"I was learning to argue by analogy rather than by appealing to evidence."
Precisely; it was an inculcation of resorting to the fallacy of false equivalence. Such flights of fancy have their utility when learning to write works of fiction. They are maladaptive when applied to domains where verifiable facts are required to avoid adverse outcomes.
Psychology is peculiarly vulnerable to these suboptimal paradigms, owing in part to Jungian symbolism. There is, however, a quantifiable distinction between meaningful symbolism and rhetorical legerdemain.
A really good piece. It is a shame that students are fobbed off with worthless degree courses but at the same time I suspect Brandon isn't usual in his thirst for knowledge. If he were then more students would become as disillusioned as he was.
It could be that many students take the path of least restistance because doing the opposite would be hard or even impossible in some cases, especially for those with only a very mediocre intelligence. Since a ludicrous 60% of the population now goes to university there are bound to be many among them who have a lower IQ than the average intelligence among the general population. Such students neither want more challenging classes nor have much thirst for knowledge. All they want is a bit of paper at the end that says they are now 'educated' and thus belong to a group who are allegedly cleverer than the hoi polloi, something that looks year on year less credible.
It would have been nice if Brandon had stood up and asked the lecturer, 'How are we supposed to see you if this auditorium isn't stepped? How are we supposed to listen to you if we are looking at our fellow students, especially those with breast-hugging sweaters?'
"Since a ludicrous 60% of the population now goes to university there are bound to be many among them who have a lower IQ than the average intelligence among the general population."
Indeed, it is ludicrous. No more than 30-35% of the population should consider a university degree.
We are always informed that the modern world with all its complexity requires a highly educated workforce. The reality is that after 17 years of education most people enter jobs that they could easily have done with some on-the-job training.
I had a similar experience in a class titled something like "Critical theory: Ideas and Power."
There were two co-lecturers who took turns telling us about how false our consciousness is and how awful and corrupt modern Western consumerist society was. One of the lecturers used a term I was unfamiliar with, so I looked it up on my phone. He called me out in the middle of the lecture, so I stood up and gave him an earful about how he's been lecturing all semester that power differentials are bad and wrong and now here you are exerting power over me, attempting to control my attention to conform to your will by embarrassing me in front of the entire classroom, you hypocrite, because you think I'm texting or something. He backed off, and I stopped paying much attention after that.
Wow, in the most ideological and propagandistic anthropology course I took, the lecturers also did a tag-team co-lecturing thing, but there was three of them, and they were all present in class all at the same time. It’s like they sensed that their ideas were dumb and were worried they wouldn’t be able to defend against critique, so they all stood up at the front together as a defense mechanism and to give the added weight of “consensus”.
It's a common tactic of critical theorists to launder their ideas through mutually reinforcing citations in academic journals. Presenting theories that purport to subvert power structures while taking advantage of those very power structures to disseminate rotten ideas is the height of hypocrisy. Once you see the scam for what it is, you can't unsee it.
——“Look at this classroom,” he said. “Look at how the very structure of this classroom exerts power. You are all on one side, stepped-up in auditorium seating so I can see all of you, but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.”
I think this quote helps explain why Foucault became the first great American of the 21st century, the guru of our age of infantile Marxist-Narcisisism.
First off, his theory of power dynamics present a handy, simplistic way of viewing the world (and of sounding smart and edgy): there is power everywhere, unseen and omnipotent, and it sculpts our every moment and motivation, is the prime mover of the universe. Here Marxism's "critical consciousness" jumps from the realm of workers and wages and becomes a Swiss Army knife for the ambitious academic—the secular Priest of the Left clerisy introduces a cosmology and a secular theology and a new road to the Promised Land: the revealer of the new god of Power tears the veil from the infinite and becomes a hierophant of transgression. There is nothing but DECONSTRUCTION all the way down.
But the frustrated rage of the angry teenager is displayed here too, perfect for the person who offers nothing but a pose and a leveling crusade against all forms of "discrimination" (and who plans on never leaving campus): "You are all on one side...but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.”
