Thomas Hobbes on 17thC Universities and Experts v Today’s Expert Clerisy

 

 

                     

                             

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) has something to say about the modern 'Expert Clerisy' because the same issues of the 17th C appear today.    Hobbes disliked universities-despite being a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford- and saw universities, and their graduates, as a cause of the  English Civil War, which, in a sense, was a cultural war, involving puritanism, blown out to a military one.   He picks out a quality of human nature of university graduates;  lack of humility, a Dunning- Kruger bias like belief in superiority and competency,  as ‘experts.’

Presently, it has become common place following Covid-19  to question the ‘Experts’ and the ‘Bureaucratic Clerisy.’   Animosity and disdainful condescension to the English “Gamon” Orwell’s “Prols” - our “Ferals” and “Bogans”- and US “Deplorables”’ classes is a signature feature by some in the  Beltway Clerisy. 

 Politicians have at times abdicated responsibility for policy decisions to experts and university academics.  Unelected people, the experts,  end up making decisions of a differing order, political decisions.  Some have become notorious with one earning the name Professor -Pants –Down for his ‘do as I say but not as I do’.   Governor Newsom of California was also derided for expensive dining out during lockdown.

Looking at the United Kingdom’s Spiked On Line over the last 18 months Brendan O’Neill and other writers have focused attention on the default to the  “expert class” its fallibility and implications  for democracy and for political elites.  Charles Murray’s idea of the “hollow elite” and T S Elliot's ‘The Hollow Men’ has traction.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the United States with scientists saying that they withheld their true  opinion and mislead the public over covid origins, because they did not want to be seen to agree with President Trump.  Professional obligations and  truth did not matter but political partisanship did. 

The cover up on US NIH funding of the  Wuhan Virology lab is unraveling and Dr Fauci is the ‘rabbit’ in the oncoming head lights of inquiry.  A ‘Litany of Lies’ seems to have been told.

The Marxist drift by the Biden administration is clear as is its deference to experts- follow the science-and centralised government experts and know how.  This historical trend has roots in Professor Woodrow Wilson’s  progressives (read as  socialist)  to FDR’s experts,  “The Brain’s Trust”, which drew its experts from the universities, some of whom were fans of Mussolini’s socialist like state and the Soviet Union.  John Dewey was foremost of its thinkers who liked the Soviet system and collectivism.

 The United States universities welcomed the émigré Marxists of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse,  Theodore Adorno and others  who avidly pushed a newer form of Marxism, Neo Marxism/Cultural Marxism, along with French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (the inventor of deconstruction).  Neo Marxism now  predominates in the universities.  Traditional learning and thought  is despised for being  racist, sexist patriarchal western and seen as favouring power elites and not the oppressed.

Wokeness and its totalitarian religious like puritanism,- echoing the puritanism of Hobbes’ time including censorship- critical theory,  in  race and gender, de growth environmentalism are underpinned essentially by a Marxian anti-capitalist mind-set-e..g. white supremacy is capitalism.    

Antonio Gramsci’s  idea of ‘the march through the institutions’ has  become a reality.  Scholars,  Harold Bloom, The Western Canon and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind were lamenting the demise of traditional university education, its fall to ideology, indiscriminateness and relativism.

Graduates of the universities have adopted the Neo Marxian view point and moved into government service, politics and the profession and  corporations.  Barrack Obama is a product of this education.  A large number of Neo Marxist leaning bureaucrats staff the Biden Administration.

 MSM in the US likewise, with graduates from Media Studies courses extolling ‘Public-thus activist- Journalism’ at  NYU and  Stanford.  One New Zealand journalist recently admitted that activism is his aim but he is not alone. 

Mark Levin, a constitutional conservative lawyer, has  on 13 July 2021 a new book, American Marxism, being published.  Listeners to his radio, television and podcast programmes will know that he lays responsibility on the universities for the Neo-Marxist undermining and transformation of the  US Republic.  Levin  uses  the term ‘indoctrination mills’ as synonym for tertiary education. 

It seems that the US is moving towards some form of -slow or colour- revolution, where the existing legal constitutional order is uprooted. 

Those who think that the ideas of university academics do not have consequences need to think again.

