Max Weber and the Two Universities

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Professor Stephen P. Turner published in January 2024:

No sooner than the ink had begun to dry (or should we say the pixels stopped changing) on the publications written to celebrate the centennial of Weber’s ‘Science as a Profession and Vocation’ ([1919]2012) than Covid and a series of shocks to the university, especially in the United States, changed the conditions for discourse. The shocks included the ‘enrollment cliff,’ the early arrival of an expected decline in students for long-anticipated demographic reasons, an unexpectedly rapid decline in enrollments in the humanities, notably history, the recognition that young men especially were choosing not to go to college, a simultaneous and related turn against wokeness, a rapidly developing skepticism about the medical research establishment as a result of the admitted failure of Covid vaccines to prevent the disease as promised and the revelation of the false narratives that were officially promoted about its origins together with the silence of the grant-dependent academy and the intimidation of those who spoke out, the great price inflation and the spectacle of prominent academic economists minimizing what was part of people’s everyday experience, and ongoing crises of governance in universities as presidents resigned, and politicians and donors intervened.

If this were not enough, the events of October 7, 2023, produced an outburst of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian demonstrations that quickly veered into anti-Semitic and anti-western directions. The Presidents of three elite universities, called to testify to congress about their response, repeated carefully crafted excuses that were immediately
seen as hypocritical about free speech—defending students calling for genocide at the same time as they enforced elaborate regimes prohibiting misgendering and micro-aggressions, and promoting anti-racism. The scientist President of one major university, Stanford, had been caught up in a scandal involving what amounted to research fraud. The limited scholarship of the recently appointed President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was scrutinized after her performance at the congressional hearing and numerous instances of what was arguably plagiarism were found.

Much of the scrutiny was in politicized on-line forums which often either seized on them as evidence of fraudulence or attacked the scrutinizers as racists or as inferiors jealous of Harvard excellence; the main results appeared on Substack, and were selectively amplified in the subsequent public discussion. Soon older questions about the dataset some of this research was based on, which she had refused to share, were raised anew. But 700 Harvard faculty supported her in a petition, some probably motivated by the idea that outsiders should have no influence over the university. A smaller number called for her to resign.

The idea of academic freedom was caught up in this crisis. It was publicly challenged, along with the idea of freedom of speech in general, by the crisis produced by the Israeli-Palestinian war, which was seen as a source of harm, but also which produced problems over the key notions of harm, genocide, and hate speech, which now seemed to be selectively applied and in ways that reproduced the political and intellectual divisions that discourse was supposed to cure. This occurred against the background of an effort to delegitimate the west and ‘whiteness’ in the name of anti-racism, decolonization, and resistance to cognitive imperialism, incarceration, and environmental destruction, all
of which were to be laid at the feet of racialized capitalism. The war was a convenient fit for the zero-sum theory of oppression to the effect that every group’s misery was the result of another group’s ‘privilege’ and exploitation.1 This kind of speech was promoted; responses to it were punished. The short-term result of these conflicts was a widespread acceptance of the need to reconsider these core freedoms as harmful and speech in need of more regulation, especially on-line. But there was also a reaction in favor of free speech and academic freedom, and a sense that it had already been deeply compromised. The fact that people had come to self-censor and act out of fear had become obvious, and documented (Clark et al. 2023; Stevens, Jussim, and Honeycutt 2020).

There was much more: the US Supreme Court had just decided, on June 23, 2023, that the scheme of racial preferences that Harvard and the University of North Carolina had relied on were cases of illegal discrimination2, leading to a massive effort to circumvent the ruling and continue the practices under different terms. In science, retractions, conflict of interest issues, and financial misdeeds had become a worldwide epidemic, in part as a result of the metricization of research evaluation and rewards, in part because of the vast system of science funding itself, which produced an artificial competition oriented toward pay-offs rather than intellectual content, and, particularly in the US, great financial rewards for patents and business deals—the perfect example of the neoliberal idea of artificial competition. At the same time, in the humanities and the social sciences, employment in academic life has become more precarious. Tenure, and the freedoms it implied, has become rarer and alternative forms of support were tied to other agendas…

‘Just and sustainable’ is a fundamental desire that needs no rational support or additional justification, any more than any other desire. In practice the bad purposes came to be interpreted in terms of terms of ‘harm.’ The concept of harm became the de facto replacement for a value system. To ask where one got the authority to pronounce something good or bad was itself harmful: it asserted the authority of the harmer over the harmed. But this denial of authority was selective: only the oppressed, or those speaking for them, could say they were harmed…

Needless to say this understanding is never articulated as a coherent theory, which is why Brown uses the notion of desire. Harm is normally invoked by examples. Freedom of speech and protest over harmful speech is a typical case where the issue arises, and typically the value of freedom of speech (and protest) is not directly attacked, but a notion like ‘responsibility’ is invoked and an affective harm is described. An example of this is the exchange between Eddie Glaude, Jr. of Princeton, and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Here the harm is entirely on the level of feelings.

