One of the predominant dispositions of the
habitus of intellectuals is illuminated the unenlightened with what seem to be counter intuitive views--observations of fact which go against what conventional wisdom would assume to be the case. In fact, one could say that this is the first trick performed by anyone trying to claim legitimacy for their interpretation of the world. Hence the 9/11 truth movement depends on its legitimacy for some twist in what is supposedly a settled case. The difference being that, since it remains marginal (and since it basically has only one trick), it can only concentrate on amassing data to support its case, pushing for support of its case.
The fact that there is not much else to its interpretation of the world (if Bush did it, why? What would this mean down the road? If all these thousands of government workers collaborated with them in perpetrating the fraud, how can we understand what led them to do so? In short, so what?) would place it in a precarious position if conventional wisdom were overturned. It actually acts as a sinkhole for all radical ideas about society--especially those which would talk about the banal violence of the everyday functioning of our culture--so that, to the hegemonic view, all marginal ideas are marginal because they are fragile, ignorant, or despicable.
The more acceptable, and totalizing, intellectual narratives work with a similar sleight of hand in their more public observations. And, like the 9/11 truth movement, they work by using a selective filter (an odd move for totalizing narratives, but whatever works.) Hence it is a commonplace of libertarian views on economics that, since everything must be done through the free market, nothing that is done directly except for working towards the more efficient functioning of
commodification, privatization, and accumulation through the profit motive. Cherry picking, for instance, government regulations that produce the opposite effects is a favorite--chief amongst them being minimum wage requirements which, according to marginal economists and those of a more radical Austrian bent, inevitably increases unemployment.
I'll lay this canard to one side for the moment. The point is that, if the only way to approach social good is through the market, that is the only way to achieve social good. Oh yes--we forgot about that premise: social goods can be achieved efficiently through the market. It's easy to leave that out because it is basically just something brought in as window dressing for its apologetics of the status
quo. It basically says that we can't choose social benefits or goods directly: instead, if they are something that everyone values (which, supposedly, social goods should be) the market will provide them. This is, of course, based on an assumption that everyone is rational, fully informed, and at least mildly motivated by the future effects of their choices. Polluting water and air; poisoning the food system with antibiotics; killing your customers with cancer; working employees to their breaking point; allowing yourself to be exploited to the detriment of your health and well being: these should be impossible
externalities which the long run benefits of capitalism would eventually undermine, just, as Richard Epstein and others claim, child labor was eventually eliminated (though, according to them, the law was useless: the market provided!)
The point, in other words, is that the only directed activity should be the profit motive: these external costs should be figured into the prices of the commodities and activities you undertake. In weak cases, the omniscient, omnipotent force that helps
determine, allocate, collect, and distribute the proceeds of this tax is something like the state; in extreme versions, it can only happen through the voluntary participation of the market: if it doesn't happen there, well then I guess it isn't a problem after all. In any case, taking direct action to create some social good is generally seen as failed before it begins. Social goods--the rising quality of living in general--cannot be proscribed: they can only be created, like black
lung or repetitive stress injuries, as
externalities to the voluntary, profitable contracts of private individuals in the market.
There is, of course, something to be gained by seeing the logic behind this system. Cass
Sunstien has made a good career of trying to square the peg of his mildly liberal (in the post-war, Keynesian sense) disposition with the atomistic cubicles of Chicago School legal and economic theory. If this theory remained marginal, it could simply spin its
counterintuitive logic and provide a source of cautionary information about previous regulatory attempts. However, since it assumes the totality of human society is either the product of 1) human nature; 2) the natural market economy, i.e. the interplay of
atomistic nodes of human nature on a larger canvas; or, the source of all complication and distortion of the above: the government--it cannot actually conceive of the forces that have made it possible for it to assume these things and still seem rigorous and rational. As
Bourdieu quotes Bergson: "It takes centuries of culture to produce a utilitarian such as John Stuart Mill."
This is especially true in the field of education. One of the points made by Harry
Braverman in
Labor and Monopoly Capital is that education in the USA--and science education in particular--has almost always been wrapped up with creating more productivity in the marketplace. That is, in so far as science education and research has been supported, it must be "scientific calculation" to lead "to quicker solutions," science "confined to trouble-shooting and [. . .] product engineering [. . .] the guiding principle
seems to have been almost entirely fast payoff" (163). He does not mean that this was just a corporate model either: it was the focus of the entire science establishment, as it has developed in the US, up until the mid twentieth century.
