Eerie, irresponsible inverted State Church; The University: Closed Power Loop
It is also hard to argue that we enjoy separation of Harvard and state. Harvard is conventionally described as a "private" university. This term is strictly nominal. Vast streams of cash flow from the taxpayer's pocket into Harvard's - as they do not flow to, say, the Vatican.
And we can see easily that Harvard is attached to something, because the perspective of Harvard in 2009, while wildly different from the perspective of Harvard in 1959, is not in any way different from the perspective of Stanford in 2009. If a shared attachment to Uncle Sam isn't what keeps Harvard and Stanford on the same page, what is? It's not football.
Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.
There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?
I'm afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep - perhaps even Cthulhu himself.
Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.
And we are again reminded of the half-mad words of the late Professor Staloff:
... officially authorized bearers of the cultural tradition must always agree in their public formulations or at least not disagree. Cthulhu R'lyeh wagh'nagl fhtagn! If this condition is violated, the laity may come to see the cultural tradition as an amorphous collection of expressions or principles manipulated by "mandarins" for their own aggrandizement.
But if Harvard in 2009 fits this description, how exactly is said agreement enforced? If you've ever met any of the officially authorized bearers, you know that the last thing they think of themselves as being is "officially authorized bearers." And it is one thing to say they must always agree - another to make them do so.
No one does. And yet, they agree. Their views change over time - and they all change in the same direction, at the same rate. There is a strange self-organizing quality about this design. Does the American university system's maintenance of broad unanimity, despite the clear absence of anything like a coordinating executive authority, make it seem less creepy to you? Or more? I'm afraid I'll have to go with "more" on this one.
Moreover, if we broaden our focus from the university system to the entire system of "education," from grade schools to journalism, we see this effect again and again. What, exactly, is the "mainstream media?" If we accept the ecclesiastical metaphor, the newspaper is a perfect analogue of the church proper. It is simply the latest transmission technology for your worm's daily or weekly security update. And here again, a coordinated message - without any central agency.
Dude, if you don't find this creepy, I gotta ask: why not? But maybe it is all an abstraction to you. Let's make it slightly more concrete.
In 1963, a long time ago but in the lives of many now living, the citizens of California, by a majority of nearly two-thirds, voted to pass a law called Proposition 14. This amended the state constitution to add the following:
"Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses."
In other words: if you don't want to live with persons of color, you don't have to. The amendment, obviously, turned out to be unconstitutional, just like this one; and we have persons of color to this day in California. In fact, we have so many of them that California in 2008 elected Barack Obama, noted person of color, by almost the same margin that its 1963 predecessor passed Prop. 14.
Part of this political change was due to said demographic shift. But not all. So: how, exactly, did California change from a state that would vote for Prop. 14, to one that would elect Obama? Was this change predictable? Was it inevitable in some sense? Again, we are seeing the movement of a bobber on the water. What is the bobber attached to? A bluegill? Or Cthulhu?
If you are still clinging to the Matrix, you might say the change happened because Prop. 14 was wrong, and the election of Obama was right. Suppose we agree with you. But why, exactly, should we have been so confident in expecting a change from wrong to right? If there is some mechanism large and powerful enough to drag the public opinion of California, in 45 years, from Prop. 14 to Obama - maybe not Cthulhu, but definitely not a bluegill - shouldn't we expect to be just as easily dragged back from right to wrong? Will segregation make a comeback in San Francisco? If not, why not?
Whatever our Cthulhu may be, it is interesting to note that there is an algorithm for predicting the movement of the bobber. On a number of subjects - not just segregation - I note that the public opinion of California in 2008 is quite similar to the public opinion of Stanford in 1963.
This is easy to explain: in post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, "public opinion." This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag.
Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of "public opinion." Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.
This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty.
(What's neat is that because of our armies' great success in the early 1940s, the governments of other countries respond to American public policy as well. The synchronization is international. Some of America's little friends overseas, such as Britain, have universities in the second rank. But there is only one global postwar academic system, the American one, and all top-tier universities are in the United States. The con by which policies devised by this system are passed off as global, transcending mere nationality, is sometimes called transnationalism. But I digress.)
The triangle of professors, bureaucrats, and public opinion is stable, because the professors teach as well as advise. Of course, there is a time lag. The system experiences some strain. But it will stay together, so long as the polarity does not randomly reverse - ie, because Cthulhu decides to suddenly swim right rather than left.
