Learning in protest-time

Whatever you think of the recent campus protests, now is a good time to read about old ones.

I used to hear about old protests at Cornell. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But the way the old protests were talked about, it seemed the best of times, morally speaking. At least it was better than the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period characterized by routine alternations of study and debauchery.

Middle-aged, I now see the obvious rightness of the study-and-debauch routine inside a university. (Well, yes, the routine could do with less debauching.)

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning,” C. S. Lewis says, echoing many, many other university people since the dawn of (at least) the modern university. This is an obvious truth … or was for a long time.

But, but, the present urgency!

Well, there’s always a present urgency; if nothing else, people need their souls saved. (It’s usually other people, isn’t it?) But that’s not what a university is for. “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” So, one (a) leaves the university and does whatever seems urgent, or else (b) stays in the university and pursues learning. No distractions, please.

(The old Cornell protests may actually have been justified since they were about how to pursue learning. This is an important point. Alas, it is not a neglected one. “How learning is moral to pursue” has been trotted out as the concern behind much gratuitous scholarship⁠/activism. The result has been the blending of two endeavors that university people, of all people, should take pains to distinguish.)

I do take issue with Lewis’s second sentence: “As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” Fine, if being a clerk is (a) temporary or (b) lifelong but avocational; but a natural reading of the passage, for us if not for Lewis’s Oxford students, is that it’s a career. The truth is, students are not expected to make themselves into lifelong professional students. Well, some are, but very few.

Lewis (p. 49):

A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

Good, good. And if one is so excited by the present urgency that one can’t devote oneself to learning or let others get on with it in peace, that is prima facie evidence that membership in the university isn’t one’s vocation – that one should leave. There is wiggle room, of course. Michael Dummett put aside his Frege for a while to decry racism. He kept on decrying racism the rest of his life. He also wrote about tarot cards. But he did get back to Frege, in a big way.

A passion for exactitude

It’s time for a long quotation from the philosopher Michael Dummett. I mention him once or twice every ten years.

(I just realized that, as of December, I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I started on Xanga, and when that service became costly I switched to Blogger/​Blogspot. I may write a recapitulation soon.)

This is from pp. 3–5 of Voting Procedures (1984), one of Dummett’s excursions into what, for him, is “popular” philosophy.

In view of all this, one would expect that voting procedures and their operation would have been the subject of a considerable amount of intellectual enquiry. One would expect also that the results of such investigations would be well known both to political and social theorists and to all those concerned with practical affairs, and would be applied both by those who have frequently to take part in voting and, above all, by those concerned to devise voting procedures to be as fair and as satisfactory as possible. Of these two natural expectations, the first is indeed satisfied, but the second hardly at all. In the period since the end of the Second World War, a considerable body of theory concerning voting has been built up. This topic was pioneered by Professor Duncan Black, an economist, who published some articles about it in the late 1940s, and a book, The Theory of Committees and Elections, in 1958: an important contribution, not expressed specifically in terms of voting, was made by Professor Kenneth Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values of 1951 [see note 1 below]. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, the theory initiated by Black and Arrow has been extensively developed, principally in articles published in learned journals. One of the most surprising features of all this is how recent this work is. Duncan Black devoted a section of his book to a historical survey. From this it emerged that almost the only serious work on the theory of voting that had previously been done was carried out in France just before and during the Revolution, by Borda, Condorcet, and Laplace; this work had subsequently been almost entirely forgotten, save by a few British mathematicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who made insignificant contributions to it. A minor exception, not noticed by Black, is the unimpressive section devoted to the subject by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze in his Logik of 1874. The only exception mentioned by Black is the remarkable intervention by C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), contained in three pamphlets which he wrote in complete ignorance of the work of his predecessors, and which were directed at the voting procedure to be adopted by the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, to which he belonged [see note 2 below].

[Note 1:] See the Bibliography for works by Arrow and Black. Arrow’s possibility theorem (more exactly called an impossibility theorem) is so fundamental to the subject that he is often credited with having been the modern initiator of it, especially since his basic notation has become standard. This is unfair to Black, who was the real twentieth-century pioneer of the theory of voting, as well as a diligent researcher into its earlier history; it may be due in part to the fact that, although Black’s original papers on the subject appeared in 1948–9, his book was not published until 1958, while Arrow’s celebrated monograph came out in 1951. Black was, in particular, the originator of the concept of single-peakedness (not used in the present book), with which Arrow is sometimes credited but which he in fact took over from Black. Single-peakedness is a condition which guarantees the existence of a top. For the case when some preference scales are weak, the condition was weakened by Farquharson and myself in our paper of 1961; alternative though analogous sufficient conditions were later given by Inada, Sen, and Pattanaik.

[Note 2:] See the Bibliography. It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book that he planned to write on the subject. Such were his lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.

I especially like Dummett’s asides on Dodgson (Carroll) and the also-ran, Lotze.