To this he contrasts the German (or Prussian) model of science education, which was more concerned with basic research. He cites
P.W. Musgrave's research into technical change, who had credited Hegel's influence with that culture's advanced scientific culture:
Hegel's influence on the development of science was, as Musgrave points out, both direct and indirect. In the first instance, there was his role in the reform of Prussian education in the second decade of the nineteenth century. And next, there was the pervasive influence of German speculative philosophy, of which Hegel was the culminating thinker, in giving to German scientific education a fundamental and theoretical cast. Thus while Britain and the United States were still in the grip of that common-sense empiricism which stunts and discourages reflective thought and basic scientific research, in Germany it was these very habits of mind that were being developed in the scientific community. It was for this reason more than any other that the primacy of European science passed from France to Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Britain in the same period remained mired in, "what J. S. Mill called 'the dogmatism of common sense' backed by the rule of thumb. (160)
The lack of funding and support for basic science continued in the US throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, with some of the larger enterprises finding the need to borrow from Germany--both by importing scientists or, in the case of the wholesale appropriation of German patents after WWI, simply stealing their discoveries--in order to advance the technical aspects of industry more than the "fast payoff" would allow. The change came at mid-century, when the Nazis drove all the Jewish intellectuals and scientists out of Germany
that the United States acquired a scientific base equal to its industrial power, which had prior to this development depended largely on the engineering exploitation of foreign science. Thus it has only been since World War II that scientific research in the United States, heavily financed by corporations and government, and buttressed by further drafts of scientific talent from all over the world, has systematically furnished the scientific knowledge utilized in industry. (166)
Braverman overplays the depth of the instrumentality that then occurred, in some ways undercutting his larger point. This seeding of investment in basic science research--of education that is not directed completely towards its instrumental association with capitalist profit--led to many important discoveries. In large part, what it showed was that there could be indirect benefits to carrying out undirected research. And that the public funding of seemingly mundane or ridiculous
experiments and research may result in simply finding the answer to the particular hypothesis one was looking for: or it may lead to a breakthrough that others can build upon later.
Recent proof of this tradition still existing at the university level occurred a few weeks ago when the
NYT reported on a team of Harvard physicists that had discovered the light sensitivity of a substance they called "black silicon." It can be used for
ultra sensitive sensors and possibly for harnessing solar energy.
This would never have happened if the physicist, Eric Mazur, and his graduate students had stuck to the original purpose of their research. He says their experience offers a lesson in government financing of science and technology, which is becoming so narrow and applied as to make discoveries like theirs much less likely.
A more narrow focus does have its advantages: for one, it can be more likely to produce an immediate payoff.
But in the current research environment, “you are less likely to be open to serendipity,” said Judith L. Estrin, an electrical engineer and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy” (McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Black silicon was discovered because Dr. Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces.
Of course, this example does confirm some of what
Braverman laments: most basic science research comes out of efforts to create more effective weapons just as often as it is hoped it will result in an indirect benefit for an entrepreneurial enterprise--which, in this case, it did: the article says that, "Harvard plans to announce that it has licensed patents for black silicon to
SiOnyx, a company in Beverly, Mass., that has raised $11 million in venture financing." This, in turn, points to the problem of patents of this kind, more thoroughly explored by
Michael Perelman who points out that much of the basic research on which patents in technology or medicine are based is done by government funded labs. I will speak more about this in the dissertation--and it is indeed an enormous problem, especially when, in the case of
pharmaceuticals, the Government hands the companies to whom they grant these patents an even larger subsidy after the fact.
At the moment, I want to point out the basic misunderstanding in US culture about science and, in a larger scope, education. Whatever the actual changes that have been made to the development of science and education at the university level, the rest of the system is still polluted with the nineteenth century presumption of how knowledge and technological innovation occur in relation to these institutions. Thus, in the presidential debates, candidates often (as Sarah
Palin did
in the Vice Presidential round, as well as on the
stump) pick on government funding for what they deem useless (i.e. unprofitable) scientific research (on Fruit Flies or seal DNA, as the two links above describe). When a candidate assumes that, just by mentioning these studies to any average American audience, you can make them groan with this absurd use of their tax dollars. As Josh Marshall's
commenters point out, there are other mechanisms for government funding than earmarks (the NSF, other peer-reviewed institutions) but the point here is not whether it went through these channels or not: it is just that the candidate can assume people
will find government support for any basic research a ridiculous proposition--especially when you simply read the proposals. As a principle, perhaps, people will claim to support it: but when they are told, specifically, what that means, the presumption is that they will groan.
