Today, the New York Times ran a story about the ways that food producers are being pressured, by market prices, to be less selective when it comes to preferring non-genetically modified inputs. On the one hand, I don't doubt that price pressures are influencing the choices of inputs large agri-food producers are selecting these days. On the other hand, there two additional suggestions in the article. The least objectionable of these two suggestions is that consumers may also begin to be less likely to choose non-GMO products in the supermarket in the face of lower prices for foodstuffs with GMO inputs. The more objectionable - and subtly implicit - suggestion is that the change in food prices and the rise of food shortages has something to do with the lower productivity of non-GMO crops, and therefore, the higher price associated with them.
First of all, under conditions where long-term industrial and chemical-intensive and conventionally monocropped agriculture has induced (or at least presented the perfect agroecological conditions for) soil erosion, perched watertables, soil infertility and salinization, and pest and weed infestations, some GM crops allow corporate growers and large farmers to reduce chemical inputs and sometimes increase productivity. However, Round-up Ready soybeans are generally less productive than conventional and actually leads to an increase in Round-up applications. Also, Bt-Corn in the Midwest has already begun to generate resistance corn rootworms; herbicide-tolerant canola in Canada has already begun to cross-pollinate with a primary weed, wild mustard; and Golden Rice has neither stickiness nor palatability necessary to successfully extend the supposed benefits of its higher Vitamin A composition to hungry and nutrient deficient people in southeast Asia.
Secondly, the problem with food prices and availability is still not a problem of productivity, it is a problem of profitability. Since the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, only more accelerated and intensively since 1989, rural and urban development policy around the world has resulted in a massive decline in food self-sufficiency for families, regions and countries. Whereas the global South used to have high population growth, that rate of growth has always been associated with the displacement of self-sufficient rural peoples, particularly their displacement into the ever-expanding slums around mega-cities where displacement engenders deep male insecurity, women's declining status and the need for children to increase gross income and adult survival once incapacitated by infirmity or old age. As these slums have grown, demand for food increases proportionate to the inability of slum residents to produce - and often provide - for themselves.
That the explosion of urban slums across the global South is coincident with the rise of new industrial, informational and cultural elites and professionals seeking to consume at rates approaching those in the global North has not only driven up the price of food but also re-oriented agricultural production towards 1) exports in the name of World Bank-led development and IMF-enforced structural adjustment and 2) production of feed for high end animals rather than food for the people. Neither of these developments helps the hungry.
More recently, the coincident rise in demand for oil - the key input in most all pesticides, herbicides, machinery, refrigeration, processing and transportation - has generated all-but exponential multiplier effects on the price of food. What constrains the price in our supermarkets, somewhat, is how very little value embedded in the price of our food actually goes to the farmers/growers/producers who bear the brunt of these rising costs. The key, of course, is that a push for GM crops isn't going to generate anything like a real reduction in food prices since other inputs, processing, transportation and retail add far more to the price than production on the land.
Lastly, the resistance to GM crops is an inordinately complex thing - especially in Europe where scientific knowledge is more widely spread and cultural commitments are agri-nationalist. Resistance to GM crops has long been dismissed as anti-scientific romanticism when, in fact, much of the resistance comes from folks with legitimate ecological concerns, with variously viable health concerns - where the viability lies in the reproduction of unhealthy diets more than the particular health dangers of specific GM crops, and serious concerns for the reproduction of cultural landscapes and identities in the face of the power of international agrichemical, seed and biotech firms and the scalar efficiencies - at the level of price - of massive capitalist agricultural units. All of these concerns are generally youthful or middle and upper income concerns, admittedly, but they speak to parallel conditions tied to the destruction of traditional livelihoods, ecological patrimonies and heirloom varieties across the global South as well - though these voices tend to get drowned out en route to the American press.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Maureen Dowd: Eggheads and Cheeseballs
Maureen Dowd, today, parrots the Republican/Clinton-ite "elitist" tag placed on Obama based on her personal biography, first, and Obama's limited comfort-level with blue collar slumming - something Dowd notes Clinton is better at, but fails to point out that it is slumming nevertheless, second.
