APA job fairs and humanities in American capitalism.
My dad sent me an article about a main job-hunting avenue for thousands of Ph.D. candidates in philosophy in this country.
Must say, it makes for quite a sad read for me. The crux of the sadness seeming to be tied up in:
The competition is so intense that many applicants consider themselves lucky to get any kind of tenure-track job, even if it is a poorly paid job teaching critical thinking to prospective refrigerator repairmen in rural Oklahoma.
In general, compared to almost any other industrialised “Western” nation, the U.S. is abysmally impoverished in its ability, and especially its willingness, to meaningfully support the development of its truly educated — specialists in the arts and humanities.
The U.S. is by far the most illustrative example of an economy and a universe that adheres most closely to Marx’s dictum that cultural life in a society is a rather literal projection of its productive relations — in a word, blind economic imperatives that cater to the lowest common denominator.
There is something about the nature of the relationship between academia/higher education and the hoi polloi that makes the former inordinately sensitive to the vicious hostility of capitalism (and whatever “democratic’ inner compulsions may be ascribed to its marketplace dynamics, the authenticity of which as suchly characterised I am generally moved to question) to the intellectual achievements of world culture, and places it in the precarious position of needing a conscious and concerted subsidy.
I am not, in general, persuaded by counterarguments that don the thin veneer of “democratic” pretensions in their suggestion that the state of affairs for scholars is simply a reflection of a system that elicits the maximum expression of human “freedom” in that it gives people to organically make choices about the appropriation of their share of the social product — for good or ill. And if it’s ill and adversarial to the fruition of intellectual life of the society, the fault lies nowhere but with its own constituents.
As the worldview — which strikes me as incredibly simplistic and overly technocratic — captured by this statement would have it, subsidising scholastic work in a way that makes it tenable to build a career of it is an imposition of an “artificiality” upon the realities of market supply and demand. The claim is that the threadbare “demand” for it indicates its marginal value to the whole of a society, and thus that any attempt to tinker with the results amounts to some form of “coercion,” “liberal elitism,” “big government knows best,” and so on.
The first problem is rather obvious, and I will plead guilty to a certain “liberal elitism” in this area as charged. Most of society — especially inasmuch as a large part of it consists of lazy, narrow-minded and unthinking consumers — is ill-educated and does not have sufficient perspective to make intelligent decisions about the role, and indeed, the indispensability, of higher education to its own well-being.
This is not really spoken from intense contempt for the common man; I am still an optimist about people overall, believe their motives to be basically good, and their collective intelligence quite capable if given the proper resources.
However, the structure of this society, the self-perpetuating socio-economic dynamics present therein, and the power inequalities that obtain widely act strongly to preempt the exercise of that capability, and its provision with what I have chosen to term “proper resources.”
This aside, the more sophisticated and recondite critique is structural, although it is enourmously brought to bear on the significance of the last sentence.
As turning one’s profession into a survival strategy that includes a sustainable compensation plan is concerned, the inner compulsion of capitalism is toward the remuneration of things of relatively simple goods and services that have the immediacy of perceptible commercial or hedonistic-subjective value. Basic economics even accounts for some of this in a variety of mundane areas in its treatment of “negative externalities,” although what is typically underemphasised is that so many of them result from the inherent shortsightedness of the profit motive, strengthened by the nature of competition to drive the long-term sustainability of certain practices down to the lowest common denominator. Oft-invoked examples of this include pollution, unsustainable agricultural practices, the depletion of natural resources, logging, etc.
The appreciation of purely scholastic work and high culture is even more capricious and exacting in this regard — and thus, when unfulfilled, more vulnerable — than the environment, I would venture to say. Much of the “output” of the liberal arts lacks any of the immediacy associated with economically transformative activities in that it cannot be commodified and readily applied or “experienced” as a good and service, and indeed, lacks even the most rudimentarily quantifiable properties of anything persuasively construed as a “good long-term investment” whose immediate benefit is not “readily” obvious.
It is just one of those things that is extremely socially necessary, and indeed foundationally supports much of the development of human society in ways readily evidenced from even a cursory examination of the pedigree of human understanding, but you can’t affix price tags to it, nor show how to a refrigerator repairman in rural Oklahoma its obvious and fathomable “benefits.” Not that there is any shortage of attempts to try to shoehorn it into some sort of economic model, but such misconstructions fundamentally pervert the very fabric of academic work.
In short, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just give the “social benefit” of an English professor or a philosophy student or an artist or a specialist of music theory a “value” and put it on the shelf at Target.
The humanities are not a “market datum.” They do not have verifiable or measurable quantities, they do not send “pricing signals,” they do not earn “investor confidence,” and do not produce “feedback.” It seems to me that it is by an ontological virtue that they participate outside the sphere of market activity; they are not “products.” Yet what we have done, for the most part, is precisely to subordinate them to those metrics, for which they cannot possibly be more ill-suited, and then wave our hands with great pep and vigour and sing encomia to our consummation of “freedom.”
Somewhere, somehow, higher and exclusive wisdom has had to step in to rescue our world from its seemingly suicidal — or at least misanthropic — propensity, however “elegantly organic” or “democratic” the mask you want to paint over the terrifying physiognomy of the process, to descend into the abyss of ignorance and cultural stagnation.
Of course, the process has always been explainable — dare I say justifiable in the eyes of the applicable contemporary proponents — in the terminology, language, and cosmological assumptions of the socioeconomic order fashionable in the time.
You’ll have to forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better. Surely you’ve read about the Dark Ages.
December 25th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Hi, Alex, nice talking to you again.
I will try to offer some thoughts from an “Austrian school” libertarian perspective. Keep in mind that I’m not exactly an Austrian myself, though if I had to commit to a particular school of thought it would be the Austrians. One fundamental disagreement I have with the Austrians is that I don’t believe that government interference in the market is ALWAYS immoral. Austrians generally object to market intervention on both moral and economic grounds. I have trouble unpersuading myself of their economic arguments, which is why I am some kind of quasi-Austrian. But the moral argument strikes me as less clear, especially when given a categorical application. So I hope that puts my cards on the table a bit.
That previous point relates to your post, I think. The ‘free market’ (at least for Austrians) is nothing more than an economic system in which every transaction is mutually voluntary (i.e., uncoerced) by the transactors. Another way of putting it is that it is an economic system in which economic resources are distributed according to the subjective valuations of the market participants. There is no ‘right’ economic answer about whether orange juice or apple juice should be a more profitable product. It all comes down to what the people in the economic system happen to desire, in accordance with their own subjective hierarchy of values. All people have a limited amount of economic resources (their scarcity–their limitedness–is what makes them ‘economic’ resources); even Donald Trump and Bill Gates. True, the superrich are able to fulfill a lot more of their ambitions than other folks. But even they die, in the end, with things that never got checked off their ‘to do’ list. Even if they don’t run out of money, they run out of time and they run out of energy. These too are economic resources, subject to scarcity.
So, if all the millions of people in society, making thousands of decisions about how to dispose of their own limited resources (money, time, energy, etc.), end up showing a ‘willingness’ (considered as the whole) to pay more money for orange juice above what it costs to produce it than they are willing to pay for apple juice above what it costs to produce it, then the effect on the free market is that the society will get more orange juice than apple juice. More producers will put their investments and their resources of production into lines of production that produce orange juice, than will do the same for apple juice. This doesn’t mean there will be no apple juice produced; there are always ‘niche’ markets–opportunity to make a profit selling things that some people value highly.
Now, is there a ‘right’ answer to orange juice/ apple juice? Not according to Austrian-school libertarianism. And most of us would probably agree, when it comes to juice. But what about other things? What about health care? What about higher academics?
The Austrian answer is that these are still economic goods, subject to the same laws of supply and demand, etc., as the juices are. If people in society, generally speaking, would rather spend all of their money on potato chips than they would on a trip to the doctor’s office, even when they are sick (just pretend), then supply and demand will make potato chips more and more profitable and doctor’s services less and less profitable. The net effect will be that society will be provided with MORE potato chips and LESS doctors. For the Austrians, this is good, b/c the people are being provided with economic resources in the way that they actually value them. And that’s as well as we can do.
Of course, in reality most people do not prefer potato chips to doctors, which is why potato chips are relatively cheap and doctors are relatively expensive. It is also why intelligent math-science-minded people are willing in relatively large numbers to pursue a career in medicine, etc. And this is good; in a world of scarcity, we cannot do everything we might want to do. We cannot have as much of everything as we might wish. And so, when it comes down to it, the people in our economy at this time ‘want’ doctors’ services pretty badly, and so they get them. (Again, generally speaking).
But what if the demand curve changed overnight? Suppose everybody becomes afraid of doctors and at the same time embraces the belief that potato chips cure all ills. What do we do then? Do we interfere in the market?
I don’t see why we would. If people WANT potato chips more than they want doctors, then I have trouble coming up with the argument that tells them they are wrong. In Kantian terms, we can come up with all kinds of hypothetical imperatives–”acc. to the best scientific knowledge availabvle to us, IF you want to live a long and healthful life, you should go to the doctor more often.” But I can’t find the categorical imperative that says “No matter what your goals in life, you ought to go to the doctor and not spend so much money on potato chips.”
Now, I said I differ with Austrians somewhat. I do believe that there are times when it is proper to interfere in the market. But the previous discussion illustrates what kinds of circumstances have to be in place for that to be proper, in my view. If you want to be justified in overriding the free market desire for (ssy) more potato chips and less doctors, then you need to be in the position where all of the following obtain:
1. You KNOW that, in fact, there is some ‘objective value’ which all people OUGHT to value. There is something thate is inherently more valuable than other valuables, not merely subject to the personal preferences of individuals.