The assumption is based in the longstanding culture of US approaches to education and knowledge production: that they really should be focused on creating payoffs, not dabbling around with the basics. The quintessential US image of innovation is found in the lone, somewhat eccentric, even uneducated innovator, tinkering in the garage, Edison-like, to find a marketable invention that will make him rich: hence the popular mythology of how Apple got its start in a garage (a myth that Manuel
Castells sees as organizing much of the libertarian ethic in silicon valley, in stark contradiction to the massive state funding that went into the college system there.)
It is a basic presumption about how things should work. The paradoxical shift in our understanding of how science and education should function in our culture--along these utilitarian yet libertarian indexes. We like to have the image of the instant success, the burst of genius, but never the long hard slog through basic education and learning. It may be that these don't make for good T.V. Watch an episode of
CSI or even
Law and Order: the basic fantasy here about the use of science, technology, even the law is that there are people who are so seemingly enlightened and adept that nothing delays their swift, effective use of the tools at hand to produce the required result. Sure, there is the general running down of hypotheses about who killed who or what their human motives are--a mystery in which the viewers are invited to participate. But in running these through the mechanism of science or the law--the effective use of the tools, long in production, long in education, often inconclusive, even counterproductive and contradictory--the results are quick and the process hidden from view.
If it were to be a real display of the struggle involved in producing results, each plot twist in which science is the pivot--particularly when it is an unusual or flashy use of science or technology--would likely play out like an entire episode of
HOUSE, where the process of illuminating the truth that science and education can provide is so long and painful that angry,
volatile characters involved in salacious interludes of sex, drugs and violence are required to make us pay attention. Yet outside the "immediate payoff" resulting from the
NYT article above calls narrowly focused research and education--that is, narrowly focused on financial
remuneration or, in the case of
CSI and Co., catching bad guys (i.e. military hardware)--science and education are simply not that exciting to watch in a 30 minute segment.
Thus, when Obama speaks of improving science and math education, as in the one doesn't really see him advancing the push for basic research. He frames it, as does the author to the book cited in the
NYT piece, in terms of
competitiveness. In fact, this is almost the only way we can frame education in the US environment: learning for learning's sake is basically frowned upon and proving results in instrumental
enculturation of specific learning tasks becomes the only goal of teachers.
Competativeness becomes the watchword, with schools competing with each other to have better scores on instrumental standardized tests; teachers competing with each other within schools; students competing with each other in class; states competing with each other for federal money; etc. It could be said that, in such a deeply--primitively, as Paul Smith would say--capitalistic culture, these would be good survival lessons for educators to impart. But we can't say that this culture will necessarily produce any increase in the standard of living or, in fact, give us any leg up on our international competition.
It is the unhealthy focus on the last issue--the
competitiveness in terms of international economics--that Paul
Krugman calls "A Dangerous Obsession" in his book
Pop Internationalism. Here he argued (in 1996)
that the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the international economic system. [. . . .] Thinking in terms of competitiveness leads, directly and indirectly, to bad economic policies on a wide range of issues, domestic and foreign, whether it be in health care or trade.
Lest it appear that I'm making him out to sound like some sort of commie (which the Libertarians already believe anyway) his basic point is that placing people who have this
competativeness bug--the idea that we need to have a workforce that is instrumentally prepared to be plugged into any task, that the purpose of education is rote learning rather than undirected, experimental exploration, critical thinking, and collaborative endeavors--in charge of public policies that, on the surface have no background in dealing with them, is ridiculous. Further, by assuming that the thing that these endeavors need is a focus on paring down, efficiency, and cost cutting (a philosophy that, more and more, seems to be taking hold in higher education, where upwards of 60% of the staff are overworked, non-tenured faculty--a model mostly advocated by the dominance of former
CEOs in the role of university presidents) we misunderstand what these endeavors are supposed to do.
