But I didn’t make the time to discuss why the 2008 exit poll is not nearly as significant as the 2004 exit poll. (For that matter, I don’t have time to bicker over the significance of exit poll numbers with you, at all.)

The thing is, the 2008 election was an interesting one because here we had Bush Jr. stepping down, so there was no security in the current incumbant, and the Republican party in general was thice damned (and still is) for just how badly they botched the economy.

The 2004 election is interesting because anyone who was paying attention could very much see that things were spiraling down the drain, but the vote was still just barely in favor of the incumbent.

The differences between the 2004 and 2008 numbers are probably a good measure of who was slow on the uptake.

I was going through an article on the “Great Books” project of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the fifties, and keeping on reading, discovered that one of the people involved with it had first been encouraged to read Plato (at age fourteen or so) out of shame, when he learned that John Stuart Mill had done the same at the age of five.

I suppose that’s an easy thing to read Plato at five when your own father happens to be a respected thinker in a position to Jeremy Bentham as your tutor. Mill’s training is quite a story in itself, but it was rooted in the excessive approach to parenting (from Wikipedia: “His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham were dead.”) Perhaps that went over well in the nineteenth century, but I wonder if it could rank as child abuse; at any rate, it would be borderline indoctrination. I suspect that if a child were subjected to this nowadays, if he doesn’t go bonkers, would spend the rest of his life trying to disprove his father and any enlisted Benthams.

But does “Joe Sixpack”, or his children, have an opportunity like that? Can you be a musical wunderkind if your parents don’t own a piano, let alone read music? Probably not. So it’s largely a case of inequality at birth; in which case, I wish we could be spared the cliche “everybody is a winner” strawman when aiming for some sort of social justice. No, not everyone is a winner. I remember discussing the case of a swim meet some time ago, either here or on MMORPG.com. Not everyone wins the race, so yeah, no equality of outcome. But it becomes a problem when not everyone starts the race at the same time. Pit the J.S. Mill of swimming against your average Joe Sixpack, and see who wins.

That is Joe Sixpack’s predicament. The perennial loser, the object of scorn and derision. His only strength, like it or not, is in numbers. And here is where I step forward to defend democracy – the idea of it. No, it’s not perfect, far from it. Someone mentioned that Churchill quote about it being “the worst form of government except for all the others”, and there is another Churchill quote to go with it, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute talk with the average voter.”

My reason for supporting democracy is, I suspect, the same as Churchill’s: it’s a safety valve. It’s a way to control society by giving the people some meaningless amount of power. For academics weaned on Plato, it’s probably too much, but get rid of democracy, and it might get worse. The state loses its legitimacy; the lack of a legal recourse means people will look beyond the law to obtain satisfaction (and some of the most compelling cases of tyranny of the majority in a democratic system never had the imprimatur of the government).

I’m all for having an informed citizenry, but as I said, I think the problem begins at the top, with the intellectual elites, instead of the bottom. First, because they behave as elitists who are content with their status but have forgotten all of their duties and obligations as the elites they so eagerly want to be. Second, because they have taken to peddling agendas and settling inconsequential accounts among themselves.

That reminds me of an article I read a while ago, by a person in charge of a think-tank that advocated returning to the teachings of the Athenians. And he brought up several of the points discussed in this thread, wondering why we endorsed celebrities as candidates and shunned university professors. I’ll quote a key paragraph here: “Although this anti-intellectual bias is less predominant in Canada, both American and Canadian voters are very vulnerable to mediatic factors such as body language, winking at the audience, ability to tell jokes and being folksy and cute. This media-enhanced trivialization started in the first television debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and it’s been said that JFK won the televised debate because of Mr. Nixon’s sweaty face while Mr. Nixon won the radio debate because of his arguments. Today, the spin doctors and image makers try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We are very far from Plato’s philosopher king.”

It would be a very convincing reasoning if not for those two little words: “Richard Nixon”. As it turned out, the guy with the more convincing arguments proved to be a paranoid and vindictive freak whose downfall, ironically, seemed to prove to a generation of Americans that their political system worked. Or is that acceptable behavior among philosopher kings?