Once, eleven years ago, I mentioned Dummett by way of griping about George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed four full books by Saunders and zero by Dummett. It wouldn’t hurt to finish Dummett’s trenchant On Immigration and Refugees; completing one of his Frege books, much as I adore them (all too often uncomprehendingly, it must be admitted), is above my pay grade.

“But can he do the job?”

Were I to become a full-time member of a philosophy department with at least some undergraduates under my care, I’d try to establish a one- or two-credit “professional development” seminar to make sure that those considering grad school could make an informed choice.

Yes, it would have to be a course. A couple of informal sessions wouldn’t suffice. The content ought to be repeated several times, in readings, lectures, and class discussions – and with a megaphone. (Even then, there’d be a real danger that the undergraduates wouldn’t listen carefully enough.)

I’d probably assign this book by the philosopher Jason Brennan. It gives lots of useful, blunt, goal-oriented advice. It tells which parts of one’s soul one would have to sell to get an academic job after grad school. (The part that loves to teach, for instance.) Here is an interview in which Brennan mentions some of the book’s highlights.

Another book, by an ex-professor of anthropology, Karen Kelsky, is also worth looking at, but it’s a brutal downer and not always helpful. One senses that Kelsky is writing with cruel glee, grinding people down with minutae about what to do and not do. Then again, who am I to say? I’m on the outside looking in. Perhaps those tiny details do matter in the job market. My impression, though, is that many of them do not matter. For example, I’ve looked at lots of CVs of successful, recent job seekers, and plenty of them run afoul of Kelsky’s very detailed rules for how to write a CV. But then, maybe that level of detail is dictated by her audience. Maybe a lot of job seekers are desperate enough to want to be told where to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.

What I’d definitely assign is this short address by the philosopher David McNaughton. Brennan and Kelsky assume that the goal is to get the job. McNaughton considers the more important question (raised repeatedly by Dan Hedaya in Joe Versus the Volcano):

I KNOW HE CAN GET THE JOB, BUT CAN HE DO THE JOB?

Or, rather, can the job seeker do the job well; that is, can the careerist philosopher write anything worth reading? On McNaughton’s view, professionalization is stunting, and the profession weeds out lots of potentially valuable contributors.

McNaughton is very down on how academic philosophy is done. Brennan thinks it’s much more workable. Who is more trustworthy? I’ve read around in several of Brennan’s books; I like him, though I tend to disagree with him; but he often sounds like he’s on an ideological mission. I’ve read around in several of McNaughton’s books, too, and encountered moments of disinterested curiosity, and even profundity; and when McNaughton isn’t being profound, he’s at least rubbing shoulders with and expounding authors who are profound. Besides, I’ve always been inclined to agree more with McNaughton’s professional priorities, anyway.

This isn’t to say that I agree with everything McNaughton says. He disparages Michael Dummett’s prose style, and I actually quite enjoy reading Dummett.

George Saunders

His old hipster voice repulses me. But I’m also comforted, because while I’m reading George Saunders I’m thinking, I could do this; in a way, I already do this. (How: Embed colloquialisms into strange contexts; transcribe each auditory quirk using punctuation that respects the ear, or logic, but injures the eye.)

No, these days, the stylist I envy is Michael Dummett. His sentences are enormous but never too long: comma after relentless comma gently cushions each from crashing. Read the preface and introduction to Dummett’s opus; download the entire book here (would that be legal? Would it be moral? On Tuesday, at the bus station, I refused a beggar a dollar, on the ground that begging is against the law; when the beggar asked if I always obey the law, I said, Yeah, pretty much. But now I’m encouraging readers to ignore the law). Again: Read Dummett’s preface and introduction; enjoy his ire, in a tome on sense and reference, quantifiers, proper names, etc. (and what a lovely old typeface!).

I’m not sure I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph. It doesn’t quite describe what’s so weird about George Saunders. His interior monologues, for example. The low-prole boy might be chained up in the yard; the low-prole kitchen table might have a tire on it; those details aren’t so weird. What’s weird is the low-prole mother’s private thought-stream: not low-prole dialect but Standard English, no, worse, Hipster English, with silent punctuation (slashes) intruding into her thoughts. 

So what she’d love, for tonight? Was getting the pup sold, putting the kids to bed early, and then, Jimmy seeing her as all organized in terms of the pup, they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.

Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.

Freaking, ending in i-n-g, not in i-n-’. And the ha ha ha echoes the language of the other woman in the story, the foil, the middle-class woman. The low-prole woman uses language above her station. That’s weird. It’s not like the scene in King of the Hill when Boomhauer talks “normal”; no, it’s as if Saunders were saying, I’ll “humanize” you by lending you a voice you’d never have, not even in your imagination, ha ha ha. And so we’re always conscious of the author talking over – drowning out! – the character.