This brings us to the famous author of  Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes.    J C A Gaskin in the introduction to the  Oxford World Classics edition of Leviathan says: “In Behemoth or The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, he  maintained that 'the core of rebellion... are the Universities'. The reasons he gives for this judgement are illuminating”:

And as the Presbyterians brought with them into their churches their divinity [Calvinism] from the universities, so did many of the gentlemen bring their politics from thence into the Parliament; but neither of them did this very boldly in the time of Queen Elizabeth. And... certainly the chief leaders were ambitious ministers and ambitious gentlemen; the ministers envying the authority of bishops, whom they thought less learned; and the gentlemen envying the privy ­council, whom they thought less wise than themselves.  For it is a hard matter for men, who do all think highly of their own wits, when they have also acquired the learning of the university,' to be persuaded 'that they want any ability requisite for the government of a commonwealth, especially having read the glorious histories... of the ancient popular  governments of the Greeks and Romans, amongst whom... popular government... passed by the name of liberty. (English Works, vi. 192­3)

Not only illuminating, but instructive for today.

Graham Hill MA (Hons) LLB (Hons)
Nelson, 20 June 2021

Ideological Race Gaming: Evidence, Knowledge and the Kafka Trap

 

 

 

Many in the race hustling world in advocating for their point of view end up making points through logical fallacies. Their viewpoint’s ends then justify the means by poor thinking.

Fallacies are prevalent across the critical theory spectrum. Having spent the week researching aspects of critical legal theory and critical theory in education it is apparent there are some rules or nostrums in the critical theory game. I look at two rules , first, evidence and Voices and then secondly, the rhetorical device of the sophistic Kafka Trap.

A simple denial of norms of thought, by the retort of racist or white supremacy, is prevalent and trite. Rejection covers most of the components of Western civil society: “the traditions of constitutionalism and individual rights…” (Christopher Ruffo, March 2021), Capitalism, property, individualism, the rule of law, cannons of academic argument, evidence and, of course, the usual suspect, objective knowledge and analysis. In fact “the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.” (Pyle 1999)

Evidence flows to form knowledge and after analysis and testing to objective knowledge. Evidence (and its analysis) is avoided by decrying it as part of the “ racist/sexist system. ” It is put forward as a proposition (an argument that is not an argument) without further ado because it is a rhetorical device. The “system”, (“whiteness”, “ the hegemony” or “the patriarchy”) is an unproven and an unfalsifiable abstracted entity or thing. Evidence, and the means of assessing it, is replaced with “Voices” of ‘life as lived.’

Voices, are a claim for "truth", to make a polemical political point . Oral history it is not. Framing Voices this way is to ‘Segway’ directly to a universal truth to support an ideological position or to support a narrative. There are Black voices, ‘Latinx Voices’, Women's voices, and so on. Voices make a visceral moral claim to being ‘as authentic’ so to be exempt from the 'oppressor's intellectual discourse and system of how we know things. Tim Hsiao, ‘Lived Experiences Aren’t special, in Quillette (24 May 2021) makes a good point:

“Lived experiences are often vividly used by progressive activists as evidence of widespread injustice, accompanied with a call for action and social change. Yet basing one’s entire case for widespread injustice and sweeping social change on lived experiences is, quite simply, bad statistical reasoning.”

We can say it is bad reasoning because policy actions affect others and rights requiring state imposition. But also because:

“The point is that one cannot prove or disprove generalizations simply based on personal experiences. This is a pretty basic rule of statistical reasoning that seems to have been lost on many people who should know better. Just because one experiences racism (as I have) does not show that racism is widespread or deeply ingrained,…”

…lived experiences cannot be used to make (or disprove) statistical generalizations about the prevalence of social injustice, whether it be police violence, sexual harassment, or economic disparities."

Further, ‘Voices’ are intrinsically an attack on the cannons of Western objective analysis and knowledge. In contrast to the western cannons, “’ lived experiences’ are appealed to as a special source , if not form, of knowledge.”

Yet, if there is no objective analysis or knowledge , and relativism prevails, as Ibrahim X Kendi says is the case, then the claim of ‘voices and lived experience’ as special or superior knowledge falls away. Voices merely existing as a narrative among narratives. Furthermore, if there is no objective analysis and knowledge then there is no debate. One wonders, despite the hapless term ‘conversations’, which may mean a one way dictate if a debate is ever intended.

The social construction of knowledge, a Marxist idea, popularised by Berger and Luckmann in the late 1960’s, is of the same order. Jeffrey Pyle in 1999 in a piece on critical race theory and the rule of law and liberalism said that “the postmodernist left, an academic movement that insists that all knowledge is "socially constructed," and.. inherently subjective, contingent and immune to objective evaluation.”