It is the logical conclusion of the limited utilitarianism of libertarian philosophy: namely, that, by making education run more efficiently, more in line with the rules of the market, we will produce a more
competitive, educated workforce. This ideology is so dominant that, even in framing my own argument for this short piece, I can only fall back on it in some skewed way. Like
Braverman and Perelman above, the implication of the argument I am building is that they can, in fact, create a more profitable workforce, they just have to approach it from a different direction. The basis of judging a pragmatic success is therefore already given: instead of making the goal the best educated population, the most enlightened critical thinkers--just because we value learning and thought--we have to focus on how this can be beneficial in the war we face in the marketplace. Learning for learning's sake just sounds naive and weak.
Unfortunately, it is this short sighted understandig of education itself that continues to plague the nation--and may likely bring the US as we know it to its knees during this crisis. As
Mike Davis said last week
If you've been watching the sad parade of economic gurus on McNeil-Lehrer, you know that the intellectual shelves in Washington are now almost bare. Neither major party retains more than a few enigmatic shards of policy traditions different from the neo-liberal consensus on trade and privatization. Indeed, posturing pseudo-populists aside, it is unclear whether anyone inside the Beltway, including Obama's economic advisors, can think clearly beyond the indoctrinated mindset of Goldman Sachs, the source of the two most prominent secretaries of the treasury over the last decade.
Or, more provocatively, as the now infamous manager of
Ladhe Capital said in his farewell letter to the financial industry:
Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, "What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it." I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.
In our stuggle to carry on the unending competative war, in our misguided attempt at structuring education for instant payoffs without considering the investment necessary for making those actually occur, we have forgotten what the purpose of education was supposed to be. It was not simply to prepare us to be good workers, to indoctrinate a class of managers, to justify the unofficial aristocracy: it was supposed to help us live a good life.
In this, one would think the best use of our resources would be to try to improve the health care, the infrastructure, the old age assistance, the education and basic nutrition of the population as a whole. One would think that the best goal of education would be to prepare us for making life better for one another. Surely this would be the best ground on which we could be competative internationally, if that were the goal. Instead, it is seen as an ineffective strategy that ignores the realities on the ground: governments need to be trim, efficient, transparent (you know, unlike multinational corporations.) The goal--competativeness, a.k.a. market freedom-- is the only goal: it must be pursued single mindedly. Any attempt to alter it will fail--and the forces that favor it will do all in their power to make sure that it does, ignoring the failure of their favored mechanism and casting all the blame, as they have with the CRA and ACORN, on any attempt to alter the cold rational logic of their utopia. That this mechanism has never existed in its purity, that it depends on the work of the larger society, that it feeds on people educated in basic research and critical thinking and needs them to compete, these are denied or explained away. Standardized testing, standardized education, after all, is a big business.
It seems like a better time than ever to dismiss this rationale and institute a more coherent understanding of what education and science should look like. On this, the idea of education for life has two meanings. On the one hand, it points to the focus mentioned above--on teaching people how to care, how to create a better life in the domestic sphere. This certainly relies on the scientific institutions in a clear way and would be equally dependent on the infusion of money from the embedded market economy. There will, most likely, always be some form of market through which some commodities are exchanged: that doesn't mean that everything has to take this form or use this mechanism. There will likely be plenty of places to make a profit and, if we really have to combat the obtuse charges of naivete, we might point out that a system that was supportive in this way would likely produce a myriad of contraptions and arrangements that could be profitably exported. Since the basic accusation seems to be "supporting life directly is wrong; life can only be supported indirectly by privatization of life processes," I sincerely believe we have come to an impass in rational discussion. The empirical results of the failure of privatizing health care, food production, medicine and pharmaceuticals seems fairly clear: it has reinstated a steep hierarchy where the working poor find themselves without all or enough of one or even all of these on a regular basis. The fact that we still mostly have to deal with trash, shit, and crime--the three most unappealing issues brought up against anyone proposing even mild forms of social democracy--are still dealt with through public or semi-public mechanisms, it is a fallacy to say that these would fall by the wayside. Having investment and education focused on life, directly, seems like a reasonable alternative.