What is fascinating about this article, which began with a discussion of Sarah Palin, is that it was published in March of this year, and not before the US election. It’s even more puzzling when you get to read such gems as “The U.S. voter from the Midwest or Deep South must realize his or her decision has global implications and act accordingly.” Which evidently applies only to regions of the US where Republicans happen to be popular. Only they must be reminded of American obligations on the world stage; I wonder why.

That’s perhaps what annoyed me most about the last US election — this idea that there is a date with history that must not be missed. I might despise Republicans, but one should have had the option of voting for them without being labeled an idiot, or worse, a racist. Apparently it’s fine for a black Obama supporter to say that blacks must rally around him; I wonder if “Whites! Vote McCain!” would have gone over just as well. Ultimately, it’s just the usual pressure that takes away from the democratic nature of the exercise. If you want to vote Republican, you should have the right to do so without having to wear a brown paper bag (and please, no “don’t you usually wear those pointy white hoods anyway?”).

In your stats, you do see an interesting correlation in that the white, particularly uneducated vote was on McCain’s side. It seems racial bias is still alive in well in the land of the free.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1

Even when you take out the distortion induced by race it doesn’t provide strong support for the notion that the less schooled or poorer are just grist for the neocon mill.

@Vetarnias
No it’s not just the US, I’ve spent the last decade with Canadian Commerce & MBA students. Maybe things are different at McGill with Mintzberg there but I doubt it.

I too did notice the trend towards the “vocational training”, which I guess is fine in small doses but not when it starts dictating an approach to higher education. However, can “Joe Sixpack” be blamed for that? To be honest, I can’t see how. As much as one could extol the virtues of a nineteenth-century-style classical liberal education, where you would read history and Latin and Greek, keep this in mind: Joe Sixpacks would never have access to such an education in the first place, for reasons having nothing to do with intellectual capacity.

If anything, the educational system (and though I’m not American, it’s the same problem here) has become a surrogate for an apprenticeship system that still occasionally shows up in the form of on-the-job training but has more or less vanished in an age when businesses regard their employees as overhead instead of assets, and would rather avoid investing in them or having to train them in any way beyond molding them to the company mentality — which explains the presence of those prestigious versions of DeVry. It used to be that you would learn hotel and restaurant management by starting out as a busboy, not by trying to obtain a piece of paper that states that you know everything about the restaurant business.

This way of thinking has reached its apex with the sacrosanct MBA, which unleashed God knows how many young immortals who think they know much about running a business because they can read a financial statement. There have been some grumbling about this for quite a few years (see Henry Mintzberg, for example), but what good is it to complain about MBA’s when military academies produce a yearly batch of young officers, some, if not most, of whom never served in the military before?

I remember one time when I was looking into applying to graduate school. My undergraduate studies were in one of the more unemployable disciplines, and I was concerned that it would be a waste of time and money to obtain a master’s, especially since I had little desire to move on to the Ph.D, much less of working in academia. When I expressed my reluctance to one of my professors at the time, she told me that I could do a dual master’s that would involve one-half unemployable discipline, one-half administration degree. I’m not sure what the curriculum would have looked like, as the very idea of a humanities-business master’s-level chimera seemed impractical enough academically. But beyond that, why would I study management when I’d never had so much as enough money to my name that I could manage with more latitude than invariably placing it in absolutely-risk-free and consequently ultra-low-interest investments? I was being financially responsible, out of necessity, but if that’s enough to qualify, wouldn’t anyone who never went bankrupt meet the requirements?

So that’s why I’m not planning on studying for an MBA, whether now or a few years down the road — I don’t think I’m qualified to be doing this (anyway, in a few years, I’ll have lost that “youthful edge” one has come to expect from MBA graduates). But if you dangle that or any other sort of vocational training in front of “Joe Sixpack”, why shouldn’t he take the opportunity, no matter how ill-suited it might be for him, since it’s practically the only one he’ll ever get? Hardly degrading, unless you happen to be one of those elitists who would sneer at such plebeian methods of social elevation.