Do you think the people who sat at the foot of Siddhartha or of Confucius felt suspicious, oppressed, and exploited? Here the postmodern academic takes a sledgehammer (the only tool they know how to wield) against: authority, mentorship, discipline, the transmission of knowledge and culture etc all by manipulating the emotions of teenagers. Imagine going to school and being taught by another student as ignorant as you are!? What would be the point?
But the emotional manipulation and frisson of empty radicalism is the entire point. Foucault and his many followers combine an overheated juvenile conspiracy theory (anything you don't like or that requires sacrifice is OPPRESSION), with the teenager's desire to tell mom and dad to fuck off while still paying your bills, along with the market's slogan of: The Customer is Always Right.
And thus we have the children of the 21st century as processed through the Foucault's Church of Transgression: always angry, always ignorant, never in doubt, slaves of their desires and of the market that promises to meet them, absolutely ruled by radical ingratitude, and whose only solid belief comes from the words of Marx's favorite character, Mephistopheles: "Everything that exists deserves to perish."
You can tell a lot about a guru by the deeds and works of their disciples: Has the Foucault cult created one lasting work of art? One well-written work of scholarship? What is their legacy and greatest achievement? Only a patented special brew of nihilsitic acid that's been poured over our every social bond and tradition. Foucault would be proud.
The only point I can think of is that under the reign of Marxism-Narcissism it is ipso facto oppression for someone (esp someone who's not a straight white male) to ever feel less-than, inferior, ignorant, or to bear any kind of discomfort or have their "lived experience" or personal truths challenged.
And if any of us have had strict teachers or have felt unprepared/overwhelmed in a classroom, this is a common part of learning—which erasing the teacher/student dynamic levels out of existence in the name of upending "power dynamics".
In their schema, we are all liberated to be equally miserable, angry and ignorant, which allows the theorist free rein to sculpt minds and souls.
The people who constantly see and perceive POWER and never stop talking about it, are simply obviously obsessed w....gaining and wielding POWER.
Psychology, sociology, and above all anthropology have been so infected by these modes of thought, for over a generation now, that they are probably unsalvageable. These fields will have to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from the foundation up someday. In the mean time, useless and to be avoided.
Similar vibe to my experience in higher education. Though I'd note that cannabis use is so widespread and common today that stoner logic is now reliably found in both progressive and 'conservative' circles, amongst both quantitative and qualitative researchers.
In one module I took at university, the study materials mentioned the theory that the Mercator map reflected Eurocentric bias since it made Europe and North America look bigger than they were. That's a pretty questionable theory in the first place, but as I pointed out, the image accompanying that text was not of the Mercator map at all. Rather, it showed the projection you usually see nowadays, which depicts relative sizes more realistically. A sufficiently ignorant student would likely have come away thinking that the currently standard world map still exaggerates the size of Europe and North America.
On another occasion (in the same module), one of the articles in the required reading list asserted that Western depictions of North Korea were biased because they did not show smiling people or amusement parks. This was based on examination of several "photo galleries" (I think that's the term for those visual articles which include few words and many pictures) which had appeared in Western media. However, the photo galleries analysed in that paper had been selected simply on the grounds that the authors considered them typical (for unspecified reasons). To test the theory, I Googled something like "North Korea photo gallery" and refined the search to include only results from before that paper's publication. I looked through the first four galleries that came up and they all included pictures of smiling people and amusement parks or festivities.
I think Foucault gets a bad rap, and in this piece, as in others, he seems no more than a name. His actual work is pretty detailed and grounded in historical facts, at least in the parts that I read. The people who talk about him may never have read him. I grant that he is disorganized and often unclear, but you can't really blame the flaws of the professoriat on Michel Foucault. If he did not exist, it would be necessary for them to invent him. They are the spiritual descendants of German egotism and pin all the problems of the world on what they view as the inventions of power. The student's job is to come up with his own constructions, which, the professors believe, would for some reason involve the student creating a leftist fantasy.
This piece would have been stronger if it tried to actually construct an argument that did explain the relationship of the author's experience to Foucault's own writing. I never see that. Foucault is just a right-wing piñata.