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Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Randall Schweller wrote in 2010:

ALTHOUGH THE BRITISH EMPIRE according to J. R. Seeley and Winston Churchill was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, territorial expansion usually advances through a deliberate and collective will to imperial power, through a single-mindedness for expansion shared by both rulers and ruled… History shows that those restless leaders who have not only succumbed to imperial temptations but most zealously pursued their expansionist aims have generally led strong and unified polities, not weak and fragmented ones…

Operating within an anarchic, self-help environment, states must provide for the means of their own security and whatever other desires they develop; they must devise strategies, chart courses, and make decisions about how to meet internal and external exigencies… Realists argue, therefore, that expansion and preventive aggression to gain control over
scarce resources are often the best means of achieving more power and security in an anarchic setting that resembles Hobbes’s state of nature..

Yet there have been relatively few bids for hegemony in recent history. This is especially true in the Third Word, which consists of regions where significant power inequalities exist among neighboring states that should, according to offensive realism, engender opportunistic expansion. Since the end of the Cold War, however, very few Third World states have fought interstate wars, and the vast majority of Third World states have not even confronted significant external threats. As Jeffrey Herbst observes:
“Even in Africa, the continent seemingly destined for war given the colonially-imposed boundaries and weak political authorities, there has not been one involuntary boundary change since the dawn of the independence era in the late 1950s, and very few countries face even the prospect of a conflict with their neighbors. Most of the conflicts in Africa that have occurred were not, as in Europe, wars of conquest that threatened
the existence of other states, but conflicts over lesser issues that were resolved without threatening the existence of another state.”5 Likewise, K. J. Holsti comments: “The search for continental hegemony is rare in the Third World, but was a common feature of European diplomacy under the Habsburg, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany, Hitler, and Soviet Union and, arguably, the United States.”6

Potentially powerful states such as India, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil have chosen to remain potential regional hegemons rather than actual ones. None has even contemplated much less actively pursued a grand strategy to achieve this exalted status. And so what Gerald Segal claims about contemporary China can be said for all these countries: “China remains a classic case of hope over experience, reminiscent of de Gaulle’s famous comment about Brazil: It has great potential, and always will.”7Why have we seen so few wars of aggression in modern times?

…fascism shared many of realism’s core assumptions about world politics and views about the nature and role of the state. There are two very significant differences between fascism and realism, however: fascists did not believe in the balance of power and they
activated realist principles with a racist ideology that, unfortunately for humankind, succeeded in mobilizing the passions of the multitudes.

…if Germany had not attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler and Mussolini would have accomplished bold but prudent expansion for their states—expansion consistent with a
realist view of appropriate state interests and behavior because it did not provoke an overwhelmingly powerful counterbalancing coalition.

…a political regime that is able to mobilize and allocate resources to meet its policy commitments, has broad scope over societal activities and social groups, is autonomous from domestic and outside pressure groups, can command compliance from its subjects,
and enjoys the general consent of its citizenry will be less constrained to act in accordance with international systemic incentives than will a political regime that does not have these characteristics.

…Aside from the Mexican-American, Indian-American, and Spanish-American wars, U.S. growth in territory and power was accomplished by the attractiveness of its political system, which proved so seductive that other republics voluntarily relinquished their sovereignty and applied for admission to the American Union.

…Aggressive expansion requires a unified state composed of elites that agree on an ambitious grand strategy, and a stable and effective political regime with broad authority to pursue uncertain and risky foreign policies.

…Realism provides neither a theory of despotic power nor an ideology for whipping up nationalist sentiment to wage large-scale wars. Indeed, there is nothing about the realist creed that would stir the passions of average citizens in support of the state, much less cause them to rise up as one without regard to hardship. Large-scale mobilization campaigns in pursuit of risky and aggressive expansion require a crusade of some kind, which is precisely what realism decries as a basis for foreign policy.39 Realism is, instead, a cynical and largely pessimistic political philosophy about why things remain the same, why wars and conflict will persist, why the struggle for power and prestige among states will endure, and why, in Morgenthau’s words, “man cannot hope to be good but must be content with being not too evil.”40 At its core, realism is a hollow political doctrine, as E. H. Carr asserts: “realism, though logically overwhelming, does not provide us with the springs of action which are necessary even to the pursuit of thought. . . . Consistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment and a ground for action. . . . The necessity, recognized by all politicians, both in domestic and international affairs, for cloaking interests in the guise of moral principles is in itself a symptom of the inadequacy of realism.”

…fascism is offensive realism with a racist and social Darwinist overlay…

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What Is Religion?: Debating the Academic Study of Religion

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book:

Jews who practice Judaism do not necessarily think they are practicing religion, unless they are part of a larger Western society that defines Judaism as such. Many ultra- Orthodox Jews do not, in my view, see themselves as practicing a “religion,” and perhaps not even “Judaism”; rather they are devoted to a series of beliefs and practices that they believe is the will of the one God who transmitted God’s will to Moses on Mount Sinai. “A” religion would imply other religions. But many devout Jews do not acknowledge
other religions that are in any way comparable to what they do; thus the term “idolatry” has long been a term Jews use to define the “religions” of others, or maybe religion itself. Religion is idolatry; Judaism is truth!