I’m all for separating the terms schooling and education, and placing what I just discussed under the former. But the two tend to collide and blend more often than not, and it is the resulting ambiguity which led to this discussion (see JuJutsu’s interpretation of it), first and foremost because of the prevailing view that the only appropriate type of schooling is that which is also educational in nature, i.e. that classical liberal education I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the only one seemingly appropriate for intellectual pursuits, which in turn are seen as the only worthy pursuits of mankind.

It also makes the closed-mindedness of JuJutsu’s master’s students much more damaging than the closed-mindedness of “Joe Sixpack” and his entire bowling league. Yet it’s always fashionable to talk of anti-intellectualism, and not nearly so much to discuss the rampant elitism in higher education, let alone the absurdity of much of what is going on there. (I am talking specifically about the humanities.)

It’s over a decade old, but the Sokal hoax still epitomizes everything that is wrong in academic circles. For those who might not know what it was about, it involved a physics professor (Alan Sokal) who submitted a deliberately phony paper to a Yale cultural studies journal, in which he argued that gravity was a social construct, with several quotes culled from poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers to prove his point. After it was published, he exposed the hoax in another publication, and not surprisingly, it led to much howling on both sides.

Yet amid the attacks on Sokal (and there were plenty of them, many ad hominem — he’s anti-French, he’s a right-winger, or just plain “he was dishonest”), the one accusation that stood out for me came from one of the editors of the journal he had fooled: Sokal “got it wrong”, the editor argued, because “he’s ill-read and half-educated” (see how it fits here), with further claims from another editor that they knew the article was “a little hokey” but ran it anyway. Then why did the journal run the piece? Could it be because it happened to be ideologically convenient and written by someone with credentials on the enemy’s side of the fence?

Yet the problem with that I have with the Sokal hoax is that it came with an unfortunate side effect. Science did not need to be saved from postmodernists, because nobody took them seriously in that field anyway except the converted (would any scientist seriously think that Newton’s Principia was, as stated by a feminist writer, a “rape manual”?), but the hoax ended up giving ammunition to those in the humanities who, while not caring much about science, certainly objected to postmodernism. So that switched from those saying that everything was a social construct to those who argued that their entire field was just every bit as unquestionably factual as the sciences.

Please understand that I think the Sokal hoax was very much needed, even despite its unfortunate consequences, because it exposed how much of what was going on there was purely politically motivated, and for a brief while the moral and intellectual veneer that covered this was stripped off. Now, imagine being “Joe Sixpack”, watching this from the sidelines; what are you supposed to think? That a lot of what is going on there is some ideological battle that claims the intellectual high ground while trying to purge those who think differently?

I’m all for education, but I wouldn’t blame Joe Sixpack for being responsible for education being discouraged; nor would I blame those smooth-talking politicians for that — they just ride the wave, they didn’t start it. No, I would look squarely at academic circles for that, that so-called intellectual elite which always cries how powerless (and superior) it is — and it’s both the left and the right doing it, against one another and everyone below (such as Richard Hofstadter and Allan Bloom).

Rail as you may against politicians and Wall Street bankers, those intellectuals wouldn’t consider they’re part of the rightful elite anyway — just rich posturers. What you get, on the other hand, are those closed-minded academics, those who proclaim themselves to be the only rightful elite (any reference to Plato is a giveaway). But for all their confidence that they, and they alone, can lead society, they’ve forgotten why they were about to lead it in the first place. It’s not even about the betterment of society, no matter how much lip service they’ll pay to that, it’s all about their own status and their petty causes.