2. This objectively valuable value is currently being undercut on the arrangement of resource distribution brought about by the ‘free market’ (assuming, naively, that we ever have genuine ‘free market’ condiditions in the first place).
3. The best available strategy for subsidizing that objectively valuable value will not have foreseeable negative consequences that call into question overall wisdom of the strategy.
I am open to interventions when all 3 of these are met; but I find them very hard to meet in real-world cases. (3) by itself is a killer, because it brings ‘economic’ arguments back in which often deflate the moral indignation that we might have built up in our throats under (1) and (2). But ‘negative consequences;’ that’s economics talk! So the moral argument for intervention falls flat, to me, if the intervention ends up having significant negative economic effects. Because at that point it becomes very hard to insist that the original inteverntion was morally justified, on the net, when it obviously increased suffering (which is what ‘negative economic effects’ represent–human suffering).
Also, there is one clear and undeniable effect of all interventions in the market, no matter how morally justified they might seem to be: they diminish property rights. Again, I believe this bummer of a consequence can possibly overcome in the right kind of case, but it really IS a bummer of a consequence, and we have to take it seriously.
So, back to doctors and potato chips. It isn’t easy, is it?, to show that people somehow should have their property rights violated (their right to dispose of THEIR scarce economic resources–their money, time, energy, etc.–in a way that they think best) simply b/c they have an irrational preference for potato chips over doctors.
And that’s just a silly case that I made up. In real life, it is usually not even clear that we can so dogmatically proclaim the market’s preferences irrational. People, at this point, speaking in generalities, would rather buy cheaper, less-healthy food than more expensive, healthier food. But is this irrational of them? I’m not so sure. People have to make trade-offs; that’s what economic scarcity is all about. Is it IRRATIONAL to prefer some extra money in my pocket when I leave the grocery store–money I can spend on other things that are important to me besides food–even if I know that the cheaper food I bought might be bad for my health in the long term. If I actually prefer to trade off future healthfulness for greater value-fulfillment in the present, is this preference IRRATIONAL? I can’t see how it is; or more properly, I can’t see how we can KNOW that it is. We might have our suspicions, but I don’t see how anyone other than God can answer such a question.
Now apply this to people choosing to pursue other goals with their limited supply of resources besides higher education, and I think you see how my argument goes. Higher education is great; sure. But is it so great that it is irrational for a person to choose to dispose his limited time, money, and energy to pursue other things? Are you willing to place that burden on folks? People have to choose between a lot of different potential uses for their scarce resources, and many of them are arguably on a similar level of importance to higher education. Health care, future security, present security, tokens of affection for loved ones, cultural events, television to unwind after a hard day at work, etc.
I agree, by the way, that not all values can be quantified. But the point is that true free market economics does not force all things to be quantified. It lets people choose for themselves among unquantifiable goods as well. People do not just have subjective hierarchies of values regarding things like bread and doctor’s office visits; they also have them for things like honor, love, etc. If a man prefers his honor (as he understands it) to food, then he will choose to starve if ever faced with the choice. And there are people who are like this; they will choose poverty and death rather than lose their reputation/honor/lovedone/etc. But THAT is an ‘economic’ choice, too! Economics isn’t only about quantifiable goods. It’s about ALL decisions that require the allocation of scarce resources. Including time, energy, etc. So I choose to spend my time working in a soup kitchen rather than working a job that pays lots of money but requires lots of overtime; and that choice is still an economic one. The free market is still at work.
The only time the free market is not at work is when one person or group of people use physical violence or the threat of such violence to ’skew’ the process. Whether the threatened violence takes the form of a mugger on the street, or a legislature that passes a farm subsidy bill; in either case, people are no longer given the same degree of freedom to dispose of their own limited resources as they think best. This is what we must resolve to do if we think the ‘market’ is screwing up somehow–we must resolve to step in and crush the property rights of people.
This is a drastic step, and while I agree with you–enthusiastically–about the true value of higher education to society, I cannot justify using government coersion to override people’s preferences.
So, my rejoinder to you in the end is fairly simple: you currently object to the particular preferences that our economic society seems to have. You wish they valued higher education in the humanities more than they do. I agree with you on this, by the way. But it seems to me that this just puts you in the same position, morally, as the pineapple-juice producer. If you want more people to buy your pinapple juice, then convince them that they should. People’s demand curves DO change, and persuasion is a big part of that. Write a book, post on your blog, argue with friends, take advertising classes and start planting messages that create positive associations with pineapple-juice, etc. But why would you consider having government agents (men with guns, in the end) come in and force your product into a more competitive position than where the people currently want it to be?
Again, there are drawbacks to this economically (and economic drawbacks are moral drawbacks, b/c they effect quality of life of flesh-and-blood people). If government starts trying to ‘prop up’ higher education, whether through price controls or subsidies or outright bans on other kinds of activity or whatever–they are in effect taking scarced resources away from people who would not have chosen to use them on higher education and giving them to people involved with higher education. It’s a sweet deal for people in higher education (although maybe not even for them in the long-term. It would depend on the particulars)–and a bad deal for everybody else in the economy. Everybody else has, in effect, had their net supply of scarce resources–their real supply of money, time, and energy–depleted for something that they themselves do not value enough to use for that purpose. You may say, “Yes! And that’s good! B/c higher education simply IS valuable, whether these dummies see it or not.” But the problem here is that you are leaving out half of the analysis; you are ignoring all the other uses that people would have put those resources to if they had had their druthers. What, precisely, are we giving up as a society by depleting people’s supply of scarce resources in this way? We gain a higher quality system of higher education, maybe (Why “maybe”? Because government is an inherently inefficient enterprise, and often even the things it explicitly sets out to do end up backfiring. A whole other wrinkle to the libertarian argument.) But we lose…what, exactly? It’s hard to say, but we definitely lose SOMETHING. We lose all the things people would have done with those resources that we have now funnelled ‘artificially’ into education. And in the real world these things are not likely to be limitied to potato chips and other inconsequential things. What exactly we’re giving up we’ll never know. But that doesn’t comfort me any more than a return to the ‘Dark Ages’ comforts you.
December 25th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Hi Xon,
Very nice to hear from you! Merry Christmas to you, Katie & family; I hope the holiday season is treating you well.
Thank you for taking the time to concoct such a thorough and thought-provoking response.
From a Libertarian economic angle, not altogether orthogonal to my own, I certainly concur with the objections you propose and the grounds on which you propose them. Though I raise the problem with great fervour, it is impossible to deny that were I more preoccupied in the thought process underlying this post with the synthesis of a solution, I would be troubled by the coercive extremes to which the remedies — on a detailed, implementational level — could conceivably be taken, as codified in:
To me, the constellation of potential “solutions” to the source of my lamentation–particularly the ones you raise–just embodies Bertrand Russell’s that everything is vague to a degree one does not realise until one attempts to make it precise. I’m sure it’s a tired cliche often invoked in introductory critical thinking courses, but it does resonate.
That having been said, it’s fitting that I put a few cards of my own out on the table. While my economic worldview does not substantially differ from this libertarian position, I suppose there are ways in which it will always be indebted to the intellectual canon of socialistic thought, and in particular, Marxism-influenced sociology. This puts me at odds with a lot of free-marketeers on the specific issue of agency and choice, because I maintain the emphasis on the deterministic socio-economic factors that — far from telling people what choices to make per se, as per many straw men of this position — simply constrain and shape people’s awareness of the choices before them, their perception of those choices, and their perception of the dilemma that prompts them. It bounds their locus of possibilities in a rather deterministic and objective way. This intercession of social milieux isn’t just aesthetic or conceptual, but has bearing that is of a downright cognitive scope. Thus, I am not persuaded that people of different class backgrounds are on “a level plane” in their epistemic privilege to make certain choices, even with respect to their own welfare.
The reconciliation of this seemingly foreign (and any other adjectives you may choose to affix to it, including pompous, presumptuous, coercive, authoritarian, etc.
perspective with the libertarian economic worldview occurs precisely because none of the prospective solutions seem to sidestep inevitable authoritarianism, coercion, corruption, mismanagement, etc. They present a number of other intractable philosophical problems, including the proper delineation and identification of how “level” the plane ought to be intersubjectively.
The overall confluence of these caveats leads me to a position of thorough solidarity with capitalist libertarians; to the extent that any of this can be helped, it does seem that free markets and the individual agency of people left to their own devices is by far the most far-reaching and ethically robust way of addressing it.
That’s where I agree with libertarians. Where the disagreement tends to arise is more with regard to the validity and legitimacy of the problem itself, as identified and taxonomised above. Many are very dogmatic in their assertion of free-will, and tend to repeatedly assert that qualitatively inferior outcomes in people’s lives (isn’t it all relative, anyway?) are the result of poor choices over which the actor(s) apparently had both complete control and unlimited epistemic privilege. I tend to see it more as, look, if you or I grew up in a crumbling ghetto with extremely lacking to nonexistent parenting, and in general reproduced a certain generalisable pedigree commonly associated with people of that fate, then in all likelyhood we would not be having this conversation–although it’s not logically impossible by any stretch, and there are plenty of anomalies. But in principle it seems rather obvious to me this is unlikely.
This digression may seem tangential, but it is actually more deliberate than it is wholly reckless. It is the sort of thing I have just expounded upon here that I was alluding to in veiled euphemisms:
The point is that as much as I am a fellow free-marketeer, it is impossible for me to consider this question without a certain recognition that, from the vantage point of making the sort of value judgments I am making in my post, anyway, people often really don’t know what’s best for them and a system that grants their agency equal weight to anyone else’s in certain questions — under the heading of distributed, maximised, high-yield freedom — may actually not lead to the highest qualitative social results as seen from virtually any rational vantage point, or at least any that occur to me.
