuma (who went on to do a PhD in the philosophy of biology), in the first week of graduate school in Hyde Park at The University of Chicago in the sweltering Midwestern heat. Julio was an ex banker, who didn't just ride an old motorcycle, but also repaired it. At the time I decided to interpret it as a kind of providential sign (except that I did not believe in providence) that I had made the right decision going to graduate school at Chicago in philosophy.* (My original, intention, thwarted by fateful comedy of life, had been to study game theory in international relations.)

Let me explain, by way of diversion: a few years ago, an excellent and philosophically subtle, mathematical economist confided to me in a letter that "it dawned on my yesterday that my (very little) knowledge of philosophy is heavily influenced by one of my favourite books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig."

In response I wrote (this is in 2013), I went to The university of Chicago, sent their by the enthusiasm of my English professor (Michael Fixler), who made me read Pirsig alongside Milton and Derrida (and a smattering of Shannon's information theory). Professional philosophers do not tend to admit to liking the book, although I did once write a blog-post about it in homage to Fixler (see here). 

Fixler was a Milton expert, who showed more than a passing likeness to the main character of Bellow's Herzog (Fixler and Bellow met at Chicago so it's not impossible). Fixler's very fine book, Milton and the Kingdoms of God, got overshadowed by the more influential work of Christopher Hill and Stanley Fish. When I met him in the early 1990s, the frail Fixler, who had suffered a bad traffic accident a few years before, was obsessed with a species of structuralism. He was convinced that certain literary structures were not merely robust cultural features, but that they were embedded in biological features of our brain reinforced by constraints of information theory. After being drafted into a course on the metaphysical poets with him my junior year, I took the senior seminar (which turned into a directed reading course) on the afterlife of the fourfold ascent starting with the Phaedrus through Shannon. (I think the idea occurred to him in the mid 70s judging by this publication.) I have no idea what the course was called, but I do remember that Fixler was pleased I discovered the Four Quartets in preparing my term paper, and I always think of Fixler fondly when I stumble across further allusions to the Phaedrus and the fourfold (even when crossed out). 

Fixler was not my introduction to Pirsig (although he did introduce me to Lila). I am pretty sure that I devoured Zen as a trusted companion while traveling alone (by train not motorcycle) in Sweden the Summer before I went to college.+  But by the time I met Fixler, I had taken enough undergraduate courses in philosophy to recognize that Pirsig was not taken seriously by professional philosophers -- unlike, say one of my other teen favorites, Doug Hofdstadter, who was clearly a buddy of  Dennett --; I knew it was best to keep his influence on me quiet.

The fact that autobiographical narrator of Zen loathed professional/academic philosophers -- he creates a memorable portrait of a bullying professor (often taken to be the now, otherwise forgotten [although that's not entirely fair, but about that some other time more] Richard McKeon) at The University of Chicago, who generates acolytes who can parrot empty philosophical phrases -- did not deter me from being excited about going there. (I did not take up riding motorcycles, but did visit Bozeman on a road trip once!) 

Because I do no have photographic memory, I adore re-reading books (recall David Heller's wisdom [here] and Zadie Smith's [here]; I love being surprised by new features in an otherwise familiar text. Even so, I do not re-read many except by teaching them. (This is compensated by another habit of reading books for the first time when I teach them.) The main reason for this is practical: time is limited, and the books I wish to read for the first time growing at a discontinuous rate. However, there are some books I do not re-read because they belong, like a time-stamp, to a particular period of my life (e.g., Sheltering Sky belongs to my teenage years; Anna Karenina and War & Peace are part of my year as an employed office worker 1994/5).

For a long time, I did not re-read Pirsig's Zen because I worried I could not engage it except as a critic. After all, odds were high that as a trained philosopher, I would find the book annoying. I worried that its musings on quality and truth would strike me as sophomoric; that my professional self would laugh at my teenage self for being taken in by Pirsig's (ahh) sophistry. But in writing these lines, I recognize a potentially, more cowardly truth: I did not need Pirsig to remind that there is a non-trivial connection between the post-Platonic institutionalization of philosophy and a a certain kind of aggression (Pirsig does not hide his fierce aggressiveness in encountering it) that moves the university based practice of philosophy inexorably away from excellence.