She suggests that her family's not bitter, had guns, had "a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling" and that her "family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren’t bitter; they were bonding.... They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket."
What she completely fails to recognize is that her (lower?) middle income, legal-immigrant Catholic upbringing in the Washington DC of the 1950s and 60s was a period of extensive economic growth - at least in the aggregate... a period, and place, that in no way resembles the last quarter century of declining blue collar employment in the industrial and rural regions of Western and Central Pennsylvania about which Obama was talking.
Furthermore, in the late 1970s, before the Reagan revolution, middle income citizens of the United States had similar rates and similarly declining rates of church attendance as in Europe - and an almost universal agreement on the second amendment as a collective rather than individual right to bear arms. Since then, the xenophobic neoliberal discourse of "small" government, self-discipline, personal responsibility and "traditional" values have destroyed the confidence working class and middle management types in this country used to have in the stability of their employment. Any number of pundits have, furthermore, pointed out the brilliant conflation of cultural neoconservativism with economic neoliberalism under Reaganism and socially, ecologically, medically and culturally contradictory consequences of folks in the former camp committing themselves to Republican demagogues in the latter camp.
Whatever the cause, however, there is an empirical correlation between the rising economic insecurity of the last quarter century and an explosion - particularly among those in the most precarious economic positions - in church attendance (often, if not always, in or related to evangelical mega-churches which preach the kinds of populist xenophobia Obama was addressing.
Obama never said all religious commitments and political concerns in all places and times are derived from economic insecurity, only that in his experiences in rural and rust-belt Pennsylvania (and Ohio), that was some of what he saw. I expect better from Maureen Dowd, as I do of the Clintons.
She suggests that her family's not bitter, had guns, had "a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling" and that her "family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren’t bitter; they were bonding.... They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket."
What she completely fails to recognize is that her (lower?) middle income, legal-immigrant Catholic upbringing in the Washington DC of the 1950s and 60s was a period of extensive economic growth - at least in the aggregate... a period, and place, that in no way resembles the last quarter century of declining blue collar employment in the industrial and rural regions of Western and Central Pennsylvania about which Obama was talking.
Furthermore, in the late 1970s, before the Reagan revolution, middle income citizens of the United States had similar rates and similarly declining rates of church attendance as in Europe - and an almost universal agreement on the second amendment as a collective rather than individual right to bear arms. Since then, the xenophobic neoliberal discourse of "small" government, self-discipline, personal responsibility and "traditional" values have destroyed the confidence working class and middle management types in this country used to have in the stability of their employment. Any number of pundits have, furthermore, pointed out the brilliant conflation of cultural neoconservativism with economic neoliberalism under Reaganism and socially, ecologically, medically and culturally contradictory consequences of folks in the former camp committing themselves to Republican demagogues in the latter camp.
Whatever the cause, however, there is an empirical correlation between the rising economic insecurity of the last quarter century and an explosion - particularly among those in the most precarious economic positions - in church attendance (often, if not always, in or related to evangelical mega-churches which preach the kinds of populist xenophobia Obama was addressing.
Obama never said all religious commitments and political concerns in all places and times are derived from economic insecurity, only that in his experiences in rural and rust-belt Pennsylvania (and Ohio), that was some of what he saw. I expect better from Maureen Dowd, as I do of the Clintons.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Krugman's Health Care Crises
In an otherwise excellent - as usual - op ed, Paul Krugman surprised me by ripping Obama supporters who followed the Washington Post's lead in claiming a Hillary Clinton anecdote about a case of health care tragedy to be false more than he ripped the Washington Post for running the BS story in the first place (tho, admittedly, he was critical of their having done so.) There are certainly overly zealous and ideological Obama supporters out there and we all need to check the sources of our "facts" before we start tearing down others, but it strikes me Obama supports come second in this case to the Post's primacy when it comes to fault.