This leads me to the other thought:
Of course, it is possible to conceptualise and brand the entire set of logically possible human activities as “economic” in the sense that they somehow transform, manipulate, or consume finite resources. In fact, traditional Marxists would be the last to disagree, being vehement exponents of the “everything is economic!” thesis to a degree even most advocates of anarchic, unbridled capitalism find untenable!
This avenue is acknowledged:
My quibble is not so much with the fact that it ought somehow to be impossible or proscribed to do this, but rather that I question the extent to which it is meaningful given that higher education
– well, in principle, anyway, leaving aside the 90%+ of undergrads that go to college “to get a good job” — lends itself least to commodification, productisation, or cost-justification.
You might say, well, that’s very nice, Alex, so maybe it’s not the sort of thing that is private sector-viable in the sense of being underwritten by a business model, but it is still an election of something amidst scarcity that has a certain subjective valuation, and that’s what confers upon it its “economic” character and gives it the anatomical pliability to plug into the universe of choices with which the economic man is beset.
Here we hit upon the essence of the disconnect. There is something about education that strikes me as being incommensurable with this universe, not in the sense that the choice to pursue it or not pursue it does not involve readily identifiable impositions and opportunity costs, but rather its unique interplay — more aptly, lack of interplay — with the rest of the economic particles subsumed under that universe.
In other words, there are aspects to an economic possibility that are at a reciprocal relation to the mechanisms of market economics as a vehicle for their access and delivery. This two-way relationship is what makes those possibilities economically functional; they are parameterised in terms of economic benefit, there are certain factors that incentivise those choices in terms of their bearing on other economic outcomes, and so on. As a programmer, I might be moved to say that that “the economy” relates to the things it contains through compatible interfaces and abstractions of data structures that enable interchange, enumerated return values, and defined behaviours.
As I see it, the academy participates, to a large extent, in an extraeconomic sphere. Not because you cannot model it economically as just another choice a person might make, and indeed, with very real economic displacement and very real opportunity costs as you abundantly point out. But I question whether it is meaningful to consider it in the ontological terms of the economic man’s observational language at all, given its lack of externalised economic feedback.
The other motivation for taking this view is that education is the foundation of the sort of knowledge that guides one to make many economic choices to begin with. To borrow another parallel from software engineering, this is “metadata” rather than “data.”
Sure, all economic choices that have the potential for influencing subsequent economic behaviours or events through imparting some form of knowledge or learning experience seem to have this characteristic, but it’s just a matter of degree. Something that seems to hone in so acutely and in such a concentrated way on the character and content of people’s economic agency — the knowledge itself — is not something partakes of a relation of similarity to the actual application of that knowledge in economic participation.
December 25th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Good post. Just a few comments …
There is some truth to the fact that we as a society don’t value philosophy and, to some extent, the liberal arts in general.
I’m not fond of this for most of the reasons you find it unsatisfactory: I personally find that most of my critical thinking skills that are worthwhile have their roots in philosophy and, to a lesser extent, literature.
Philosophy gets the least respect of the arts: the arts, in general, have some perceived social value while philosophy is more of a social joke.
To a large degree, this is due to the unfortunate exclusion of philosophy in the public school system, which also is responsible for the disparity between supply and demand which is especially extreme with philosophy. This is a deplorabe state of affairs…I lament the absence of philosophy from the public school system; by and large, by the time people are already too trained in the arts of academia absent any real critical thinking or analysis for a token introductory philosophy course to have any real effect. The result is that, by and large, most intro philosophy courses seem to me
to be mislabled literature courses: analysis of the content of the great thinkers that revolves around the presentation of the ideas rather than the ideas themselves.
Still, some fault does lie with the philophy discipline itself. Most
philosopher professors, once they reach their coveted positions, do very actively perpetuate an ivory tower image. They very deliberately eschew an effort to make their content meaningful, accessible, or even desirable. There is almost a sense of: if you have to ask why philosophy is relevant, then you are _obviously_ too unenlighrened to ever understand its value. In our society, if you don’t “market” your worth, you will be marginalized…and, of all the liberal arts, philosophy seems to even abhor the very idea of having to actually market itself. Combine that with the fact that modern philosophy is almost non-existant, and the result is self evident.
December 25th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Or a good gateway major to law school.
I have the suspicion that many in the discipline would bristle at the notion that philosophy ought to neighbour with theatre, poetry, etc. as a mere “art.” Philosophy is not just an aesthetic exercise. To some extent, that’s going to come from its historically bound idealistic compulsion to be the thing that provides real “answers” to “ultimate” questions, or the Enlightenment-backed qualification that it ought to provide insight about “natural world”/”natural law” questions.
True, but depends entirely on how they’re taught. I’ve experienced both varieties.
Unfortunately, with a survey of the canonical history of the tradition, I suspect it is often difficult to treat it as anything other than a successive presentation of historically incidental ideas if for no other reason than their fairly obvious lack of contemporary relevance as anything other than foundational building blocks or evolutionarily prior “iterations” of thought. With some subject matter that is relatively “timeless” that is easier than with others — most positions in ethics, for instance, I feel can be approached “as such” and not as that ancillary thing over there way back then. But with others, they are just too bound up in the idiosyncrasies of the period from which they issue. How do you get a class full of undergrads to seriously contemplate the merits and viability of St. Anselm’s argument for the existence of God? How does one consider Platonic metaphysics in a non-artefactual way unless one is some kind of neo-Platonist?
I cannot really argue with the need for the discipline to provide meaningful ingratiation avenues (”marketing”, “public outreach”?).
On the other hand, I will stick by a point that Lisa and I frequently touch on inasmuch as she is an extremely specialised person in a very esoteric area. To get there requires certain innate personal predispositions and habits of mind; at the end of the day, it’s not something that you can market forward. Philosophy participates at a certain level of high culture at which it is necessary to have an extrinsic appreciation for it, and neither that appreciation nor the prerequisite understandings and intellectual disposition can be fostered from the ground up, even with a very systematic approach.
You can’t make someone into the sort of specialist that Lisa is, nor compel or persuade them that they ought to have that aspiration. It’s just something they are–the few, the proud, the exclusive and privy. I think many cultured people who have this view of their humanities work are not wholly reprehensible for doing so; there are very good reasons for it, despite the ease with which it can be dismissed as “elitist,” “snooty,” etc. Philosophy as a disciplinary track is not for anyone and everyone, and neither is medieval literature.
I think it’s safe to gather from the article I linked to that people do go into philosophy despite the odds (effective “PR strategy”?), but the gulf between the quantity of them and the quantity of economic accommodation for their teaching and research interests is as vast as heaven is wide.
Modern philosophy does exist. I just get the impression that it increasingly concerns itself with very formal ontological, linguistic/semantic, and cosmological problems … things that many predecessors in the lineage would balk at for their seemingly “synthetic” preoccupation.
Also, I do not think anyone seriously believes that philosophy is equipped to provide answers anymore. A degree in philosophy is more of a prolonged “critical thinking” exercise; it sharpens your reasoning skills, assists you in being able to anatomise the relationship between a claim and the reasons used to support it with the force of formal logic, exposes you to texts of discursive and/or polemical value, and otherwise is useful generally for “clarifying” positions or “enhancing” their conceptual integrity and precision.
December 25th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Alex,
I think that you didn’t adequately address Xon’s point about economic modeling of academic studies. I have a feeling that you tend to reduce economic modeling to its traditional use (which is very “business” oriented…ie money for goods and services). Modern economic studies tends to be broader in scope and will apply the same principles (ie costs, returns, etc…) in much broader terms that encompass costs and returns that aren’t necessarily monetary and/or tangible goods/services. In that sense, I’m not sure that “extraeconomic” argument really makes any sense. In the end, there are some motivational factors that drive demand and some perceived and/or real benefits to pursuing an education. I don’t necessarily buy your “lack of external feedback” as valid, in that sense as there is _always_ feedback or there is _no_ benefit. It may not be immediate, recognized, or quantified, but, I can’t think of a situation for which there is benefit without feedback.
December 26th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Just as a matter of curiosity, what do you consider as the value of ongoing work in philosophy in our society? I definitely see a lot of value; however, I’m curious as to what your view on the matter is…
I think to some degree, philosophy is marginalized somewhat because it has been segregated and neutered from most of the components that once gave it “value” in society. Most of the modern academic disciplines are children of philosophy/theology (difficult line to draw in pre-modern European civilization). Economics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, math, etc… where traditionally practiced by “philosophers” to some degree or another.
I would put forth a criticism of modern philosophy that it (with some exceptions such as your father’s particular specialization) has unfortunately divorced itself of any engagement with the other disciplines. While this may seem a bit ridiculous–after all, what should a philosopher say about science–at one time it was that very inter-disciplinary approach that created the very theoretical concepts that are at the root of our modern society. Our endless faith in empiricism, I would argue, is due largely to the result of the philosophical battles between the likes of Bacon, Berkeley, the Pyrrhonists, Hume, Locke, etc: empiricism was, by and large, “proved” philosophically before it had any relevance and, absent the likes of Bacon and Locke, would have likely never become the fundamental basis for most of modern scientific progress. Philosophers have often, historically, had a great role to play in the revolution (not necessarily the evolution) of systems of thought; that is probably a historical artifact, in some ways, more because philosophers have largely relinquished that role than because it has necessarily been taken from them.
I’m not sure that I agree your argument that appreciation for philosophy is something that can’t be systematically instilled in people (which is not surprising since that really does strike at the heart of a lot of most of our past philosophical and political discussions). While that is the case for a future refrigerator repairman who has never read any sort of intellectual analysis other than Sports Illustrated column, I think that is more of an environmental issue than the almost Calvinistic predestination. “Before the world was formed, it was determined that one Tom Jones will have absolutely no appreciation for philosophy or the arts in general (other than “sports photography”). While not knowing Lisa’s exact background, I think it is safe to assume that your appreciation for the liberal arts (and mine as well) is the consequence of your environment.