On Being Conditioned to Fail

3. You don’t need to feel like you’re succeeding.

There are some days where you’ll feel successful, but not many. Again, you may have completed 1-2% of a project, but often it’s tough to see where that piece fits into the larger whole.

The other part of this is that there are simply very few milestones. You pass your comprehensive exams, your candidacy defense, and your dissertation defense, so during graduate school — a five to six year process — you have three markers that tell you you’re doing well. Apart from these, the only real professional currency you can acquire is publications, and to put it simply, you don’t want to rely on the publication process to tell you if you’re doing well professionally. That’s not to say the work isn’t interesting or rewarding, because it often is.

One thing that professors told me again and again early in graduate school: you absolutely must condition yourself to fail. Constantly. For every small success I had in graduate school, I am certain I had at least a dozen failures: rejected articles, brutal conference reviews, discovery of a flaw in something I’d just spent days working on, etc. (In truth, were I to tally these up I’m certain the ratio would be higher, but just writing this it seems implausible, so I’ll leave it as is.) These iterative failures are, at a very deep level, the essence of creating new knowledge, and are therefore inseparable from the job. If you can’t imagine going to bed at the end of nearly every day with a nagging feeling that you could have done better, academia is not for you.--Daniel McCormack "Some Lesser Known Lessons from Academia" [HT Dailynous]

A recent dinner with friends from graduate school and Daniel McCormack's useful post  (see also this moving piece by the late Josh Parsons) brought to mind a painful memory: my equivalent of what McCormack calls the "candidacy defense." I am pretty sure that at Chicago this involves a proposal,  which is basically an extended summary of each proposed chapter and bibliographical essay/partial literature review, and, if my memory does not fail me, a draft-chapter. For me this exam came in my fourth year.

I knew my draft-chapter was not very strong because I had started from scratch after dropping the idea of a PhD on the puppet image in Plato's Laws, which had been the subject of my 'Preliminary Essay" (a qualifying paper that's kind of equivalent to a MA thesis and was demanded in lieu of a comprehensive exam (which had been abolished some time before). My Preliminary Essay evaluation process had not been a happy experience because the committee was very divided about the quality of my work (about that some other time). But the two supportive faculty members were two members of my dissertation committee (including one of the co-supervisors).

I don't recall much about the actual candidacy defense, except that it was in my supervisor's office, and that after, I felt like a total intellectual idiot/nitwit. (The more recent jargon would be imposter.) It was clear that my project relied on half-baked assumptions and badly understood distinctions. Even though none of them had any special expertise on my topic, they had seen right through the project and honed in on its weaknesses. They were not mean, and I sensed no ill-will toward me (and this made it worse); it was strictly business, and I was left holding unsaleable shmattes. While they were conferring on my fate, I recall sitting in the hall-way too numb too feel, but contemplating if I should apply to law-school at once or move with my Bullmastiff to Red Lodge, WY, and spend the rest of my life in exile from the world.  (No way I was going home having proved myself such a failure.) Before going to graduate school, I spent a year working in corporate America researching by phone what kind of Linotype printers European print-shops owned, and I was not eager to go back to such mindless drudgery.

Perhaps I missed the cues, but I did not come away from that exam thinking that my project was worthy or original. So, I was truly dumbfounded when my supervisor came out of his office and warmly congratulated me on being ABD. I went back into the office, thanked my smiling and kind examiners, and left; I don't recall any festivities that night.

So, of  the three formal "markers that tell you you’re doing well" the first two were not unambiguously encouraging. (I spent seven years in graduate school.)* Interestingly enough, genuine depression only set in (recall) near the end of the dissertation when I could see that I would complete it (recall also my response to Peter Railton here) [and this post]. In fact, once the dissertation was under way, I had gone back home for six month. It had been a mistake; I was in my thirties and had really nothing to show for my life. I struggled with loneliness and made no progress on the dissertation. One day, a box with dissertation related books arrived out of the blue (I had sent it with surface mail). It contained a six volume set of Hume's History of England. In my languor I found myself taking hot baths and diverting myself by reading Hume's History from the start. This did not feel like work (I had a kind of absurd image of myself as a comic character in a late nineteenth century novel). I wish I could say at what moment during the War of the Roses or Tudor volumes it occurred to me that if I stayed in academia I could read Hume's History and books like that for a living, but I don't recall. In addition, I missed dog-park.