For some reason, Marxists are the most conspicuous, perhaps because they are forced to justify their intellectual premise while being confronted with the reality of the application of Marxism (which, no matter how loudly they can proclaim such applications to be travesties of their ideology, isn’t particularly convincing). Strange example of that happened on MMORPG.com a few months ago — just imagine someone showing up and making a case that MMO’s are a modern example of the “opiate of the masses” (for the link-inclined: mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm?thread=232238&bhcp=1 ). Nothing particularly groundbreaking; a believable premise, but a faulty argumentation, and even a case of plagiarism. The author took advantage of a Chinese official referring to MMO’s as a spiritual opium that corrupted the Chinese youth; but in the true Marxist sense, it’s an entirely different situation (not one of social corruption, as seemed to be the official’s accusation, but one of social control), and a totalitarian-capitalistic regime like Beijing’s would gladly welcome every opiate it could exploit, not clamp down on them. And any but the purest Marxist regimes would do exactly the same, if the opium were safe enough (which an independent organized religion left unchecked is not, but MMO’s might be).

But anyway, just imagine going to MMORPG.com and starting this sort of pseudo-intellectual bullshit, with all the smugness you can imagine attached to it. At one point the author linked to an unrelated article in one of those British Marxist publications. I look up the stuff, just for fun (yes, I know, I have weird interests), and it turns out that the publication has been criticized for caring little for the plight of workers in any practical sense, and only studying them in a clinical, detached method, as an anonymous group, “The Proletariat” and so on. And if you consider that among academics, Marxists are the most obsessed with questions of class, where does that leave the others?

“Joe Sixpack” might lack the refinement provided by a good education, but he isn’t dumb, and his instinct tells him that in those loftier circles, the reality of “Joe Sixpack” is just more ideological fodder, a case study, just like House doesn’t care about his patients. Unlike House’s diagnoses, however, the condition of “Joe Sixpack” can be distorted at will according to what you want to make it say. In the end, it inevitably ends up being a battle over the state of “Joe Sixpack” in which “Joe Sixpack” plays no part; and should he want to play a part, to chime in on his own condition, it’s always the same response. Not interested. Uninformed. False consciousness (always handy, for either side). Apparently “Joe Sixpack” cannot assess his own condition because he has not read Marx, or Milton Friedman, or Nietzsche, or any other writer deemed important by the intellectual doing the dismissal. (Or, if it turns out that “Joe Sixpack” *did* read it, there is always that “got it wrong” they leveled at Sokal. It’s your fault for not understanding it. Go reread it.)

Is it any wonder that this open-minded approach to education does not exist, if possible at all? If you want to educate yourself, you get presented with a rigid reading list where individual interests and preferences don’t even matter. Prefer Marvell to Milton or Jonson to Shakespeare? Wrong! That reminds me of Raymond Chandler, who did much to legitimize the detective novel as an artistic venture as opposed to a mindless distraction. He once wrote that “all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.” I can almost hear the rebuttal of intellectual snobs: “Oh, but you don’t read Marx or Plato or Nietzsche for pleasure. You read them because you must.” Otherwise, reading out of obligation would be confined to those eight years’ worth of financial statements by this company that your boss has asked to be briefed about.

What’s worse is that it’s pretty a hypocritical rebuttal, because they don’t expect you to read them in the first place (or not understand them if you did). I suspect it’s quite similar to the Linux buzz, in that it derives its glamour not necessarily from being better, but from being exclusive. “We techies love Linux, it works great, and there is no Microsoft. The masses who know nothing about computing use Windows, but we’re better than that.” Make Linux more accessible, even without sacrificing any of its quality, and all of a sudden it loses its cachet — even though it’s still better than Windows. It’s the type of reasoning that provides the sole justification for Rolex watches — no matter how reliable they are, a lifetime supply of Timexes would amount to a fraction of their cost. It’s like that foreign film with subtitles (that isn’t playing within 100 miles of where you live): it stops being hip when the popcorn crowd walks in.

In other words, intellectuals are proponents of education on the one hand and discouraging it on the other, so that they could be better at ease when launching little ideological attacks against one another (and, sometimes, at taxpayers’ expense). But we can’t denounce them, for that would be anti-intellectualism.

It’s already long enough, so I’ll post this while working on a follow-up to discuss a few more matters.