Again, with philosophy, I do feel that is entirely a lack of exposure to any sort of real philosophy until college in our educational system. By and large, history and literature have quite a large mass appeal (relatively speaking)–after all, there are several cable channels that are devoted to them. While Lisa’s study of medieval literature is a bit esoteric, it is nevertheless a field that has a great deal of mass appeal (albeit in a watered down form)–I can think of dozens of movies and other forms of popular culture that revolve around her particular academic niche–which is much more than I can do for the entire discipline of philosophy. While not everyone who is exposed to literature gains appreciation for it, exposure certainly does help immensely. We, as a society, value literature _much_ more than we value philosophy; I feel the difference is, as much as anything, a matter of exposure.
December 26th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Alex, I appreciate your response. I am all for a return (if we ever really had it) to vigorous, principled debate on a philosophical level between Marxism and libertarianism. Though I hate when people dichotomize with reckless abandon, I am one of those folks who sees these as our two great options. The ‘real world’ societies that we find in nature are intelligently and helpfully interpretable as mixtures of these two systems. There have been brief, oh so brief, experimental phases in which ‘pure’ Marxism/Socialism (ignoring for now distinctions between socialism, communism, etc.) or ‘pure’ laissez faire capitalism have been tried. In fact, off the top of my head I can’t even think of any examples of genuine attempts on the capitalistic side. But these brief periods give way again to a ‘mixed’ economy, in which elements of free market activity are permitted to exist but the government coercively attempts to control some of its features. Under Sovietism, they tried to control more than under 19th century ‘gilded age’ USA. But both economies were ‘mixed’–neither represented ‘pure’ Marxism or ‘pure’ capitalism.
Anywho, my point is: I would give a limb (precise limb negotiable) for a return to honest philosophical interaction b/w the advocates for both schools of thought. The misrepresentations have been, to understate things, rampant.
In the spirit of such honest interaction, I appreciate the classical Marxist emphasis on the socio-economic influences that factor into the choices that people make, and even more than that that shape the very way people think about choice itself. I myself am a theistic determinist (a Calvinist, to be specific), and so I am not an advocate of ‘free will libertarianism’ either, even as I sit here and advocate for POLITICAL libertarianism. (By the way, does this comments-thingy accept html tags? I hate to ’shout’ with capital letters…) Things are never so simple as rational individuals sitting down to weigh their options carefully and to make an informed decision.
My problem with the classical Marxist analysis, as I understnad it, is that I don’t see where to go from here. Yes, the way people subjectively value different things is heavily influenced by underlying factors that are very different for different individuals (the classical Marxist in you locates these underlying factors in socio-economic factors; the Calvinist in me locates them in the eternal decrees of an omni-sovereign Providence). But, this acknowledged, so what? The fact is that I still think it is better to be politically free–to make choices in accordance with our own evaluations and desires–than not to be. This is not because of some inherent ‘free will’ (as defined by will-libertarians: the ability to do the contrary of what you in fact do) that humans possess that makes them oh so noble and ontologically dignified. It is for a whole host of other reasons I won’t go into right now. (The one I will say is by way of critique: if the deterministic position is right, it applies just as much to our would-be masters. The choices they claim the authority to make on all of our behalfs are just as determined by these underlying factors as the choices individuals would make. It’s not clear to me why the better policy for political economy is to respect the non-libertarianly-free choices of central authorities over the similarly non-free choices of individuals.)
The bottom line (to me) is that Farmer Brown makes five hundred extra dollars this month (for whatever reasons). He now has to choose how best to spend that money. He can reinvest it into his farm (by buying more livestock, upkeep, new equipment, etc.), or he can buy something unrelated to his farming for his own consumption or for the use of his family, or he can save the money for some future use, or he can give it away to someone else. These choices, it seems to me, should be up to Farmer Brown, unless we have an extremely compelling moral objection to the choice Farmer Brown is going to make. Overriding Brown’s choice with the ‘better’ choice as determined by some central planner strikes me as morally and politically absurd, despite the long historical pedigree this notion claims.
But this means that Farmer Brown, or, aggregating the millions of decision-makers alongside him, society as a whole, might end up showing a preference for cow feed over night classes at his local college. I’m not sure how to evaluate that preference morally; it seems adiaphora (as the medievals would say) to me. But the net result of all these Farmer Browns (and City Jims) making all these choices, day by day, to spend their marginal income in these ways rather than these other ways will be that education might not be as well-supported as I would prefer. But I don’t see how I have any other option if this is the case but to try to persuade to value education more than they currently do. If I succeed at this, then all the economics will take care of itself, and the new higher valuation placed on education will be reflected in society’s allocation of resources.
The market is certainly not perfect. This is one of those ‘best option available’ kinds of arguments. I don’t like undervaluing education. But I dislike coersion and economic unforeseen consequences even more. And, to acknowledge some of my own underlying factors that determine the way I look at the world, I suppose that if my fellow citizens end up refusing to heed my advice and higher education ends up sinking b/c we stop supporting it enough to allow it to flourish, then I would probably interpret this as God judging our society for our insolence. God often gives us what we say we want; we say we want other things besides humanities education, and God has created a world for us in which economic laws will see to it that is just what we will get. We will be the worse off for it, but whatchyagonnado?
To a classical Marxist who retains the atheism of Marx, this sounds like so much twaddle. But many atheists are libertarians, too. They just have other ways of ‘writing off’ the bad valuation decisions that society makes. In the end, we all stand together in the conviction that interfering is more costly to our society than allowing the bad valuation to run its economic course.
December 26th, 2007 at 1:40 am
Marx himself, of course, may not have been an atheist. You know, deep down in his heart. I don’t mean to contribute to the misunderstandings that often accompany these discussions. The association is clear and firm, though, and was carried on enthusiastically by the political revolutionaries who took up Marx’s cause (though such political revolution, too, is not-quite-as-Marxist as it might seem…)
December 26th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Clint wrote:
Well, yes, but that is because I do not think such modeling is very useful outside of its “traditional use,” or at any rate, as it relates to academic studies. So, because I disagree with the method of assessment, it is not so much that I didn’t “adequately” address it, but more that I did not address it from the same premises.
Yes, they do. But I am not persuaded that this is anything more than a misguided oversimplification.
Economics as a discipline generally — and capitalistic ontologies in particular — do not, in my opinion, deal well with things that are not recognised or quantified in the manner I initially suggested.
It’s not that there isn’t feedback of some kind. As I said in my article, if you want to shoehorn academic work into an economic model proceeding purely from the premise that there is some kind of subjective valuation and choosing going on somewhere — an exercise of “economic” agency — you can.
What I am moved to question is the philosophical - and economic - usefulness and intellectual robustness of representing it that way.
December 26th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Xon:
Indeed. And, for what it’s worth–which, in the context of the discussion particularly, I suspect to be nothing–most lineages of Marxism generally hold that pure(r) socialism literally cannot exist amidst and/or coexist concomitantly with capitalist social / productive relations in one interdependent economic sphere, which for some time now has been considered to be the entire world according to the particularities of capitalist imperialism as a world-historic iteration.
Even as someone who is not any longer of particularly Marxian persuasion, I must say that is eminently refreshing to hear.
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Well, what can I say? Compatibilism reigns.
This is why I said above that ultimately, I am fairly confident that market-based resolution of these disparities is still the arbitration mechanism most aligned with “democratic” intentions.
Agreed emphatically, although to be really fair, central planning is about as distant from any policy solution to my lamentation that I could stand to get behind as … well, something really far away.
If there is anything I could encourage on a practical level, it is only much higher state budgetary provisions and appropriations for the humanities within the university system, bolstering the backbone of something that starts to resemble the classical Western European approach as far as academic career-viability starts to become at least a vaguely tenable option.
And before you think I’m one of those people driving up the national debt still further, or contributing to willful tax increases, let me just make it abundantly known that I am against either. My vote is with reappropriating government funds spent on a great deal of other things in this direction without adjusting the balance sheet.
Like military occupations of certain Middle Eastern countries.
As far as the moral valuation is concerned, let me put forth the following question to you:
Do you not feel coerced, as a practitioner of education, by the fact that the consequences of the amalgam of millions of Farmer Browns and City Jims have the power to not only affect their own lives in a manner seemingly inconsequential to you, but to shape entire structures and macroscopic composition of society around their choices? In other words, far from innocently exercising their right to affix subjective preference to cow feed, they are contracting inward the curve of educational possibilities in this world, decreasing the number of universities, decreasing the amount of funding they receive, and the number of teaching appointments and research assistantships and fellowships and grants that exist in sum?
Worse yet, this is bad for reasons they have neither the capacity nor the perspective to begin to comprehend, let us say for purposes of discussion. Not “perfect market information.”
I know this is not a particularly novel or original position to take, but, I did just want to throw in a gentle reminder that coercive projections can be described in bidirectional terms.
And yes, I realise that in the view of natural rights and agency to which we are all paying homage by logical implication, privation of a constituency is not equivalent to an imposition upon one, and so on. Still, this is an exploratory hook into a vital Marxist tenet.
Certainly fair.
I guess in my position as an atheist bumbling with “scientific materialism,” I just do not find that kind of relinquishment to Providence or the almighty, anonymous, anarchic and gloriously organic it-is-what-it-is-and-that’s-all-it-is quite so palatable. My worldview emphasises the ability of man to master and subordinate the natural world to his needs, and to build the kind of world he wants, and to enact transformations upon it productively to achieve certain ends. Agency, willpower, and efficacy are the defining qualities of one’s experience and distinctiveness. With that kind of exhortation, comical as you may find it, it’s much harder to sit back and just let the currents of populism Do Their Thing.