Let me explain. I am pretty sure I would not have completed my PhD, or stayed in academia, if it weren't for (a) my dog and the twice-daily dog-park conversations. For, in dog-park [Nichols Park for Hyde Park aficionados] and (b) the reading groups that I was incorporated into by various professors, I received daily informal markers of progress. For, dog-park was not just a source of distraction, fresh air, and camaraderie even the source of life-long friendships, it was also an open-ended conversation with brilliant minds (professors and fellow graduate students from all walks of life and intellectual orientations). And I did not feel a nitwit in their presence; rather I felt that I was taken seriously as an audience-participant day in day out by world class scholars and peers that I respected enormously; and when I talked about my own findings and projects, I could sense my own enthusiasm and liveliness in the presence of their critical interest. 

I guess the moral is this: there are, indeed, very few formal milestones during graduate school, and much of academic life is a career in delayed and partial gratification (even with encouraging and warm supervisors--I really warmly recommend mine who were encouraging when it mattered to me at key moments). It can be piercingly lonely, and often solitude is emphasized in descriptions of scholarly life (in the Humanities and many social science). But for me it also has been a means to have open-ended, overlapping, stimulating conversations. So, while it is true that iterative (I am tempted to say, Popperian) failures are the essence of creating new knowledge, and are therefore inseparable from the job, it is equally true that these failures are embedded in (to use highfalutin words) discursive practices that often make all the rejections worth it; well, that's true for me often enough to stick with it.

 

On Civilization (Coetzee style)

Is that what civilization is: an unwhispered agreement that no one, no matter how insignificant, should be allowed lose face?--J.M. Coetzee, Youth, p. 157.

There are three important characteristics of civilization mentioned here: (a) a tacit agreement or norm; (b) fundamental (even if minimal) equality; (c) a taboo against causing or facilitating others to lose face. Losing face produces both (d) loss of respect for the person principally concerned among others and (d) embarrassment or (or depending on the culture) shame in the person principally concerned. (In context, Coetzee's narrator, who is 'Coetzee,' accepts Japan as an obvious site for such a norm, but recognizes that England may have it, too.)

As an aside, this understanding of civilization is one of the transformative by-products of the youthful's Coetzee struggle with loneliness,  his inability to produce art and sexual coldness, and his recognition of his own misanthropy, not to say, being a bastard (especially to women). Earlier in the (auto-biographical) novel, Coetzee had accepted other understandings of civilization including (i) an elitist "Anglo-French" conception centered on rare, particular literary cultural products exemplified by Athens, Rome, the "Germany of Walther von der Vogelweide, Provence of Arnaut Daniel, the Florence of Dante and Guido Caculcanti, to say nothing of Tang China and Moghul India and Almoravid Spain" (pp. 24-26) on the authority of the philanthropic Pound T.S. Eliot; (ii) a political conception centered on Christian values and history of colonial settlement in Southern Africa (p. 38-9) on the authority of self-interested and partial politicians.

It would be reductive to see in Coetzee's tripartite understanding of civilization merely a coordination problem among unequal members of a society --- England's classes, South Africa's racial and linguistic communities, etc. -- who struggle to find a thin, abstract layer of mutual, equal respect. For, preventing the loss in face in others requires judgment and tact. General rules can guide us in preventing us from generating circumstances in which these may be necessary and can, even, (Adam Smith is very good on this) help us feel what we ought to feel absent any feeling at all (or correct against self-deception). But general rules cannot teach us the skills and tenor of character needed to navigate social nuance. (Perhaps, deep learning will solve this problem, but I am skeptical.) Coetzee's narrative suggests that individuals, even whole cultures, can achieve adulthood without ever mastering the skill.

I often Digress about civility (see here) and civilization (see here). At one point (here) I had suggested that civilization is no more than the art of keeping conversation going; and that philosophy's role in civilization is to teach the skills and develop the concepts that allow conversations to be continued or, alternatively, the state of war to be held at bay.  At first sight Coetzee's and my approach have little overlap. But it's not too difficult to see that Coetzee's analysis of civilization can be treated as a means to achieving what I have been calling civilization. This, then, results in civilization being, (a) a tacit agreement or norm; which presupposes (b) a fundamental (even if minimal) equality among members of a society;* in which there is (c) a taboo against causing or facilitating others to lose face in order (d) to keep the conversation, including silences and long-stutters, going.