He cites race crit theorists:

“… Derrick Bell, a pre-eminent race crit, insists that "abstraction, put forth as 'rational' or 'objective' truth, smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged [i.e., whites] to ‘depersonify’ their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good, 'that In other words, mainstream truths dominate legal discourse not because they are better than other truths, but because groups in power espouse .' them. Charles Lawrence urges "outsiders" (i.e., minorities) to free themselves from the "mystification "produced by the "ideology" of objective truth: "We must learn to trust our own senses, feelings, and experiences, and to give them authority, even (or especially) in the face of dominant accounts of social reality that claim universality."" According to the race-crits, knowledge is not universal;" it is autobiographical and group-based."

Amidst the subjectivity, inherent is the inability, owing also to relativism, to academically discriminate between good and bad, better and worse. The upshot is that indiscriminateness in thought according to Allan Bloom (1987) had become a “moral imperative because its opposite was discrimination.” Relativism and indiscriminateness – and the ensuing rejection of western legal norms-then have implications for the insider-outsider majority-minority formula by being, with irony, antagonistic to inclusion.

We do need to have a consensus on knowledge for problem-solving and civil society. Fitting facts to ideology is the reverse of the proper flow of information forming knowledge. But is the objection not really about knowledge but about the aim of the delegitimising of present civil society for a collectivist one?

The second type of rule is the Kafka trap. The Washington Examiner, (17 June 2021) has an article “Critical race theory school battles are deepening the red-blue divide” by William Jacobson points to the fallacy of the Kafka trap.

Democratic lawmakers seem unbothered by the public’s disapproval of their educational agenda. Instead, they employ the logical fallacy of “Kafka-trapping,” using denials of ubiquitous racism as proof that it must exist. This often takes the form of accusations of “white fragility” or the insistence that “whiteness” is a cancer on our society.”

Eric Raymond coined the term in 2010. The source is The Trial a 1915 novel by Franz Kafka.

In The Trial the protagonist is arrested and accused of serious crimes which are never specified. He receives no explanation or description of the charges, and his refusal to acknowledge that he must be guilty is what makes him guilty. The only way to stop his abuse is to admit that he is guilty.

Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility (2018) is an exemplar, and astonishingly, if not uncritically, has been set as reading for The Defense Intelligence agency, The US navy’s Second Fleet and Marines’ Units,  while b the Admiral of Operations has set  Ibram X  Kendi’s  (formerly Henry Rogers) Marxist and anti-capitalist book  How to be Antiracist as reading for the United States Navy.   David Burke in his article on DiAngelo's book, "The Intellectual fraud of Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility," (link below), calls out her theory and its basis:

"White Fragility is religion masquerading as knowledge. DiAngelo’s conception of white fragility isn’t hard-won wisdom. It’s an unprovable and unfalsifiable theory, deceptively framed to convince readers of their own guilt. DiAngelo relies on rhetorical tricks and skewed interpretations of ambiguous events to deceive readers, in the same way, a zealot tries to gain converts."

Burke then turns to DiAngelo's use of the Kafka Trap:

"DiAngelo leaves white readers with only two options. Either acknowledge your fragility, which proves DiAngelo’s theory, or deny your fragility, which according to DiAngelo, also proves her theory [guilt of racism]. This is a logical fallacy known as a Kafka Trap. If our legal system worked this way, no person accused of a crime would ever be acquitted because their denial would prove their guilt."

Examples of this manipulative loop are set out online by Life’s Lessons:

Model A
“Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of racism, confirms that you are guilty of racism”
Model C
“Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of racism, you are guilty because you have benefited from the racist behaviour of others in the system” [i.e, White privilege]
Model M
“The act of arguing against the theory of anti-racism demonstrates that you are either racist, or do not understand the theory of anti-racism, and your argument can therefore be dismissed as either corrupt or incompetent”
Model P
“Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of racism, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the racist system” [i.e All western civilisation is racist and must be burnt down]
Model S
“Scepticism about any particular anecdotal account of racism, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt”
Model T
“Designated victims of racism who question any part of the theory of racism demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized racism”
[colonised by whiteness and have derogatory titles e.g. Spud (as affixed to free-thinking Maori man) brown on the outside but white on the inside]
Model J
“Even if your innocence is proven in a court of law, this not only confirms your guilt; it also confirms the guilt of the legal system that found you innocent”
In summary:
“You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of Kafka Trapping precludes that possibility.” – Wendy McElroy”

The advice is not to engage as it is a no-win game and is meant to be one. The verdict is always the guilty verdict of The Trial.  The point to know with ideological gaming is to know that it operates on its own circumscribed, flawed, and tainted knowledge base, which is ultimately nihilistic. Burning the world down does not fix or build anything.