Friday, April 4, 2008
David Brooks' "The View from Room 306"
David Brooks' revisionist history never stops... That he can provide an account of Martin Luther King's engagement in the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike that stresses the disjunction between the economic and identity-radicalism of Black Power and King's work at the time seeks to reinforce the conventional view of King as a liberal, civil rights reformer when, in fact, King himself had joined in the efforts of folks to the left of the moderate civil rights movement and was stressing economic equality in a manner not all that far from late-in-life Malcolm X and many of the Black Panthers (tho, his commitment to peaceful resistance obviously set him apart from the all-but surely justified militarism of the Panthers.
Further stretching history, as a means of supporting his efforts to shore up the positive/moderate conception of MLK, is Brooks' claim that "in the ensuing years [after King's assassination-APR], crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder." It's simply not possible that Brooks doesn't know or failed to check on the fact that the Watts riots were in 1965, the Detroit, MI, and Newark and Plainfield, NJ, riots were in 1967 and that the rending of the fabric of the urban US was part and parcel of the white, middle class, industrial and tax flight from cities in the twenty years following WWII. Furthermore, the interstate highway system - which facilitated this exodus - then destroyed the social and economic coherence that existed in places like the Oranges in NJ, the Bronx in NYC and a significant portion of Philadelphia, PA, and Oakland, CA. (I'm sure there are parallels across the country, I just don't know their specifics.)
The key to understanding David Brooks and his editorials is to understand that he is not ignorant, just ideologically incapable of bringing contravening examples that what he knows (or could easily find out) to bear on the topics he covers.
Further stretching history, as a means of supporting his efforts to shore up the positive/moderate conception of MLK, is Brooks' claim that "in the ensuing years [after King's assassination-APR], crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder." It's simply not possible that Brooks doesn't know or failed to check on the fact that the Watts riots were in 1965, the Detroit, MI, and Newark and Plainfield, NJ, riots were in 1967 and that the rending of the fabric of the urban US was part and parcel of the white, middle class, industrial and tax flight from cities in the twenty years following WWII. Furthermore, the interstate highway system - which facilitated this exodus - then destroyed the social and economic coherence that existed in places like the Oranges in NJ, the Bronx in NYC and a significant portion of Philadelphia, PA, and Oakland, CA. (I'm sure there are parallels across the country, I just don't know their specifics.)
The key to understanding David Brooks and his editorials is to understand that he is not ignorant, just ideologically incapable of bringing contravening examples that what he knows (or could easily find out) to bear on the topics he covers.
Monday, November 19, 2007
David Brooks doesn't know indie rock...
While just about the last person in the world to fight the promotion of Steven Van Zandt's secondary school blues/rock curriculum, David Brooks - who ranks among the most infuriating seemingly-reasonable conservatives on the planet - has once again written an op-ed, The Segmented Society, on a topic he knows far too little about to write on. He gets the racial purification of pop music in the 1970s completely wrong... laying at the feet of musicians, listeners and (implicitly) political correctness, when in fact is comes from the "need" his favorite entity, "the market" (read: large media corporations), had to distill promotional budgets to increase their targeted efficiency. He claims white indie musicians are effectively not allowed to play music from traditionally black traditions when the most simple look at The Black Keys, Manu Chao, Scout Nibblet, The White Stripes, Cafe Tacuba, Cat Power, even the Waco Brothers and a million inter- and mixed-racial hip hop and techno bands shows the man hasn't a clue... and this is to bracket all the retro-rocking Americana bands playing post-punk inter-racial and deeply political folk music from Bonnie Prince Billy to the still amazing Steve Earl.
what he likely means is that none of these bands are going to be as big as Springsteen and the E-Street Band, to which I can only say, so what?! The whole history of the 1980s underground and its post-Nirvana syntheses is obliterated by, once again, Brooks' failure to do any real research before writing as if he knew what he was talking about.