Professional philosophy today is pretty good at fleshing out and analyzing (a-b). And I believe it is even capable of teaching the skills and concepts necessary for these. As I often document (and as Eric Schwitzgebel, Michael Rea, and Amy Olberding have also emphasized in various ways), professional philosophy today is horrid at (c-d)--that is we often instantiate uncivilized behavior (in the sense discussed here) and we probably lack the skills to teach it to others. That is to say, we may, in fact, at the margin contribute to the decline of society's inability to keep conversation going.

On the European Parliament and the British Empire (Arendt)

The nineteenth century bestowed upon us the amalgamation of nation and state. Since Jews everywhere were loyal to the state--you do recall, don't you?--they had to attempt to shed their nationality, they had to assimilate. The twentieth century has shown us the ultimate consequences of nationalism, as evidenced by horrible relocations of peoples and various massacres, beginning with the Armenians and Ukrainian pogroms. The British Commonwealth reveals--in a distorted form, as is often, indeed usually the case--the rudiments of a new arrangement. Someone who is part of the British Empire does not therefore cease to be an Indian or a Canadian. That is another reason why this war--and the existence of England, the last bulwark against the new barbarism--is so important for us. Belief in a single homogeneous European nation is belief in a utopia--and not a pretty one at that. Such a belief could originate only in America--and then only on the basis of a United Europe. But I do not think it is utopian to hope for the possibility of a commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own.--Hannah Arendt (1940) "The Minority Question" in The Jewish Writings, p. 130.

It surely was utopian to imagine a commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own any time in 1940 (and not just because it is a rhetorical trope of utopian literature to explicitly deny being utopian).* Leaving that aside, it is striking that the parliament is proposed as an alternative to a single homogeneous European nation--undoubtedly a nod to the racialized, murderous eugenics of the Nazis, whom did not even accept (as Sean Spicer artfully recently reminded us) assimilated minorities as belonging to the people. Strikingly enough Arendt treats the belief in the effort to generate a homogeneous nation as indebted to American thought. (That's historically well-founded; see here for recent scholarship.)

I view these Digressions as an indirect, oblique commentary on the day's newspaper headlines; so today  there is some irony in reading how Arendt treats her own proposal as partially inspired by the British Empire, which she interprets as facilitating multiple overlapping identities. Oddly enough, her proposal is reminiscent (recall) of Adam Smith's ill-fated proposal for an imperial parliament for the British empire in which multiple nations co-existist. England (by which she clearly means to refer to Great Britain) matters in another sense because she takes it to be "bulwark" against the tendency toward national homogeneity which is characteristic of modern times.

Arendt proposes her commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own in order to address the political weakness of minorities within the nation state, especially minorities that lack a home-land state. (She treats the homeland not so much as a possible refuge, but more as possible advocate for one's brethren in another state.) One may wonder how effective parliamentary systems really are in protecting minorities (a lot depends on technical details of the nature of the franchise, the system of representation, the relationship with the judiciary/executive, etc.).

Here I want to close by noting that the Treaty of Rome, the key founding documents, echoes Arendt's language. (I am not claiming influence--it's my sense that this bit of writing was largely unknown.) That Treaty (recall) speaks of an "ever closer union among the peoples of Europe" not the nation-states of Europe. As is well known, the EU never got around developing a truly powerful assembly or parliament let alone much interested in protecting Europe's minorities (although that sentence is unfair to particular parliamentarians). Instead, despite the existence of article 7, the protection of minorities was farmed out to the European Court of Human Rights. Because its judgments are always delayed, post facto, and, one is sad to note, not always friendly to Europe's minorities it's pretty clear by now that it offers little protection against determined, illiberal states in Europe's midst.

 

 

A Note On Cover Letters

During the last year, I have read more than 400 cover letters (I have lost track) in the context of four (junior) job searches. These jobs were all advertised in political science, but three of the positions also encouraged applications by philosophers and other social scientists. (Two of these searches are still ongoing, so I will write rather abstractly and will make gross generalizations that, of course, do not apply to all the candidates.) And what follows is a minor reflection on the nature of the cover letter.