On the other hand, it refers to the consequences of this changing environment--consequences that seem to be here no matter what. And it refers to a principle we should reinstate whether the above emphasis is ever able to take hold or not. In a way, it actually seems to be something that we have forgotten in the last two generations. Namely, that education isn't just something we do once and then get on with the money-making. The time when the same kind of problems would face us forever and require the same people with the same knowledge of them are behind us--if they were ever here before. We will need to have people learning throughout their lives, building on their knowledge and filling in the gaps, continuously.
But more than this, we need to adjust our understanding of how education fits into the average person's life. This is all the more pertinent in the current atmosphere of education and work, which doesn't allow for the kind of learning--or at least the liesure to do it--just mentioned. In this atmosphere, to justify the runaway profits of a select few, we are greeted with the narrative about how bravely they have risked their capital in putting it to work for the social good in the profitable investment. I've recently said
what I think about this notion of risk. And I stand by the idea that there has been a starkly unequal reward provided for this kind of risk in the current atmosphere. In large part this is because the risk that workers undertake is sleighted in favor of the glamorous Objectivist capitalist/entrepreneur-porn above.
To this, I could just say, bollocks: there's no risk and you know it. You might go under but you won't lose your shirt. You might lose some money, but there is, as you seem to think, plenty of it to be made.
But I'll be a little more nuanced. In starting a trade, training for a career or beginning college, the fanciful thing to ask people is what they would like to do. Of course few people will get to do what they would like to do, and only a marginal percentage settle on doing something they can tolerate. The point being here that when people decide this, more than likely they are forced to look around and see what employment opportunities are out there for the doing of that thing they might "want to do." More than likely, there isn't and they have to reconsider. I see this struggle often with students I advise, who are pulled in various directions. The unfortunate thing is that, those who don't consider this in a calculated way, those who are really into a university education for the learning, for the education, find themselves in pretty desparate straits at the end, trying to figure out what they will now do after graduation: they have been educated, many of them, far above what their class position necessitates: yet in order to make a living they will likely have to find some new career, one they will need to be trained for, to invest yet more time in, in order to support themselves. The education they have, in this way, is usually very ill suited for the work they will ultimately have to do.
This is, of course, fine. Many people do things they don't like and have to undergo training and put in time in an industry in which they only slowly learn to take an interest. But, on the other hand, in whatever path they choose--whether before training, in beginning college or a trade school, after college in starting at ground level in a career path--they take a risk. It is a significantly greater risk than the simple, short term investment of one's already plentiful capital: it is an investment of valuable, irreplacable time in one's life. Granted the prudent capitalist will invest in similar time and effort, but the stakes are lower. And while there is always lament about investors losing their money, when the average worker suddenly finds that their chosen career path is no longer viable, this is not seen as a similar sort of risk: it is seen as a force of nature, overtaking a poor cog in an enormous machine. But, just as the system supposedly depends on capitalists taking risk with their capital, it equally depends on workers risking their time--and often their mental energy, their health, their relationships--in order to work for those capitalists. When they are suddenly turned out of an industry, when a shop is shuttered and sent abroad, when any number of world events occur to displace workers, the risk that they have taken is not rewarded with, for instance, the golden parachute of the CEO. In increasinly rare cases, they are given six months of meager benefits in order to 1) discover whether it was just a single closure in an industry that still has viable employment options or 2) discover a completely new industry at which they could be qualified, get training, and, in either case, find a placement in a job. In other words, they have to embark on another set of risks which will possibly lead to another set of failures.
This is not the case of people not wanting to work or asking for more than their share: it is the case of people trying very hard and their effort being squandered, often by the very system they train themselves to serve.
Education for life, in this case, means that workers--as they are starting to--will need to be more nimble in their association with the relationship of their education with their job. Retraining for the next career will need the be something that we all continue doing throughout our lives in order to combat the chaotic turnover that the market creates--the exponential destruction of our investment in life time through devalorization of our work experience and knowledge. Most of us should deny loyalty to this system or to its administrators, except in so far as we are paid to do so. This is the fragile, fragmented association it has deemed we are worthy of and we should afford it no deeper relationship.
Perhaps this could be mediated by more government or community programs--and if there are any wise administrators in the system left, they will suddenly find this in the back of the intellectual cupboard Davis refers to above--but in the event that it is not, it should be a cue to all of us that, if the system isn't ready to educate us for life--in either sense of the phrase--we need to be laying the groundwork for a new system which will.