what he likely means is that none of these bands are going to be as big as Springsteen and the E-Street Band, to which I can only say, so what?! The whole history of the 1980s underground and its post-Nirvana syntheses is obliterated by, once again, Brooks' failure to do any real research before writing as if he knew what he was talking about.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
In Dusty Archives, a (Ridiculous) Theory of Affluence
I need to note that this post is based on the review of Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms (2007, Princeton University Press), by Nicholas Wade in today's New York Times... I have not read the book and may get things wrong as a result.
First off, Wade states:
However, the vast majority of anthropological data accumulated during the 20th century clearly shows that hunters and gatherers lived anything but impoverished lives... their "abject poverty" is rooted in the ethnocentric and ahistorical imposition of advanced industrial norms and standards on people who's values and desires were radically different than our own.
Wade also finds Clark arguing that:
as if anyone with an historical sense believed otherwise. Making matters worse, of course, is the wrong-headed assumption that the middle class is 1. committed to non-violence (spousal abuse, corporal punishment and beating animals were common in the middle class until very recently -- if not through to the present), 2. didn't embrace the forty hour work week of the post-war era (much less the still-shorter one in Europe to this day) and 3. is centrally concerned with an interest in saving (has anyone heard of credit cards, second mortgages, etc?)
The argument is basically that:
As such, Wade argues that incomes, in 1790, were "pitifully low" in terms of the grain people could buy and that peasants lived on about the same number of calories as contemporary hunter-gatherers. Perhaps the measure of caloric intake is accurate, though the focus on purchased food is likely a problem when peasants, distinguishable from independent farmers (tenant and otherwise), produced much of their food outside of the market.
Equally important, however, is the technodeterminist line taken here that suggests productivity was primarily constrained by technological -- rather than sociocultural limits -- and that new technologies, rather than new ways of organizing production, were the key to the boom in productivity. Anyone who appeals to changes in the nature of humanity or the determinates of technology is almost surely hiding (or failing to take into account) changes in social relations.
What is most staggering, however, is the utterly uncritical appeal to Malthus' argument about population outstripping food production when Malthus' argument has been so thoroughly savaged on intellectual and empirical grounds -- starting with Marx. The idea that the English Industrial Revolution increased productivity faster than the English people could produce people of course misses the extraordinary flow of people out of England to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand and beyond.
In rather extraordinay fashion, however, we don't learn until half way through the long article that Clark's argument is largely based on a comparative analysis of the wills of the rich and poor when it is all-but impossible to believe that the majority of peasants between 1200 and 1800 had wills, much less had wills that survived in comparative numbers to those of the mercantile and elite classes of England.
Clark apparently argues that:
This, too, is flabbergasting. On the one hand, I have no idea when Clark starts collecting his data. On the other, and again this may be Wade more than Clark, in 1200 the proportion of the English population who were wealthy would have been inordinately small and, from 1200 to 1800, the vast majority of peasants and independent producers didn't have professions for left over elite kids to take over! The church and marriage were quite specifically for taking up excess boys and networking with other elites for girls. In fact, one of the major problems for the manorial and royal populations was subdividing lands.
What really knocks my socks off, however, is that none of the Marxist, Weberian, Wallersteinian, Foucaldian or other arguments about changes associated with the enclosure of the commons and proletarianization of the peasantry, the rationalization of bureaucracies and production, the dynamics of interconnection between the colonial core and colonized periphery, or the disciplining of bodies and minds even begin to be addressed in this argument.
As I should have noted in my previous posting about Carl Zimmer's reporting on Martin Nowack's work, the problem in passages like this:
resides in the intellectual and disciplinary limits of economics far more than anything else. That Wade and Clark would rather appear to arguments about changes in human nature rather than changes in human behavior rooted in changes in the material and ideological conditions of social life speaks once-again to the spread of relatively uncritical sociobiology-positive reporting in the Times.