Now, in some academic environments cover letters matter very little (compared to, say, CVs, research or teaching statements, the writing-sample, or letters of recommendation)--as a PhD student in the 1990s, I was told stories about applications with just a single sentence cover letter working  just fine. So, what follows is largely irrelevant to such environments (as I suspect is the case in top research departments Stateside). However, in a Dutch academic context cover letters matter a lot. This is not just because in my department we ignore letters of recommendation entirely in order to winnow down the candidate-pool to a shortlist. (I like that because it really does reduce prestige bias, but about that some other time more.) For, given the grant environment, which rewards publication at a regular clip in above average journals (for a more cynical take recall this post), one might have thought we focus exclusively on CVs. Yet, despite the importance of perceived grant-making potential, committee members really read cover-letters carefully, and this turns out to be quite normal in the Dutch civil service (and in Europe universities take on, for good and evil, the characteristics of their local civil service) and even business.

I said above I was going to offer a minor reflection, by which I mean that I am not going to list all the features of a would-be-successful cover letter. Most of such features involve reflection on how one can present oneself (skills, research-trajectory, teaching experience/attitude, grant-building, etc.) in light of the nature of the position, the needs of the hosting department, and wider fit with the research unit/department/institution/environment. A lot of that actually requires some local knowledge and, with the benefit of hindsight, I am surprised by how few queries one receives about the nature of the position and other relevant characteristics. (The previous sentence is not meant to be critical of would-be-candidates; I know that for a lot of candidates, who are applying to many positions with low odds of success, time is a luxury they do not possess.)

Okay, so much for set-up.

What I have learned from reading 400 cover letters is how at the start of their careers (most of the applicants fit this category), few people are capable of characterizing their own research to professional peers. (The previous sentence is compatible with the thought that these letters are not an unbiased sample.) By this I mean that almost nobody conveys what is distinctive about their research.  By 'distinctive' I mean, what's the key insight, trick, or contribution one is using (e.g., applying and refining the PSR to problems of inter-generational justice) or central research program (e.g., using formal features of Scotus's philosophy of mind to develop new accounts of political representation).

The examples of the previous paragraph are obviously fake. And they may be thought to exemplify facile superficiality. But notice (a) that you don't need to limit yourself to a single sentence; one can easily use a paragraph or two to characterize one's research if it conveys distinctive quality of one's would-be-contribution. In addition, (b) there is a world of difference between superficiality and succinctness (e.g., any good Haiku). And if one is worried about overselling, one can always qualify one's' distinctive contribution in various ways.

Now, one may think that a research statement is the proper site of conveying the distinctness of one's research agenda/project or contribution. Fair enough. But (i) not all application processes demand a separate research statement.  And (ii) what I have said about cover letters is also true of a research statement. I can't tell you how many of the presentations of people's research are nearly indistinguishable from each other, stringing together key buzz words about a field (even characterizing the field in homogeneous ways) without saying anything about what's so special about their contribution. (The situation gets worse when one reads quite a few applications from the same department--the visible hand of local gurus shaping the young is still strong.) This is not just due to the way in which fashion/trends percolate their way through a generation of the young's research (are all the kids till studying the grounding relation in metaphysics or have they moved on?)

Now, I am not saying it's easy to characterize one's own research. Sometimes finding one's voice only happens after one has landed a job (or two) [recall]. That is one requires a certain distance from one's own research. For example, it's only a few years ago that I recognized that one of my main moves as an early modern scholar was to take the dominant narrative for any X [e.g., Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza, Adam Smith] as a fellow-traveler of the scientific revolution or scientific naturalism and turn X into a (friendly, clever, severe, etc.) critic of the scientific revolution, mathematical physics (etc.). And one of my tricks as a philosopher of economics (which dawned upon me, in fact, during my blogging) is to take a very complicated mathematical concept in contemporary economics, and study it at its introduction in the economics profession in order to reveal the modal, methodological, or evidential moves that underpin it (or not).

Presenting oneself as essentially one move feels a bit naked; it's not obvious whether others will grasp the relevance of or be excited about one's trick/project, etc. They may well think it sounds easy or trivial. And, of course, one can be a whole lot more (a dedicated teacher, a workplace activist, an innovative public disseminator, a warm colleague, etc.) than that key move. (Perhaps, one even has more than one move; swell!) By all means don't be shy about all of that important stuff in a cover letter.