The paradigm’s unerring focus is on power and the oppressors and the oppressed. But this is utilising a pinhole matchbox camera obscura of race to examine Socrates’ unexamined world and the race theorist ideologues inherently fail to comprehend by such contraction of perspective the full dynamic matrix of human life.

It is a case of the Hedgehog and the Fox. Surrendering to the Hedgehog of the ‘big theory’ means a contraction of perspective, an abdication of reason, the devaluing and the misattribution of human experience, the data bank of cultural knowledge's know-how and the abdication of responsibility to be broad and open-minded, to discern and know, like Archilochus’ Fox, what is better, good, what will work and to problem solve in the real world, not in an over abstracted totalitarian mental silo.

Graham Hill
Nelson Revised 20  June 2021

Links:
https://www.heritage.org/progr...
https://www.washingtonexaminer...)
https://quillette.com/2021/05/...
https://newdiscourses.com/2020...
https://lifelessons.co/critica...

 

The Alternate Political Realities

 

The dual political alternative reality universe has been getting some coverage.

CNN's Brian Stelter alleges a dual alternate universe and that GoP is the unreality v Dan Bongino, that the liberal universe is unreal. https://rumble.com/vhlrk5-ep.-...

A cause in my opinion is extreme idealism and utopianism, which overrides and is immune to facts. One can also stir in the Neo Marxist 'social construction of reality'.

The media and Big Tech have exacerbated this trend and have abandoned their duty to factual inquiry. Where the narrative and opinion are more important. Dan Bongino illustrates the point with the 'defunding of the police' narrative which has lead to death and crime rate spikes.

Opinion over truthful inquiry is a point made by Socrates in The Republic and The Phaedros.

The problem of over heated idealism and utopianism has been noted in Classical Athens.

Plato in the Republic had already covered this. The following quote is from the late Allan Bloom's commentary to his translation of the Republic:

"The proper spirit of reform, then, is moderation. Socrates constructs his utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism; as such it is the greatest critique of political idealism ever written. The Republic serves to moderate the extreme passion for political justice by showing the limits of what can be demanded and expected of the [polis]..."

ACT Party decries Critical Race Theory in NZ Schools

 

 

Here is the link to the ACT part website with David Seymour's press release.https://www.act.org.nz/schoolkids_being_taught_about_white_privilege.

I am hardly a fan of the ACT Party but the article in the above link makes a point.

The "White Privilege" dogma emanates from US universities critical theory dogma and has entered mainstream US public discourse. It was only a matter of time before the NZ left and the Labour Government were "colonised" by US-made American Marxism.

The teaching of this theory in schools has been a contested issue with some states banning the teaching of it. The opposition has come from across the racial divide eg.https://rumble.com/vgxaad-black-mom-delivers-scorching-takedown-of-critical-race-theory-at-school-boa.html.

Some members of the French intelligentsia is also complaining of United States university colonisation in terms of non-gender language. This is a bit rich  given that France has given the US academic world- and thereby us in NZ the toxic Michel Foucault.

A Marxist keyword is present: 'decolonise'. But the race "issue is not the issue." It is the blind or bluff for the real issue, the change of regime.   American Marxism also known as Progressivism ha a start under Herbert D Croly and Woodrow Wilson as President gave it impetus and it flavoured FDR's regime and the dalliance with the then Societ Union where Brins Trust members had in the 1920s been hosted by Stalin. In the latter 20th C names such as Cloward and Piven and Saul Alinsky (both Hillary Clinton and Obama wrote papers on Alinsky).

Alinsky- a community organiser (a title Obama had) famous book was Rules for Radicals. Its techniques are once known can be seen. One of his techniques:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

In this one can see the effectiveness of the campaign again Trump, the MO of cancel culture and the effectiveness of slurs such as "racist" and "fascist". Alinsky is famous for the comment 'never let a crisis go to waste.

Again his advice:

The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.

The doctrine is divisive and undermines attempts at maintaining 'concord' and a functioning civil society.

American Marxism's arrival on our shores and  its embrace by the Ministry of Education does not augur well. Good intentions are how useful idiots are inducted.

Funnily enough, there is a great deal of sad irony in the fact that Marxists never ever contemplate that they have been intellectually colonised by a 19thC European journalist, whose thinking went back into 18thC, an exiled German who was a resentful malcontent and racist if not sexist, called Karl Marx.