But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn't that interesting?
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html
And we can see easily that Harvard is attached to something, because the perspective of Harvard in 2009, while wildly different from the perspective of Harvard in 1959, is not in any way different from the perspective of Stanford in 2009. If a shared attachment to Uncle Sam isn't what keeps Harvard and Stanford on the same page, what is? It's not football.
Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.
There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?
I'm afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep - perhaps even Cthulhu himself.
Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.
And we are again reminded of the half-mad words of the late Professor Staloff:
... officially authorized bearers of the cultural tradition must always agree in their public formulations or at least not disagree. Cthulhu R'lyeh wagh'nagl fhtagn! If this condition is violated, the laity may come to see the cultural tradition as an amorphous collection of expressions or principles manipulated by "mandarins" for their own aggrandizement.
But if Harvard in 2009 fits this description, how exactly is said agreement enforced? If you've ever met any of the officially authorized bearers, you know that the last thing they think of themselves as being is "officially authorized bearers." And it is one thing to say they must always agree - another to make them do so.
No one does. And yet, they agree. Their views change over time - and they all change in the same direction, at the same rate. There is a strange self-organizing quality about this design. Does the American university system's maintenance of broad unanimity, despite the clear absence of anything like a coordinating executive authority, make it seem less creepy to you? Or more? I'm afraid I'll have to go with "more" on this one.
Moreover, if we broaden our focus from the university system to the entire system of "education," from grade schools to journalism, we see this effect again and again. What, exactly, is the "mainstream media?" If we accept the ecclesiastical metaphor, the newspaper is a perfect analogue of the church proper. It is simply the latest transmission technology for your worm's daily or weekly security update. And here again, a coordinated message - without any central agency.
Dude, if you don't find this creepy, I gotta ask: why not? But maybe it is all an abstraction to you. Let's make it slightly more concrete.
In 1963, a long time ago but in the lives of many now living, the citizens of California, by a majority of nearly two-thirds, voted to pass a law called Proposition 14. This amended the state constitution to add the following:
"Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses."
In other words: if you don't want to live with persons of color, you don't have to. The amendment, obviously, turned out to be unconstitutional, just like this one; and we have persons of color to this day in California. In fact, we have so many of them that California in 2008 elected Barack Obama, noted person of color, by almost the same margin that its 1963 predecessor passed Prop. 14.
Part of this political change was due to said demographic shift. But not all. So: how, exactly, did California change from a state that would vote for Prop. 14, to one that would elect Obama? Was this change predictable? Was it inevitable in some sense? Again, we are seeing the movement of a bobber on the water. What is the bobber attached to? A bluegill? Or Cthulhu?
If you are still clinging to the Matrix, you might say the change happened because Prop. 14 was wrong, and the election of Obama was right. Suppose we agree with you. But why, exactly, should we have been so confident in expecting a change from wrong to right? If there is some mechanism large and powerful enough to drag the public opinion of California, in 45 years, from Prop. 14 to Obama - maybe not Cthulhu, but definitely not a bluegill - shouldn't we expect to be just as easily dragged back from right to wrong? Will segregation make a comeback in San Francisco? If not, why not?
Whatever our Cthulhu may be, it is interesting to note that there is an algorithm for predicting the movement of the bobber. On a number of subjects - not just segregation - I note that the public opinion of California in 2008 is quite similar to the public opinion of Stanford in 1963.
This is easy to explain: in post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, "public opinion." This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag.
Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of "public opinion." Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.
This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty.
(What's neat is that because of our armies' great success in the early 1940s, the governments of other countries respond to American public policy as well. The synchronization is international. Some of America's little friends overseas, such as Britain, have universities in the second rank. But there is only one global postwar academic system, the American one, and all top-tier universities are in the United States. The con by which policies devised by this system are passed off as global, transcending mere nationality, is sometimes called transnationalism. But I digress.)
The triangle of professors, bureaucrats, and public opinion is stable, because the professors teach as well as advise. Of course, there is a time lag. The system experiences some strain. But it will stay together, so long as the polarity does not randomly reverse - ie, because Cthulhu decides to suddenly swim right rather than left.
But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn't that interesting?
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html
posted by martin at July 16, 2015
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