Well, it’s not twaddle; it just sounds like a level of resignation I haven’t yet reached. I’ve got some growing up to do yet.
In principle, I would say yes.
December 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Clint wrote:
Well, I certainly hope my choice to drop out, move to Atlanta and pursue a career in communications technology and software is not taken as a reflection of the value I place upon philosophy elementally.
Hard one to tackle, really, especially if the overall role of the discipline in the contemporary intellectual nexus is considered as a departure point in an empirical vein, rather than dismissed and ignored as an illegitimate perversion.
First, I agree that philosophy has played a seminal role in the germination of inquiries into the natural world, as in the manner in which “concrete” disciplines have spun off from it as they gained empirical character, took on a certain division of labour, and necessitated of esoteric, detailed work conducted under certain axioms with which philosophy furnishes them.
I think philosophy plays — and ought to continue to play — that role in the negotiation of frontiers that we place outside the bounds of the “scientific” perimeter and rather more in the realm of the analytical. This does mean I don’t really think “empirical” work is philosophy; philosophy is an a priori act, a deductive act, a manipulation of conceptual devices and their conceptual attributes.
This is something of which I do see my dad’s specialisation as something of an embodiment, if for no other reason than greater (if only marginally so) near-end familiarity. Developments in cosmology, theoretical physics, astronomy, conventional & quantum mechanics, etc. arise as consequences of philosophical inferences or directions of inquest.
Aside from that, however, I am moved, out of what I see to be largely pragmatic and empirical motives, to aid the legitimacy of its seeming modern “relegation.” I do think that there is some validity to the apparent realisation that philosophy is more a source of interesting questions to take up otherwise than it is a source of convincing and reliable ultimate answers.
And, as sheepish as it may seem, I do think that philosophy has enourmous value as a study of intellectual history, and as a prolonged “mental exercise” to increase the adroitness of one’s logical formulations, sharpen one’s polemical skills, and hone rhetoric.
I don’t know how much it was “proved.” I think it is more that it was persuasively cast as a “rather pragmatic thing to do” in light of epistemological limitations that were gaining ever more explicit delineation as such.
But maybe that’s just because I really do have a very Humean take on the whole thing, which some are moved to suggest is an “anti-philosophical” position.
I’m not really qualified to comment here, but I do also have this impression, yes. It seems to me that the preoccupations of people I see in philosophy are adhering rather strictly to a few categories of work that do not have animating illuminative qualities, nor are charged with revolutionary tension. A lot of “analytic philosophy” these days is concerned with what must seem like very contrived, artificial and uncompromisingly formal “puzzles.”
To some extent, it can. But, I am unyielding in my allowance for a generous helping of “elitism” in high culture, based on my personal experience. There is a je ne sais quoi quality to those practitioners of humanities that are genuine connoiseurs, original and interesting thinkers, and creative, dynamic scholars in their field.
In other words, to some extent, either you do get it, or you don’t. The reasons for this aren’t always traceable through an environmental causality chain, but are indubitably influenced heavily through environmental exposure.
I do not think it is wholly untenable or illegitimate to say, in many cases, that if one is inquiring simplistically about the “usefulness” of some of these disciplines, one is insufficiently enlightened to begin with. You just can’t bridge those gaps without performing a stilted and uncharitable reduction.
That’s one of my fundamental problems with capitalism on a sociological level. The ability of something to subsist within it should not vary so much with the degree to which it is able to “market” itself accessibly to the lowest common denominator of the populace, and to the ways in which it is able to convincingly assuage the Philistine rubes clamouring, “Where am I gonna use this stuff?” Some subject matter and occupations simply cannot be explained that way.
It’s the same way as when a technically inept boss dismisses certain perfectly good ideas, backed by years and years of solid engineering perspective, in under five seconds, because the ideas do not seem to lend themselves wholly to representation as a “business case in plain English” in a manner satisfactory to him. “If he can’t explain it to me, it must not be any good.”
Yeah, but maybe the limitation isn’t all with the communicative repertoire of the engineer.
Except much worse, because academia isn’t business; expediency and production are not the standard-bearing motives.
December 26th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
I’ve enjoyed seeing this dialogue unfold.
The value of higher education generally, and the study of esoteric liberal arts subject matter particularly, in the mass cultural mindset has already received attention here. As Alex just suggested, and Clint did above, if someone asks what’s the *use* of studying philosophy or literature, then the burden on the person answering is not how to frame a reply as such, but that the question itself produces a hopeless kind of answer — well, there’s no *use* exactly, but…
In other words, when the question is framed like that, there seems to be no convincing way to reply. For a “justification” of studying the liberal arts to be compelling, you already sort of have to agree that there’s an intrinsic and non-commodifiable value to it. And what it takes to get a majority to say, “hey, 14th-century history is pretty cool” is not a sudden widespread appreciation for the Pearl poet, but Renfests and movies like A Knight’s Tale. Clint, you spoke to that point — that the field has mass appeal but in a “watered down” form — and that’s true. But I hope it’s reasonable for me to say that, by the time the “medieval” is reduced to leather shops and turkey drumsticks and histrionic Chaucer impersonators, what the public is getting is not what I’d claim to have studied and written about, or what has real value in the discipline.
Also, I feel that it’s worth mentioning that the liberal arts themselves fare badly enough when their “worth” is under capitalistic scrutiny, but even worse off is the profession as a result of the related attitudes. The linked article at the top of Alex’s post touches on this by way of the ludicrously stressful conditions of going on the job market with a Ph.D. in philosophy. Speaking from a literature student’s perspective, I’d say that the humanities as a profession are beset by much more through-soaking problems — not just that there’s a glut of Ph.D. students all searching for jobs under dreadful circumstances, but that everyone must go to conferences, conferences, conferences. Publish here, there, however you can, whatever journal will take you. More, more, more. Better turn that dissertation into a book, stat! If your first book isn’t out by this or that time, and you haven’t published at least seventeen articles, may the MLA have mercy on your soul… and so on and on.
The point I’m aiming at is that there’s a severe economy of publishing that’s solidified in humanities disciplines in the last 20-30 years (possibly in other fields as well, though I can’t speak to that). Produce your quota of articles, or you and your degree are out of a job. But even worse is that there’s a grave and extremely illusory sense of meritocracy promulgated regarding humanities departments’ “publish or perish” policies. If you’re a serious scholar and a good one, then you’ll be able to punch out ever more work, no problem. Also, don’t forget to teach a few classes and carry on with your own research — there’s a good academic, run along. Solid scholarship is just not made this way, hurried along and artificially bloated.
Grad students have nervous breakdowns because academic work is becoming measured more and more by quantity. The profession, its professors, AND the integrity of the work they produce all suffer because of an artificially “product”-like mentality toward the purpose and activity of the academy.
December 26th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Fascinating thoughts by all which will take several more readings to grok …
I’d just like to add one thought:
I’d argue that “great philosophy” was made possible in the past (I’m speaking of the classical through early modern eras) by the maintenance of an aristocratic class which had the means to live a life of leisure and think on things. Empirically, I think I’m on solid ground with that one. I’m having a hard time thinking of a “great philosopher” of the past that was not independently wealthy.
And in fact, those great philosophers don’t appear to have gained much economic advantage from their philosophy — it wasn’t any more profitable then that it was now — except insofar as it contributed to your popularity in aristocratic social circles.
So in the past, it appears, we had “great philosophers” who had the obscene wealth necessary to permit a life of leisure and philosophy. Their passion for philosophy, therefore, was not driven by market forces, but by their personal desire to understand the world.
We still have obscenely rich people in the world, living a life of leisure. But for some reason, they’re not doing philosophy. They’re into either work or conspicuous consumption, but nobody’s really doing philosophy.
Since philosophy occurred among the independently wealthy before and now, and was never undertaken with a profit motive, I think it’s not economic systems that discourage philosophy, but rather something in our souls. Just like Xon was saying, for whatever reason we don’t value that particular product as much as we used to.
Personally, I think that our loss of INTEREST in philosophy can be explained, at least to some degree, by another economic reality: specialization of labor.
I’d define the PRACTICE of philosophy as the gathering of knowledge and wisdom in all its areas — from science to religion to art to technological know-how.
But because of specialization of labor, the PROFESSION of philosophy has become concerned only with the rather abstruse aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, and reading what old dead guys thought. You never “touch the real world” in a philosophy class. You are either a “philosopher of science” or a “scientist” — but very rarely in our specialized, market-driven society does a person have time to be BOTH a philosopher AND a scientist, like the ancients and early moderns were able to do — Aristotle, Newton, and Jefferson jump to mind.
And when philosophy is cut off from the practical, fascinating, concrete nitty gritty of real life, it becomes … well … boring as hell. And as with most things that are boring as hell, people as a whole tend to lose interest.
The key is, in an individual level, to maintain the PRACTICE of philosophy — that is, seeking to understand reality in all its facets — some of which are strictly scientific, and some of which fall into the category of “uniquely philosophical” — e.g. epistemology, etc. — the things that don’t mean much on their own, but mean a LOT when applied to daily life.
And I don’t think the practice of philosophy is any more or less encouraged or discouraged by our current economic system. The practice of philosophy is something you do or don’t do in your life as a whole, no matter what system you live under.
Look at us: we’re doing it; and we’re doing it for free, because we care about the issues. And we’re using tools to do it that the ancients couldn’t have even dreamt about.
Certainly we lack the aesthetic of the subject matter experts, or the “truly educted.” But I think we exchange it for a more broad-minded sensibility. I may not be the master of philosophy of science, but I know enough about lab science to know when philosophers of science are off their gourd, and I know enough about philosophy of science to know when evolutionary biologists are off their gourd. It has its advantages.