A few critics are presented at the end of the piece but they are straw men for utterly fallacious arguments about natural selection having something to do with lactose tolerance in Northern Europe and changes in the population genetics of the people of Puerto Rico which are used to undermine more sociological/institutionalist accounts. Natural selection is about the evolution of species, slight differences in the genetic composition of geographic sub-groups of individual species are all-but surely not about natural, but are about social, selection.
First off, Wade states:
"For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
However, the vast majority of anthropological data accumulated during the 20th century clearly shows that hunters and gatherers lived anything but impoverished lives... their "abject poverty" is rooted in the ethnocentric and ahistorical imposition of advanced industrial norms and standards on people who's values and desires were radically different than our own.
Wade also finds Clark arguing that:
"The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history"
as if anyone with an historical sense believed otherwise. Making matters worse, of course, is the wrong-headed assumption that the middle class is 1. committed to non-violence (spousal abuse, corporal punishment and beating animals were common in the middle class until very recently -- if not through to the present), 2. didn't embrace the forty hour work week of the post-war era (much less the still-shorter one in Europe to this day) and 3. is centrally concerned with an interest in saving (has anyone heard of credit cards, second mortgages, etc?)
The argument is basically that:
the economy [from 1200 to 1800] was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.
As such, Wade argues that incomes, in 1790, were "pitifully low" in terms of the grain people could buy and that peasants lived on about the same number of calories as contemporary hunter-gatherers. Perhaps the measure of caloric intake is accurate, though the focus on purchased food is likely a problem when peasants, distinguishable from independent farmers (tenant and otherwise), produced much of their food outside of the market.
Equally important, however, is the technodeterminist line taken here that suggests productivity was primarily constrained by technological -- rather than sociocultural limits -- and that new technologies, rather than new ways of organizing production, were the key to the boom in productivity. Anyone who appeals to changes in the nature of humanity or the determinates of technology is almost surely hiding (or failing to take into account) changes in social relations.
What is most staggering, however, is the utterly uncritical appeal to Malthus' argument about population outstripping food production when Malthus' argument has been so thoroughly savaged on intellectual and empirical grounds -- starting with Marx. The idea that the English Industrial Revolution increased productivity faster than the English people could produce people of course misses the extraordinary flow of people out of England to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand and beyond.
In rather extraordinay fashion, however, we don't learn until half way through the long article that Clark's argument is largely based on a comparative analysis of the wills of the rich and poor when it is all-but impossible to believe that the majority of peasants between 1200 and 1800 had wills, much less had wills that survived in comparative numbers to those of the mercantile and elite classes of England.
Clark apparently argues that:
Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.
This, too, is flabbergasting. On the one hand, I have no idea when Clark starts collecting his data. On the other, and again this may be Wade more than Clark, in 1200 the proportion of the English population who were wealthy would have been inordinately small and, from 1200 to 1800, the vast majority of peasants and independent producers didn't have professions for left over elite kids to take over! The church and marriage were quite specifically for taking up excess boys and networking with other elites for girls. In fact, one of the major problems for the manorial and royal populations was subdividing lands.
What really knocks my socks off, however, is that none of the Marxist, Weberian, Wallersteinian, Foucaldian or other arguments about changes associated with the enclosure of the commons and proletarianization of the peasantry, the rationalization of bureaucracies and production, the dynamics of interconnection between the colonial core and colonized periphery, or the disciplining of bodies and minds even begin to be addressed in this argument.
As I should have noted in my previous posting about Carl Zimmer's reporting on Martin Nowack's work, the problem in passages like this:
After the Industrial Revolution, the gap in living standards between the richest and the poorest countries started to accelerate, from a wealth disparity of about 4 to 1 in 1800 to more than 50 to 1 today. Just as there is no agreed explanation for the Industrial Revolution, economists cannot account well for the divergence between rich and poor nations or they would have better remedies to offer.
resides in the intellectual and disciplinary limits of economics far more than anything else. That Wade and Clark would rather appear to arguments about changes in human nature rather than changes in human behavior rooted in changes in the material and ideological conditions of social life speaks once-again to the spread of relatively uncritical sociobiology-positive reporting in the Times.