To be sure, not everybody is looking for a distinctive researcher and not everybody would think that sounding distinctive is a good, first proxy to research excellence in a grant-heavy-research-environment (recall we're just talking about the marginal difference between having a shot at a short list or rejection all other things being equal, but, of course, lots of things are not equal). I am not in the how-to-turn-one's-portfolio-into-job-placement-success business. By no means ignore your local job-placement officer--she really cares about how you do on the academic job-market, while I probably don't. Moreover, most of the people whose cover letters are not distinctive do get jobs, so I do not want to over-emphasize the point. But, having said all of that, a cover letter is a chance to convey what's exciting about a candidate's research profile. If your professional future depends on it, why not call attention to what's really special about your research?

 

Spinozism, Venice-style

To say that Venice is an interior is a possible summation of everything I have said so far. It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and this same self-sufficiency is what creates that 'endless imaginary fragmentation': the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.--Javiar Marías Venice, An Interior, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa p. 49.

To be self-sufficient, without (external) need, and a source of endless imaginary fragmentation is to be a Spinozistic substance.  This Spinozism is marked by a few familiar tropes: the absence of chance (49), and the co-existence of homogeneity (31; 41) and fragmentation (42).  (I am not the first to note the Spinozistic resonances; see here.) The reader is prepared for such Spinozism a bit earlier in the text:

I have always had the sense that the threat of catastrophe, of irremediable calamity or total annihilation, was less a genuine fear among its inhabitants and more of a necessity. This deliberate feeling of dread -- artificially created, in my view -- immediately infects visitors too, probably even the most ephemeral ones, who have only to set foot on a bridge to feel that this could well be the city's final day.

Venice is the most protected and studied city in the world, the most closely monitored and watched. The universal desire is not only to preserve it, but to preserve it exactly as it is now. We know that it cannot cease to exist, that it cannot be lost. The terrible certainty that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or expansion, without the possibility, in short, of any surprise or change, means that the Venetians see life from the 'viewpoint of eternity'*...The viewpoint of eternity! The words froze my blood, while we were having supper together: I was eating sole, and he salmon. Can there be a more frightening, unbearable, less human point of view? (26-27)

Marías wouldn't be Marías if he didn't inject -- cf. knowing echoes to Aristophanes's hiccup -- some comic dissonance (sole vs he salmon) while engaging in the hyperborean flights of metaphysics.

What to make of all of this? Is Venice, An Interior more than the expression of a weird, kind of artistic, competitive emulation with Thomas Mann? [One may say that Mann:::Plato's Phaedrus :: Marías :: Spinoza's Ethics.] Mann's Death is explicitly mentioned, in a comically dismissive aside (12), about the inferiority of the beach at the Hotel des Bains to the beach at Hotel Excelsior (on The Lido).

As an autobiographical aside, the only time I was on the Lido, I stayed at the Excelsior with my dad. I do not recall the beach especially well. But I was rather sick -- I only recovered once we made it to the opera in Verona -- and shunned the sun. (I started wearing sun-glasses at a later date.) My most vivid memory of the Lido was being offered huge bowls of chamomile tea by the immaculately dressed, Excelsior's staff. Since then, whenever I smell chamomile, I remember these huge bowls.

I do not want to deny that Venice, An Interior is primarily a shameless attempt by a publisher to cash in on Marías's sudden commercial success in the English speaking world. (It's short and per word probably hugely overpriced.) Others have suggested that Venice, An Interior is a kind of extended metaphor for the writing life (creativity, imaginary fragmentation, etc.). I wouldn't deny it. But  this understates the story's ambition; Venice is treated as a metaphor for our age with its many threats of man-made catastrophes (produced by terrorists, ecological disaster, or bankers who rely on models of randomness that fail to grasp all genuine possibility, etc.). To say that the threat is manufactured, it does not follow it is not real. (I honestly believe it is possible that Donald Trump will accidentally blunder us into WWIII.)

And Marías puts his finger on the oddity of our hyper-connected times in which we all seem to get infected with a certain, pervasive dread; this dread entails that we have more confidence in the unfolding  of necessity than the more familiar, uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises. That is, we are all weak-willed Spinozists now, without the love of fate.