My undergrad degree is in English Literature, which I obtained about 20 years ago. I recall writing papers and being told to 'cite sources' to back up my 'assertions.' Preparing to write, I would often say the primary 'source' is my own brain - I'm thinking critically about this text and this is my reasonable interpretation. What was off-putting is that the 'Lit Crit' papers I was supposed to cite were... well, interpretations. The difference was that these 'interpretations' were from a credentialed expert.
It really rubbed me the wrong way to suggest that I, mere student, could not interpret a text in a way that hadn't at least been suggested by a cadre of professors and PHDs. Well, why not? In close-reading a poem or prose, the only source that matters (IMO) is the Oxford English Dictionary, which you use as a lodestar to make sure you're not interpreting a text based on modern definitions and understandings of words within in. (The OED is a dictionary that gives you a timeline of a word's definitions, for those not familiar). For instance (this is off the top of my head), you wouldn't read something written in 1500 and interpret the word 'lit' or 'fire' with their contemporary slang definitions - that would be hard to justify. But beyond that? Perhaps you read a passage in Shakespeare where many of the word choices suggest now-antiquated naval references that were not explicit in the text itself. That would be a fruitful topic for a paper. Just shouldn't matter if some PHD somewhere ever explored that before or not.
The funniest thing were that these papers I was supposed to cite were batshit crazy. One example I remember discussed a passage in a Jane Austen novel of two sisters brushing their hair together and made the argument that the passage was suggestive of mutual masturbation. Sure glad that author has tenure somewhere!
What was mutual masturbation was the entire field of Lit Crit. Now, I'm an accountant.
"What I needed was rigorous education from people smarter than me."
Indeed, that is what everybody needs, in personal life and business life.
"For this reason, I dropped out of the BA and switched to a Bachelor of Science (still majoring in psych)."
Smart move getting out of BA and into a Bachelor of Science program; I'm not a big fan of a psychology degree. If you wanted to be challenged with critical thinking, you should have majored in STEM
"I was learning to argue by analogy rather than by appealing to evidence."
Precisely; it was an inculcation of resorting to the fallacy of false equivalence. Such flights of fancy have their utility when learning to write works of fiction. They are maladaptive when applied to domains where verifiable facts are required to avoid adverse outcomes.
Psychology is peculiarly vulnerable to these suboptimal paradigms, owing in part to Jungian symbolism. There is, however, a quantifiable distinction between meaningful symbolism and rhetorical legerdemain.
A really good piece. It is a shame that students are fobbed off with worthless degree courses but at the same time I suspect Brandon isn't usual in his thirst for knowledge. If he were then more students would become as disillusioned as he was.
It could be that many students take the path of least restistance because doing the opposite would be hard or even impossible in some cases, especially for those with only a very mediocre intelligence. Since a ludicrous 60% of the population now goes to university there are bound to be many among them who have a lower IQ than the average intelligence among the general population. Such students neither want more challenging classes nor have much thirst for knowledge. All they want is a bit of paper at the end that says they are now 'educated' and thus belong to a group who are allegedly cleverer than the hoi polloi, something that looks year on year less credible.
It would have been nice if Brandon had stood up and asked the lecturer, 'How are we supposed to see you if this auditorium isn't stepped? How are we supposed to listen to you if we are looking at our fellow students, especially those with breast-hugging sweaters?'
"Since a ludicrous 60% of the population now goes to university there are bound to be many among them who have a lower IQ than the average intelligence among the general population."
Indeed, it is ludicrous. No more than 30-35% of the population should consider a university degree.
We are always informed that the modern world with all its complexity requires a highly educated workforce. The reality is that after 17 years of education most people enter jobs that they could easily have done with some on-the-job training.
Hahaha the “breast-hugging sweaters” killed me 😆
I had a similar experience in a class titled something like "Critical theory: Ideas and Power."
There were two co-lecturers who took turns telling us about how false our consciousness is and how awful and corrupt modern Western consumerist society was. One of the lecturers used a term I was unfamiliar with, so I looked it up on my phone. He called me out in the middle of the lecture, so I stood up and gave him an earful about how he's been lecturing all semester that power differentials are bad and wrong and now here you are exerting power over me, attempting to control my attention to conform to your will by embarrassing me in front of the entire classroom, you hypocrite, because you think I'm texting or something. He backed off, and I stopped paying much attention after that.