A few critics are presented at the end of the piece but they are straw men for utterly fallacious arguments about natural selection having something to do with lactose tolerance in Northern Europe and changes in the population genetics of the people of Puerto Rico which are used to undermine more sociological/institutionalist accounts. Natural selection is about the evolution of species, slight differences in the genetic composition of geographic sub-groups of individual species are all-but surely not about natural, but are about social, selection.
Blogged with Flock
Monday, August 6, 2007
Getting Iraq, Politics and the Academy Wrong
In Michael Ignatieff's exploration of how he got the stance he took on the Iraq War so wrong, he says some provocative things. Among these are that
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life.
While the argument about the academy would seem to, maybe, apply to the humanities, certain moments in the social sciences and some of the more interpretive/contested areas of the natural sciences, this strikes me as a deeply problematic generalization about te academy.
Imediately after the quote above he argues that
In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
The disjuncture between this quote and the history of the academic legitimation of racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric and other forms of hate-filled "play" and policy is rather striking. Furthermore, the absolute silence with respect to recent trends in politics and corporatization of the academic definition of true and false ideas is also rather stunning. In a world where state regulation is increasingly defined by public-private collaborative governance and where life in many areas of Reseach I universities is increasingly driven not by the viability of ideas but by the capacity to draw external, and often corporate, funds the focus on the truth or falsity of ideas is quite misleading.
I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.
Here again, this account seriously mis-states the historical conditions of work in universities. In the North American social sciences, where I am situated, an intense empiricism (with an associated deep suspicion of theoretically-driven interpretations) pervaded the scientization of these disciplines after WWII and continues to this day as part of the quantitative-qualitative research fractures in geography, sociology, and anthropology (as well as the political theory vs. government studies dynamic in Ignatieff's own field of political science).
What is meant by the idea that theory gets in the way? If theory means philosophy -- which is most often taught as ideas abstracted from any engagement with material reality... the realm of first principals and traditional ethics -- then this may be the case. However, if theory in the academy and politics means the conceptual product of engaging with the material world in order to abstract trends, tendencies, contradictions and opportunities then theory had better be the foundation of the kind of self-reflexive pragmatic politics Ignatieff spends so much of the rest of the article embracing.
He writes:
An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
Is this really an intellectual's primary responsibility? Perhaps an intellectual's responsibility to to operationalize their ideas in a way that does not support harmful policies? Ignatieff has ideas about the differences between ideas and policy, between the academy and politics, that might have had some viability at the height of modernity but in todays utterly hybridized, synthetic and interdisciplinary world such stances make no sense whatsover. But even if this understanding of the role of intellectuals and politicians made sense once, it was in this period that many of the people who constructed nuclear bombs said: "Hey, I just build them, what the politicians do with them is neither my concern nor responsibility."
Perhaps the deepest problem with this article is that it so deeply feeds American anti-intellectualism at the same time that it promotes a liberal mode of political self-reflexivity. He notes:
As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.
The problem is not that a sense of reality fails to flourish at elite institutions and it doesn't matter at all that some bus drivers have a shrewder grasp of reality than some Nobel Prize winners, the problem is that the reality bus drivers, housewives, family farmers, skilled union millwrights and army corporals live is so separate from that of most academics awarded prizes of any sort. The problem is that the character of contemporary society separates so many of us from so many of the rest of us that modernist arguments like Ignatieff's still make sense in the kind of public space that is the New York Times, even though the vast majority of folks outside the academy (or undergraduate students in it) and inside the government (or engaged in working with it) know that these splits are infinitely more "theoretical" than "real."
Blogged with Flock
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