Just my two cents.
December 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Having reread my two cents, I can’t help but think my point might be lost. Forgive me if I soundbite it:
1) From the discussion above, I take it the argument is that “Free markets discourage humanities; therefore something else must step in, presumably a benevolent and wise government.”
2) I think the differentiation doesn’t hold water. The great philosophers and artists of the past were not aided by a benevolent government interested in advancing the humanities. Quite the contrary, by and large they acted on their own volition, because of their own passion for the subject matter. When the Soviets subsidized art, it preferred hollow propaganda films. When the NEA subsidizes art in America, it prefers crucifixes in jars of urine and empty canvasses. But Aristotle, Da Vinci, and Newton engaged in their arts because they LOVED it.
4) I think the problem with “institutionalized humanities” today is that they are isolated from real life. In school, we study Aristotle just to understand Aristotle, not to use it. We study literature in order to be able to spit back pretentious comments that impress the prof, not to savor it.
5) But in our REAL lives, once we’re out of the classroom, we can still engage in the real work of the humanities, not because we needed to pass the exam, but because it IMPASSIONS us. That is the PRACTICE of philosophy and the humanities as a whole, rather than the profession.
6) So in the end, we are BETTER, not worse, able to engage in the humanities today — we have tools we didn’t have before, available to so many more minds, that the philosophy of the future will not be done by the independently wealthy who have the time and means to write massive tomes that only a tiny contemporary audience has the means to appreciate. It will be done by millions of people like you and me, liberated from the chains of perpetual labor of the past, and given the tools of google, wikipedia talk pages, and blogs like yours.
7) And we owe all those tools which facilitate our more popular philosophy to the free market that gave them to us.
December 26th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
A:
In response to your first comment: I think the question of how the “independently wealthy” luminaries of yore got that way should not be entirely sidestepped, even as I doubt it was your intention to do that anyhow.
As you say, it was not for economic advantage that they practised their art, so presumably, possible explanations are:
1. All of them inherited it, to one measure or another, along with a life of leasure informed by the background of a sound classical aristocratic education;
2. They got “independently wealthy” through unrelated entrepreneurial means, after which they acquired the freedom to retire and meditate on whatever they wished relatively early;
3. They were the beneficiaries of patronage of one sort or another, perhaps from other aristocratic consumers of their work solely or possibly from the windfall from the few mass-popular throwaways they may have produced at some point, or backed by a formidable institution of higher learning.
Fair enough, all this. If #1 is the case, the illuminati appears to be a closed system. If #2 is the case, I would question how one would go about doing that in the character of today’s infinitely more productive, demanding, and fast-moving economy. If #3, I would entirely welcome a return to that model but would question where the demand is going to come from.
Also, having accounted for the very few luminaries and distinguished contributors to the canon somehow, we are still left with the question of how their proportionally large flocks of students, assistants and interlocutors would expect to subsist.
December 26th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
A wrote:
To some extent. Apart from that claim, however, there also exists the more sociological contention that the particular outcome of free market participation in the U.S. is uniquely abhorrent toward high culture.
Well, you’ll have to excuse me if I call that out for the rather gross oversimplification that it is.
I cannot speak with particular illumination to the NEA’s criteria, but the Soviet government’s subsidies to the arts extended far beyond “socialist realism” or things that would serve a narrow and unsophisticated ideological purpose, although I would agree that there was much extremism to the effect of subduing “bourgeois” art in the early years after the revolution. However, in the grand scheme of things, pre-revolutionary European opera, theatre, poetry, and classical orchestral and choral ensemble were widely subsidised, to the point of allowing something that would here in America be considered a world-class orchestra to flournish in nearly every nontrivial municipality throughout the socialist world.
Despite the damage that Stalin did to the legacy core of Moscow’s centre with crass industrialisation projects, he also immensely promulgated art, although certainly within widely acknowledged ideological straitjackets if it is of philosophy or literature that we are talking.
Maybe, but look what the preponderance of the masses are doing with them.
I think that’s very much part of the argument.
December 26th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Alex Wrote: To some extent. Apart from that claim, however, there also exists the more sociological contention that the particular outcome of free market participation in the U.S. is uniquely abhorrent toward high culture.
I agree — but I think the contention is a bit simplistic. As Xon was arguing, the free market just gives the people what they want. Why do people want shitty art? That’s a question of the soul, not the economy. Whether people with bad taste are in the government or in the smut shop, they’re still going to prefer bad art. At least in a free market I’m free to prefer whatever kind of art I want.
And given the quality of the government bureaucrats I work with on a daily basis and the demonstrated preferences of the NEA, I wouldn’t expect a government to do much better than my brother and his Britney Spears posters.
Well, you’ll have to excuse me if I call that out for the rather gross oversimplification that it is.
I meant no offense to Soviet art in particular. My beef was with the subsidy of art wherever it occurs. I think it’s safe to say that Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Solzheniztsin … they all did it on their own. Chekhov SOLD his stories to support his family, before he got out of med school:). I’ve seen a number of Soviet films, but nobody could hold a candle to the pre-Soviets IMO.
I also wouldn’t want to minimize the investments made by Stalin and other leaders in the visual arts … the subway system and the WWII memorial in Moscow are nothing less than stunning. But all the great stuff in the museum in St. Pete came before the Soviets.
Maybe, but look what the preponderance of the masses are doing with them. I think that’s very much part of the argument.
The masses will do what they will — Socrates, Gallileo, Newton, Einstein … they all existed amidst a mass of mediocre and/or self/destructive minds. If we expect “the masses” to behavior rationally I suspect we will always be disappointed. But that doesn’t alter our ability to appreciate and invest in philosophy and the humanities …
December 26th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
As you say, it was not for economic advantage that they practised their art, so presumably, possible explanations are:
1. All of them inherited it, to one measure or another, along with a life of leasure informed by the background of a sound classical aristocratic education;
2. They got “independently wealthy” through unrelated entrepreneurial means, after which they acquired the freedom to retire and meditate on whatever they wished relatively early;
3. They were the beneficiaries of patronage of one sort or another, perhaps from other aristocratic consumers of their work solely or possibly from the windfall from the few mass-popular throwaways they may have produced at some point, or backed by a formidable institution of higher learning.
I think historically there are examples of all three. Interesting point also, but I think I’m missing its relevence to my point, respecting the degree to which the market system, rather than the values of a culture irrespective of its economic system, determines the quantity and quality of its contributions to the humanities …
December 26th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Alex, this really is a discussion both entertaining and sharpening. A true rarity!
I’d like to say some more stuff later, but for now I just want to offer some further thoughts I’ve had about education from a historical perspective (though my training is in philosophy, I have been told by various people that I often argue and write like a historian, and this may be true…a philosophical historian).
You mentioned your own decision to drop out and move to Atlanta to pursue a career. I assume you did this because it was economically beneficial to you, in your own estimation. Yet you yourself continue to value philosophical education and the humanities in general, despite your personal decision not to continue formal participation in an institution that advocates these things. And this got me thinking: to what extent is our current ‘ideal’ about the humanities, particularly as something that is usually pursued through a post-secondary educational institution, a relic of pre-modern sociology? I mean, in the classical and then especially the medieval period (cut your historical pie as you wish as far as when exactly ‘pre-modernity’ ends and ‘modernity’ begins), the university developed as a sort of academic parallel to the monastery. It was a place where those rare souls who possessed the double gift of intellectual ability and financial blessing could go to pursue a life of intellectual engagement, and hopefully along the way setting themselves up to do something more with their life than flop around in mud like those peasants at the beginning of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” This was a good life, if you could get it.
But then came Gutenberg, the printed page, the Reformation, widespread literacy, an infusion of access to classical texts and alternative points of view, etc. And the net result is that all of a sudden lots of people who would not normally be able to access a university education (still reserved for the elite) were nonetheless enabled to achieve a certain level of cultural intelligence that was far above what most of them had been left with in the earlier period. Luther is reported to have lamented near the end of his life, in a phrase often cited by Catholic counter-Reformers, “What have I done? I have made milkmaids interpreters of Scripture.” Whatever the veracity of historicity of that statement, it illustrates the effect of these changes on common people at that time. Not everybody became capable of ‘high-level’ philosophy or a career in the university, but lots of people became able to attain a higher level of intellectual awareness than they had had before.
But this change for the better might very well mean trouble for the academy. If it is no longer the elites who can claim sole possession of the riches of the humanities, then to some extent the influence of the university is going to diminish over its role in the medieval period.
I understand how absurd this sounds now, given how plum stupid so many people seem to be in western culture. Sure, they can read (most of them), but after that they pretty much lack any critical thinking skills of note and they parrot the most shallow platitudes they hear from people with social influence and authority. But, even so, I do think that a good number of folks, even in this ‘late capitalist’ age of ours, do pursue intellectual self-improvement in ways other than going to university and sitting under the ‘masters.’ And I don’t think this is a bad thing; in fact I think it is probably a better way to do it. I’m glad we don’t need monasteries anymore to preserve a cultural legacy as everyone else is devoured by barbarism. I’m also glad that we don’t need universities any more in the way that we once did.
Of course, we do need to improve the critical thinking skills of common people. Things are clearly trending downward, and that’s a problem in itself. But I don’t think the problem is really a matter of ‘official’ humanities institutions losing much of the influence they once had several centuries ago. I think instead that the issue is primarily one of people losing their critical thinking skills on an individual level; and while universities might help correct this trend they need not be the only way to do so. In the 19th century Lincoln and Douglas could debate slavery all day long, and all the townspeople and local farmers came out to hear it and were able to follow the discussion. It was a basic civic responsbiility that people took seriously. Heck just read the federalist papers or the anti-federalist letters, all of which were published as newspaper editorials in the late 18th century. Today we have grad students in history who probably ’struggle’ with the deep mysteries contained in these texts. This is a problem, and I’m not offering much to solve it. My main point is just that universities per se aren’t the issue. Respect for ‘higher thought’ can be pursued in other ways, and I wonder if our concerns about the diminishment of more traditional institutions of higher learning reflects the fact that we still haven’t caught up completely to the full implications of the modern revolution.