Wow, in the most ideological and propagandistic anthropology course I took, the lecturers also did a tag-team co-lecturing thing, but there was three of them, and they were all present in class all at the same time. It’s like they sensed that their ideas were dumb and were worried they wouldn’t be able to defend against critique, so they all stood up at the front together as a defense mechanism and to give the added weight of “consensus”.
It's a common tactic of critical theorists to launder their ideas through mutually reinforcing citations in academic journals. Presenting theories that purport to subvert power structures while taking advantage of those very power structures to disseminate rotten ideas is the height of hypocrisy. Once you see the scam for what it is, you can't unsee it.
——“Look at this classroom,” he said. “Look at how the very structure of this classroom exerts power. You are all on one side, stepped-up in auditorium seating so I can see all of you, but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.”
I think this quote helps explain why Foucault became the first great American of the 21st century, the guru of our age of infantile Marxist-Narcisisism.
First off, his theory of power dynamics present a handy, simplistic way of viewing the world (and of sounding smart and edgy): there is power everywhere, unseen and omnipotent, and it sculpts our every moment and motivation, is the prime mover of the universe. Here Marxism's "critical consciousness" jumps from the realm of workers and wages and becomes a Swiss Army knife for the ambitious academic—the secular Priest of the Left clerisy introduces a cosmology and a secular theology and a new road to the Promised Land: the revealer of the new god of Power tears the veil from the infinite and becomes a hierophant of transgression. There is nothing but DECONSTRUCTION all the way down.
But the frustrated rage of the angry teenager is displayed here too, perfect for the person who offers nothing but a pose and a leveling crusade against all forms of "discrimination" (and who plans on never leaving campus): "You are all on one side...but you can only see me, not each other. You are kind of forced to look at me and listen.”
Do you think the people who sat at the foot of Siddhartha or of Confucius felt suspicious, oppressed, and exploited? Here the postmodern academic takes a sledgehammer (the only tool they know how to wield) against: authority, mentorship, discipline, the transmission of knowledge and culture etc all by manipulating the emotions of teenagers. Imagine going to school and being taught by another student as ignorant as you are!? What would be the point?
But the emotional manipulation and frisson of empty radicalism is the entire point. Foucault and his many followers combine an overheated juvenile conspiracy theory (anything you don't like or that requires sacrifice is OPPRESSION), with the teenager's desire to tell mom and dad to fuck off while still paying your bills, along with the market's slogan of: The Customer is Always Right.
And thus we have the children of the 21st century as processed through the Foucault's Church of Transgression: always angry, always ignorant, never in doubt, slaves of their desires and of the market that promises to meet them, absolutely ruled by radical ingratitude, and whose only solid belief comes from the words of Marx's favorite character, Mephistopheles: "Everything that exists deserves to perish."
You can tell a lot about a guru by the deeds and works of their disciples: Has the Foucault cult created one lasting work of art? One well-written work of scholarship? What is their legacy and greatest achievement? Only a patented special brew of nihilsitic acid that's been poured over our every social bond and tradition. Foucault would be proud.
"Imagine going to school and being taught by another student as ignorant as you are!? What would be the point?"
Exactly, there is no point.
The only point I can think of is that under the reign of Marxism-Narcissism it is ipso facto oppression for someone (esp someone who's not a straight white male) to ever feel less-than, inferior, ignorant, or to bear any kind of discomfort or have their "lived experience" or personal truths challenged.
And if any of us have had strict teachers or have felt unprepared/overwhelmed in a classroom, this is a common part of learning—which erasing the teacher/student dynamic levels out of existence in the name of upending "power dynamics".
In their schema, we are all liberated to be equally miserable, angry and ignorant, which allows the theorist free rein to sculpt minds and souls.
The people who constantly see and perceive POWER and never stop talking about it, are simply obviously obsessed w....gaining and wielding POWER.
" The people who constantly see and perceive POWER and never stop talking about it, are simply obviously obsessed w....gaining and wielding POWER."
Exactly right.
The people you are speaking of are rapacious megalomaniacs. They are in the process of consolidating their power in the quest for total control.
Psychology, sociology, and above all anthropology have been so infected by these modes of thought, for over a generation now, that they are probably unsalvageable. These fields will have to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from the foundation up someday. In the mean time, useless and to be avoided.