 

Gellner on Nationalism and Liberal Self-Deceptions

The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. That is what really happens.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalism affirms and what nationalists fervently believe. Nationalism usually conquers in the name of a putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist self-presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officials of another, an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted) culture of its own, though admittedly one which will have some links with the earlier local folk styles and dialects.--E. Gellner (1983) Nations and Nationalism, 57

What the first paragraph of the quoted paragraph of Gellner's classic text makes clear is that on Gellner's picture a certain kind of liberal individual -- the atomized individual who works in an anonymous, impersonal (mass) society (hereafter the atomized individual )-- is an intended byproduct of nationalism. This kind is often treated as a liberal fiction worthy of contempt by liberalism's or neo-liberalism's articulate critics (e.g., Communitarian, Thomist, or Marxist), sometimes with disparaging nods about Hobbes (as founder of possessive individualism) or Smith (as source of all stupid ideas one may wish to attribute to economists).

This connection between liberalism and nationalism as such is not very surprising as such. After all, some of the most interesting 19th century liberals (Mill (recall), Mazzini (recall), Sidgwick) were nationalists of some sort or another (Mill, perhaps, instrumentally). But, of course, the kind of liberalism they advocated was not of the atomized individual sort which goes against they interpret nationalism (in fact, Mazzini's version of liberalism incorporates quite a bit of Idealist inspired corporatism). Few would accept the atomized individual individual as their aim or as a true characterization of social reality. In fact, what follows is fully compatible with the thought that, in practice, even liberal individuals have many important connections to others, including sub-national and transnational groups. (Gellner allows this.) Even so, I wish to explore what follows if we take Gellner's analysis of nationalism and its byproducts seriously. (One reason to do so is that Gellner's analysis correctly and thoroughly avoids understanding Islamic fundamentalism as something archaic or non-modern.)

One implication of Gellner's position is that modern liberals also practice deception and self-deception. (To be sure, in the book Gellner is not very concerned about liberalism.) That is liberals understand themselves as robust pluralists about human possibility and many even recognize fundamental pluralism over values. Liberals take these as facts (as well as important aims). We understand societies as constituted by fundamentally heterogeneous ways of life. One may even say that the liberal, technocratic obsession with consensus formation is an expression of anxiety over so much diversity.

Yet, on Gellner's view liberals are deluded in two ways. First, liberals think that our ideas shape human history whereas whatever liberalism we have is a byproduct of other forces. (In fact, he thinks that ideas matter remarkably little to the development of modern society.) Second, liberals understand themselves as embracing human variety, but industrial society aims at standardized and homogenized human beings and requires this to function ever more smoothly. Instead of human diversity, we get standardized humans who become so by receiving many years of generalist and fairly similar educations. This makes possible open-ended human and economic growth (these become increasingly intertwined)--the true goal of modernity.

From the perspective of human history humans have never been more homogeneous and standardized. Gellner, who signals his indebtedness to Adam Smith on many other points, is here picking up a thought that worried Adam Smith.  But he goes beyond Smith by seeing that the human-machine in the modern industrial economy is primarily a manipulator of symbols. (That's compatible with Smith's anthropology, but not something Smith emphasized.) For, in fact, modernity (if we may use that term) is characterized by a drive to ever increasing amounts of standardization in the factors of production (which generates positive externalities, efficiencies, etc.) which inter alia also include language, culture (in a broad sense), and communications. A Gellner-style interpretation of modern free-trade accords, for example, is that these are fundamentally about setting mutual agreeable standards (as opposed to tariffs, etc.): "society and its inescapable implications will continue to ensure that men are dependent on culture, and that culture requires standardization over quite wide areas, and needs to be maintained and serviced." (120) Where he goes wrong is (and he could have picked this up from Foucault) that this process must be maintained by "by centralized agencies;" (120) a lot of it can be farmed out and devolved to interested parties and self-monitoring.

One nice implication (although it may also be thought a weakness) of Gellner's analysis is that cultural values and economic goals are not seen as different areas of human existence. All politics is debate over values and always also de facto a debate over the structure of the economy and vice versa. For cultural issues are always connected to economic interests if only the economic interest of the group: what matters is who gets to decide what cultural standards are the shared standards (this point is familiar to those who get exercised about the debates over the EU's attempts to label goods and foods).*

To be sure, the view just sketched is compatible with surface variety, and even the development of liberal anti-nationalism. But because liberals buy into the gospel of growth, which presupposes common cultural  goods and standards, they thereby always reinforce the engine of nationalism or other versions of cultural homogeneity (this is a trope among critics of liberalism). So, on this picture nationalism is not just an intermediary stage in economic development (to kick-start it), but always a live possibility fueled by the liberal's embrace of economic growth.