December 27th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Good stuff, Xon. I don’t know that “the people” are much dumber today than they used to be. In the 30s and 40s, they bought into fascism. In the 1880s, they bought into Jim Crow. In the 1810s they thought blacks were subhuman. In the 1600s they slaughtered each other for being the wrong denomination. In the 1500s they bought indulgences.
The common folk have always been kind of dumb. The only difference is, now they have a voice — the mass media (which reflects their attitudes because that’s who they’re marketing to) and the internet.
December 27th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I think it’s easy to think that people were smarter in the past, but we have a distorting selection mechanism — we are reading materials written by the best and brightest, for the best and brightest. Today, the media we swim through everyday is written by the lowest and stupidest, for the lowest and stupidest.
December 27th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Andrew,
I suppose that is the central axis about which the essential motion of the contention spins.
As much as my worldview has shifted in a nominally free-market affirming, libertarian direction of late, I am still strongly inclined to believe that part of the
problem is structurally intrinsic to robust market economies in that activities that I perceive to be rather extraeconomic, such as the study and practise of humanities, provide negative feedback into the economic dimension in which those things subsist.
I don’t wholly disagree with you; if the collective really desired the aggressive preeminence of the liberal arts come hell or high water, it would get done in whatever economic system. And, in general, I’ve found persuasive and agreeable to reason your thematically persistent adage that any economic system can theoretically work if people just had the right values.
Nevertheless, I see certain systemic facts of capitalistic relations that still further problematise the existence of high culture, in effect compounding their woes. In the most charitable and diplomatic inflection, perhaps one might say it represents a mild for of “market failure,” but my problem with that is that it still grants a modicum of intrinsic marketability to the humanities at that level.
For the reasons I mentioned above in various comments and in my post, the system fails to adequately incentivise or reward the practise of the humanities. To some extent, this is because they are not highly valued by the society at large; under capitalism, we are at the mercies of the vox populi in determining things that the masses are ill-capacitated to properly appreciate, demand, or remunerate. But other problems exist more intrinsically, also; it is virtually impossible to evaluate the merits of studies in humanities as a course of action in the way that they ought to be evaluated according to higher-order ontologies meaning, parameterised by something other than its interplay with other capitalistic incentives), leaving them to dwindle under the capitalistic criteria of commodity value exchange.
If we look at marketplace interaction in terms congruent with game theory, I am moved to believe that higher education, at least when considered in terms of a profession and a lifetime commitment, isn’t “plugged in” to the game. There simply are no compelling economic reasons whatsoever to do higher education.
Do you want to be a “poor student” or a “starving artist” in perpetuity?
Expressing preference is an innate cognitive function. You are always free to “prefer” something under any system. The real question is how effectively and fairly the sources (”suppliers”) of the object of your preference can be connected with you transactionally. Capitalism does a great job of the logistics, but a poor job of delivering diversity to the product space where the products concerned aren’t easily “commodifiable” according to capitalistic indices. As I pointed out above, this can be considered as a form of “coercion” as much as a centrally planned economy can, especially once innate structural disincentives to produce what you’re looking for exist, along with imperfect market information, diseconomies of scale, etc.
Truly a matter of opinion. I’ve seen quite a few Soviet films that, in my opinion, could. Hardly a worthwhile commentary on the overall state of the arts in the Soviet era, especially as the Soviet era was not some historiographic monolith. Very sundry artistic and expressive climates flourished under Khruschev and Brezhnev than under Stalin or Lenin.
Seventy years entails innumerable “zeitgeists” of grandiose significance to intellectual history.
A lot of the investment admitted of cultivating scholarship and popular knowledge of existing classical art.
December 27th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Personal opinion:
By the way, Solzhenitsyn is not an “interesting” author that ought to be buried with Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, etc.
I mean, good books, sure. But authorial genius?…
He has just achieved inscrutability, unaccountability, and characterological immortality by virtue of the enourmous quantities of propaganda milk squeezed from his quaint epistolary udders. He is little more than a flaming ideological broadsword in the disinformational polemic of officially-sanctioned Cold War discourse.
December 27th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Xon,
I agree! But for that I encourage you to thank and acknowledge not me, but the indefatigable contributors — notably including yourself.
A big part of the motivation was economic, yes. Although, I think the ultimate composition of psychological reasons for taking that step are quite manifold, even as I am conscious (and conscientious) of overcomplicating it through gratuitous introspective navel-gazing.
But in an attempt to sum it up tersely and self-honestly:
1. Economic motivation.
2. Personal / moral motivation, strong desire to cultivate the means to provide security and comfort for my existing and prospective family.
3. Intellectual motivation; apart from my interest in the humanities, I quite enjoy and take a cerebral interest in what I do. The profession allows for and values this in certain strata of certain sectors, although I am still in the process of ascertaining the potential extent and reconciling it with my rather pessimistic view of the narrow imperatives of business.
4. I already had a developing career for a majority of the time that I was a full-time student, and at some point in its ascent, acute crossroads arise that require one to make a choice — however arbitrary the criteria may be — to avoid the distinctly unpleasant sensation of being quartered somehow.
5. Some degree of disenchantment with the day-to-day practicalities of continuing as an undergraduate in the discipline, as well as differing curricular preferences. They bear fraternal, but very, very distant relation to the sorts of reasons for which Lisa chose not to continue in the graduate program toward a Ph.D. in English after consummating her M.A., which she essentially elucidates in her comment above without explicitly identifying them as such.
…
Your view of the historicity of the university and of institutions of higher learning and the implications of modernity upon it is certainly interesting and worth pondering. To the extent that it has any concrete components beyond the scope of the merely speculative, the possibility of its veracity (whatever that means, logically, given that you raise more interesting questions than anything else) certainly gives one some cause for optimism.
Spoken from a very practical, mundane, everyday level, I am inclined to disagree, proceeding from my personal narrative and its parallels to the larger condition of working people in Western societies, and especially in the U.S. But I do recognise that this doesn’t directly speak to your point, which is not injured by this type of detailed, implementational-level critique.
Work is structured here in a manner that saps time and stamina, discourages intellectual stimulation, and leaves one ill-capacitated to engage one’s mind to any substantive degree after the end of the workday, on top of all the other bromidic things one has to do in the course of the logistics of everyday survival. Back in high school, before I started working and understood this, I used to take umbrage and bewilderment to the propensity of people to vegetate and display mental laziness as much as they do, but a few weeks - even in a relatively low-stress, physically undemanding white-collar environment - taught me differently.
There is just no way that an ordinary working person in this country is going to come home every day and read volumes and tomes, compose symphonies, take evening courses, broaden one’s literary horizons, etc. At least, not without an extraordinarily fortunate division of labour and a confluence of other wildly incidental accessories. Even where the time to devote to such things exists in a technical sense, neither the stamina nor the motivation exist — it’s all taken by work.
It’s been months — and in substance, much longer than that — since I’ve read a line of erudite text from a book for leisure. I am painfully and perceptibly aware of the atrophy of the adroitness of my intellect and my verbal capabilities, to the extent that either existed beforehand. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve got enough personal impositions on top of my day job anyhow; I am trying to start a niche software business on the side, I partake of physical fitness, I travel to Athens most weekends to see Lisa & my family. But I am conscious that even were I to lead a less demanding life in these areas, the practicality of pursuing intellectual development in the epic ways of which your comment is evocative would be out of arm’s reach.
I say this not to lament my personal state of affairs as much as to cast some scepticism upon the idea that there isn’t a discernable necessity to the academy as a formal institution or that a lifetime devotion to learning in a very real, professional way is not truly requisite for high-cultural achievement. I also wonder about the degree to which education of this sort really is mass-accessible in practise without the benefit of considerable wealth and idledom, as opposed to modernity-affirming optimism and attractive technocratic theory the likes of which you and Andrew seem aligned on.
December 27th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Also, the question of whether to “do humanities” at all taken aside for a moment, I think that some of the most incisive examples of the ways in which capitalist participation is brought to bear injuriously on the character of the humanities on a fundamental, metaphysical level were furnished by Lisa in comment above. In particular:
If you are puzzled at my suggestion of structural adversity that is systemically inherent, you may wish to consider her words very carefully.
There is more at work here, in my opinion, than can be easily dismissed as “sociologically” or “spiritually” or “soulfully” “bad” and not reflective upon the psychology fostered by capitalist relations in any way.
Of course, you can always dismissively wave your hands and say, “Well, that’s just what people do with [or take away from] those capitalist relations. The system isn’t inherently at fault.” Ontologically correct, but practically and sociologically bankrupt semanticism. There is an inextricable moral relationship between the features of the economy humankind creates and humankind itself, together with whatever intricate biases or organic compulsions the former may engender.
December 27th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Alex:
I concur with your description of the problem — it is hard to work and pursue the humanities at the same time. Not impossible, but difficult. However, in order to blame capitalism (rather than just work itself) I think we need to compare it to a system that “works” — in which people’s material needs are cared for, and in which people exhibit substantially more interest in the humanities. Yes, work drains the creative impulse in a capitalist system. But doesn’t it do the same in feudal, socialist, and tribal systems?