Similar vibe to my experience in higher education. Though I'd note that cannabis use is so widespread and common today that stoner logic is now reliably found in both progressive and 'conservative' circles, amongst both quantitative and qualitative researchers.
In one module I took at university, the study materials mentioned the theory that the Mercator map reflected Eurocentric bias since it made Europe and North America look bigger than they were. That's a pretty questionable theory in the first place, but as I pointed out, the image accompanying that text was not of the Mercator map at all. Rather, it showed the projection you usually see nowadays, which depicts relative sizes more realistically. A sufficiently ignorant student would likely have come away thinking that the currently standard world map still exaggerates the size of Europe and North America.
On another occasion (in the same module), one of the articles in the required reading list asserted that Western depictions of North Korea were biased because they did not show smiling people or amusement parks. This was based on examination of several "photo galleries" (I think that's the term for those visual articles which include few words and many pictures) which had appeared in Western media. However, the photo galleries analysed in that paper had been selected simply on the grounds that the authors considered them typical (for unspecified reasons). To test the theory, I Googled something like "North Korea photo gallery" and refined the search to include only results from before that paper's publication. I looked through the first four galleries that came up and they all included pictures of smiling people and amusement parks or festivities.
I think Foucault gets a bad rap, and in this piece, as in others, he seems no more than a name. His actual work is pretty detailed and grounded in historical facts, at least in the parts that I read. The people who talk about him may never have read him. I grant that he is disorganized and often unclear, but you can't really blame the flaws of the professoriat on Michel Foucault. If he did not exist, it would be necessary for them to invent him. They are the spiritual descendants of German egotism and pin all the problems of the world on what they view as the inventions of power. The student's job is to come up with his own constructions, which, the professors believe, would for some reason involve the student creating a leftist fantasy.
This piece would have been stronger if it tried to actually construct an argument that did explain the relationship of the author's experience to Foucault's own writing. I never see that. Foucault is just a right-wing piñata.
My undergrad degree is in English Literature, which I obtained about 20 years ago. I recall writing papers and being told to 'cite sources' to back up my 'assertions.' Preparing to write, I would often say the primary 'source' is my own brain - I'm thinking critically about this text and this is my reasonable interpretation. What was off-putting is that the 'Lit Crit' papers I was supposed to cite were... well, interpretations. The difference was that these 'interpretations' were from a credentialed expert.
It really rubbed me the wrong way to suggest that I, mere student, could not interpret a text in a way that hadn't at least been suggested by a cadre of professors and PHDs. Well, why not? In close-reading a poem or prose, the only source that matters (IMO) is the Oxford English Dictionary, which you use as a lodestar to make sure you're not interpreting a text based on modern definitions and understandings of words within in. (The OED is a dictionary that gives you a timeline of a word's definitions, for those not familiar). For instance (this is off the top of my head), you wouldn't read something written in 1500 and interpret the word 'lit' or 'fire' with their contemporary slang definitions - that would be hard to justify. But beyond that? Perhaps you read a passage in Shakespeare where many of the word choices suggest now-antiquated naval references that were not explicit in the text itself. That would be a fruitful topic for a paper. Just shouldn't matter if some PHD somewhere ever explored that before or not.
The funniest thing were that these papers I was supposed to cite were batshit crazy. One example I remember discussed a passage in a Jane Austen novel of two sisters brushing their hair together and made the argument that the passage was suggestive of mutual masturbation. Sure glad that author has tenure somewhere!
What was mutual masturbation was the entire field of Lit Crit. Now, I'm an accountant.
Odd. Not my experience at all in literature nor in other fields. It is factual claims that require support, not interpretations of them.
"What I needed was rigorous education from people smarter than me."
Indeed, that is what everybody needs, in personal life and business life.
"For this reason, I dropped out of the BA and switched to a Bachelor of Science (still majoring in psych)."
Smart move getting out of BA and into a Bachelor of Science program; I'm not a big fan of a psychology degree. If you wanted to be challenged with critical thinking, you should have majored in STEM
"Subversive" just means that some people disagree with it, and one is brave for saying it anyway.