…My father- in- law is a professor emeritus of electoral politics. He does not vote in elections. When asked why, he says he does not want to tamper with the data… There is a story that every year on Passover, J. Z. Smith’s wife, who was an active member of a synagogue in downtown Chicago, would prepare a Passover seder. When the ritual of the seder began (which happens before the meal), Smith would get up from the table and go upstairs to his study. He would remain there until the ritual part of the seder was complete, then he would come downstairs and join everyone for the meal. I do not pretend
to know if and why he did that. But if he acted so, it may not be that different
from my father- in- law’s choice not to vote. Smith was a scholar of religion.

…J.Z. Smith once confessed to me his voracious and promiscuous television- watching habit, which both delighted and scandalized me as a graduate student.

…I have not seen a major textbook, nor scholar, for almost three decades that affirms the old Protestant “belief in God” model of religion, but that’s clearly still the common understanding of the public. Public discussions of religion, from television to the nightly news, revolve around what people believe, and whether they believe in “God,” as well as some code of ethics…

…Religion is whatever people think it is…

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Impulse Control Disorders

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2010 book:

Pathological Gambling: Promoting Risk, Provoking Ruin

* Americans spend more money on gambling than on any other form of entertainment (Volberg 2001). From 1995 to 2006, consumer spending on commercial casino gambling almost doubled, from $18 billion to $34 billion. Revenues from casinos, pari-mutuel wagering, lotteries, legal bookmaking, charitable gambling and bingo, Indian reservations, and card rooms experienced similar growth, from $51 billion in 1997 to $94 billion in 2007.

* One hundred years ago, gambling was essentially outlawed in the United States, and it
remained so until 30 years ago, when it was first legalized. By 2007, there were casinos in 32 states, and every state except Hawaii and Utah had some form of legalized gambling.

* A preoccupation with gambling can result in poor job performance, absenteeism, health
problems, job loss, and unemployment. A national study established that problem and
pathological gamblers were more than four times as likely as low-risk gamblers to have
lost a job and more than three times as likely to have been fired within the past year. They were also six times more likely than their low-risk counterparts to collect unemployment.

* Efforts to replace words such as “pathological gambling,” “compulsive gambling,” and
“gambling addiction” with the term “disordered” gambling and the like are intended to
replace language clinically recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or well
established in the literature. Industry also substitutes the word “gaming” for “gambling” in an effort to have the public view their venues purely as entertainment and fun.

Virtual Violence: The Games People Play

* Experimental and correlational studies have reported that playing violent video games is associated with increased levels of physiological arousal, decreased prosocial behaviors, greater hostility, more frequent arguments with teachers and poorer school performance, and more frequent physical fights and aggressive or antisocial behavior…

* A hypothetical analogy may be useful here: how would society treat video games that
portray child abuse (physical or sexual)? Although exposure to such video games would not
necessarily cause one to abuse children, these games would be considered to promote or
condone child abuse, perhaps in a way that child pornography does. As a result, such video games would probably be illegal in most countries, as is child pornography. If exposure to most violent video games also promotes or condones aggression without necessarily causing it, why should these video games be legal and held to a different standard? This is a paradox that is ultimately related to societal attitudes and values. Video games that depict particularly extreme forms of violence such as decapitation and dismemberment or feature violence directed against defenseless women are less socially acceptable and are frequently banned or censored in some countries. However, many modern Western societies consider “ordinary” aggressive behavior to be to some extent socially acceptable and tolerate it, while (at least publicly) showing zero tolerance for aggressive behavior toward children. As a reflection of these societal norms, in the realm of video games, killing an adult might seem more acceptable than hitting a child. This double standard sends conflicting and confusing messages about the type and amount of aggression that is or that could be tolerated by the society.

The Sex Industry: Public Vice, Hidden Victims

* Sanders (2004), in interviews with women working mainly in indoor settings, found
that emotional and psychological distress related primarily to feelings of depersonalization and loss of self-esteem as well as to the fear of discovery by family and intimate partners. The workers identified the practical and emotional difficulties encountered in keeping their working and private lives separate as a greater threat to their well-being than either violence or infection. There seems little doubt that sex trading as an occupation has a propensity to cause psychological distress, although common sense also suggests that the context in terms of the physical setting, levels of violence, drug dependence, coercion from pimps, and pressure from police must have a major impact on the extent to which this occurs.

Sex work is a dangerous business. The constant threat of violence, the consequences of sexually transmitted disease, and the cumulative damage to mental health are all compounded by the effects of heroin, crack cocaine, and other drugs.

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Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker Lectures On Rationality At UCLA 2 (5-30-24)

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Luke Ford

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