December 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Alex, continuing the spirit of our good discussion, I’d like to get more in depth about these ’structural’ issues you are (cautiously) finding with free market libertarianism (I’d rather not call it by its derisive epitet invented by its enemies, ‘capitalism’). Part of the problem with having a principled philosophical engagement b/w the two schools of thought is that we have taken such different roads so many miles that now we have lived in different countries for three generations, taught all of our kids to speak different languages, read propaganda that caricatures each other without knowing what is true and what isn’t, etc. Sorry for the clunky metaphor. I might do it again before I’m done.
Here I go again: one of us is playing chess, and the other is playing checkers. We are criticizing each other for ‘not playing right,’ but the truth is that the rules, pieces, and strategies for the two games are totally different. So I’m not sure how exactly to traverse this chasm and communicate properly, except to say that somehow–mirabile dictu–such communication sometimes happens when people sit down and give it a try. That is my naive common sense realist answer–we know it is possible b/c we see it happen. So I’ll try to keep it going but at the same time I am recognizing the difficulty in comparing two paradigms that are in many ways so different.
”
Just a test of the ‘blockquote’ tag. Sorry.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Awesome, blockquotes here I come!
Who says what the adequate incentive is, though? This gets back to my original comment, doesn’t it? You seem to be presupposing that there is some ‘right’ amount of ‘humanities’ for society. But how is this different from claiming that there is a ‘right’ amount of orange juice that should be produced as opposed to apple juice?
On the one hand, perhaps there is a hypothetical imperative that recommends academic humanities. “If we want such-and-such a kind of society, then we should have more academic humanities than we have now.” I am inclined to agree with you that there are such hypothetical imperatives, but it seems to me that the right way to pursue our goal is to CONVINCE people of the antecedent of the hypothetical. Persuade people to want the such-and-such, convince them of the means-end relationship b/w that such-and-such and academic humanities departments, and the demand for academic humanities departments will go up. What I am having trouble understanding is how, failing in this persuasion, we can justify coercing people to give up their own scarce resources to fund our preference for more academic humanities. You say later in a recent comment that the structure of capitalism creates constraints upon people’s choices that are just as ‘coercive’ as any central planner, but this is where the chess/checkers problem kicks in for me, because I am simply stupefied by that claim. Huh?
In a seminar on biomedical ethics, we talked a lot about ‘quasi-coersion,’ which I think got at the same general point you are making. If a person is so poor that they have to choose between having enough to eat or having the medicine they need to cure an ailment, then this person is suffering from (quasi)-‘coersion’. Even though they are, in the political and legal sense espoused by classical liberalism, ‘free’ to choose, their range of choices is ‘funnelled’ in a way that we do not find acceptable. There are conditions built into the ‘background’ of their choices that shape those choices, and this shaping in the end counts as a type of ‘coersion.’ And so the libertarians offer us a deceptively too-simple choice when they claim to take the high road and oppose ‘coercing’ people to use their resources in ways they would not prefer, because in reality we end up ‘coercing’ no matter what we do. If we adopt libertarian political economy, then we end up quasi-coercing people through the structures of economic evaluation and exchange that will inevitably become dominant.
But I didn’t buy that argument when I was in that seminar, though my stubbornness annoyed my classmates and the professor (and probably caused them to pity my unenlightened soul, as well). It seems to me that the distinction is straightforward and simple: under one form of political economy, Bob buys a car because he has the money to buy a car, and out of all the other things he could spend that money on, he chooses to use it for a car in furtherance of his own goals and self-understanding of happiness. He exchanges the money for the car, and the man who sells him the car is equally satisfied with the exchange. Of all the things he could have done with that car, he prefers to exchange it for Bob’s money. The price they come to is mutually negotiated, and both sides walk away feeling like they are better off. But not only do they feel this way, they ARE truly better off, for each of them has successfully increased their quality of life by fulfilling an ambition that each had which, in their own respective estimations, produced a better quality of life for them than what they had before they made the exchange. Bob is happier with the car than he was with his 10,000 dollars, and Sam the Seller is happier with the 10,000 dollars than he was with the car. It seems to me that there is a pretty clear and reasonable sense in which this scenario is completely non-coercive, in which neither Bob’s nor Sam’s property rights have been violated.
On the other hand, suppose that Bob obtains the car with the help of the government. By whatever means of assistance the government uses, what it amounts to in the end is that someone, call them the family of Victor Victim, is having their resources taken to enable Bob to buy the car from Sam. Again, it seems to me that there is a pretty clear and reasonable sense in which this scenario is coercive in a way that the other was not, and in which someone’s (the Victims’) property rights have been violated. That’s the distinction in a nutshell between coercion and non-coersion, and it seems to me that whatever inherent structures of capitalist economy might be weighing upon and influencing Bob when he decides to buy the car, he is still hardly being ‘coerced’ in any meaningful way under the first scenario, whereas in the second scenario the Victims clearly are being coerced. And they are being coerced no matter what structural justices might exist in the socialist economy in which they find themselves.
Remember that the humanities are still pursued in free market libertarian (henceforth FML) society, they just are not pursued with sufficient demand to support financially all the people who WISH to go into that line of work. Like private jets, lots of people want one, but not everybody who wants one gets to have one. There are currently more people going to grad school and trying to obtain a job in academic humanities than there are available slots for such academicians. There is, in economic jargon, an oversupply or surplus of aspiring humanities academics. There are more currently being supplied by our university-graduate-school complex than there is demand for them. But there is not an all-out dearth of demand, just an under-demand in relation to the actual supply.
Under competition, prices go down and quality goes up (this is the general trend, not a one-for-one reality for every product at every moment in time). When PhDs compete for humanities jobs (the ‘sellers’), the ones who can offer HIGHER quality at LESS cost to the universities (the ‘buyers’) will get the jobs. The others are simply not efficiently providing their product, by the standards of the market (i.e., by the standards of the subjective evaluations of the millions of choice-makers who collectively make up the economy). For the good of the overall economy, they must put their skills to use into other things. Perhaps they take a job as a consultant, or as an ethicist on a hospital board, or perhaps they do something unrelated to their degree altogether. This is just like when businesses go bankrupt because they make bad investments. That money is liquidated as the investment goes bad, it goes to people who made smarter investments, and they in turn put that money into different projects.
Now, I know one of your basic points is that this sort of economic analysis is clunky when applied to academic humanities, but I’m just not sure why it is. Again, this might be a chess/checkers problem for us. But let me continue anyway…
First, remember my earlier point in my first comment, which is another one on which we do not yet find full agreement (and so our descent into the chess-checkers pit continues deeper), that FML society does not necessarily prioritize only those goods that can be quantified financially. When I spoke of quality and costs above regarding would-be humanities professors and universities, for instance, I wasn’t using “quality” or “costs” as shorthand for “mo’ money!”. The quality the university wants in its professors might be all sorts of things. Probably money lurks in there somewhere, but not necessarily. And the costs to the university for retaining a particular humanities academic is not reducible to money, either. The costs are whatever things the university might have done if they had not hired that professor (the ‘opportunity costs’), as well as any foreseeable effect of the hire which the university finds displeasurable. If the university simply doesn’t want to hire a racist professor, for instance, than a very brilliant scholar who is willing to work for 20k a year still won’t be hired. But the point here is that in a FML economy the particular standard of quality that the university wants to get from its professors, and the particular costs it is willing to pay to for that level of quality, is up entirely to the university’s own subjective evaluations of the choices that are available to it. The university gets to dispose of its scarce resources as it thinks best, in line with its own peculiar projects, priorities, and goals. It isn’t clear how there is a ‘right’ answer to these kinds of things.
Second, the societal demand for universities is not an ‘objective’ thing, either. There is no ‘right’ answer for ‘how many universities ought we to have?’ The answer is, “however many the subjective evaluators who make up society want to ‘buy’ with their scarce resources.” Perhaps we already have too many universities (college education is certainly subsidized by government at a high rate), and thus too many jobs for academics in the humanities as it is. In which case, the competition among people seeking out these jobs needs to get even MORE intense than it already is. I don’t know. But I need more help if I am to see how thinking of universities and humanities professors as subject to supply-and-demand is a clunky and unhelpful way to approach these questions.
When there is too much supply, the ‘price’ needs to come down to ‘clear the shelves’. Or, if clearing the shelves is not possible, as is sometimes the case due to the details of the situation (such as when there can only be one winner of the Super Bowl, perhaps) then the resultant competition for the relatively few slots will force the suppliers to ‘earn’ their way into the slots that are available. They ‘earn’ their way in by sufficiently satisfying the desires of the people who control the slots. Just as a car supplier wins my patronage by offering me something that I want at a price that is better than his competitors, so newly-minted PhDs in the humanities win the few available slots for academic jobs by offering the universities that offer those jobs something the universities want, at a level of quality they want, for a ‘price’ the university is willing to pay.
Third, back to the issue of FML economy not being necessarily tied to ‘commodity exchange’ as the end all be all. Commodity exchange value is a big deal in such economies, but this is for obvious and reasonable reasons. The improvements to quality of life across society that is accompanied by, first, the move to commodity-based exchange and, second, the increasingly efficient use of the commodity money (i.e. the ability of society to get more and more bang for its buck…higher quality goods and services for lower prices), testify to why people in ‘developed’ societies place such a value on such exchanges. But this still does not preclude non-commodity values from being realized and pursued, and in fact they still are pursued in FML economies.
I myself am not a sufficiently good academic philosopher, by the standards of current universities, to land a tenure-track job. This is partly due to my own career goals all along, maybe, but the point is still that I have done all this training in philosophy and yet I am not going to use it in the ‘traditional’ way we would expect. But I don’t see this as a problem, or as a sign of the internal structural problems of FML economy. Quite the contrary, one thing FML economy enables me to do is to make a ‘living’ doing other things, and to pursue philosophy in my spare time. I talk