Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
Ray E. Harrell wrote:
[snip]
Rowe's comments about the ivory tower of economics
resonated well with me because I belong to an "illegitimate"
profession
[snip]
I think Foucault pretty well exposed the nature of professional
"legitimacy" in such books as _Discipline and Punish_, where
he observed that the growth of the social sciences, unlike the
exact sciences of nature (physics, etc.) is not due to their
revealing powerful facts about unalterable reality, but due to their
*creating* lots of powerful social arti-facts, like SAT testing
(to pick one *relatively* innocuous example). By measuring
the reality they have created, they create ever more and
"deeper" of it, and make it seem ever more "natural" to everyone.
This ties in with the Susan George article which documents theculture
that I have known both in Oklahoma and New York
City.
Note that the conservative Congress would rather be known as
fools and provincial louts around artistic sophistication than
give up what the National Endowment of the Arts here in the U.S.
really is up to and means.Numbers are the great contemporary
artifacts and both education and the arts have been crunching,
documenting and publishing the numbers that go counter to the
conservative orthodoxy that George writes about.
Whether it is a President who worked his way from Arkansas to
Oxford and is not only a "great communicator" but a smart one,
or whether it is the numbers that Historian Lawrence W. Levine
notes in his analysis of Allan Bloom's (Closing of the American
Mind) fakery or the fact that so-called private enterprise
conservative magazines have to receive million dollar grants
to survive while arts institutions stimulate 11 dollars for every
dollar raised in fundraising.
These folks don't want a great communicator who "tacks with
the wind" but knows what he wants, anymore than they want
proof of their own inefficiency and lack of imagination being
documented by government agencies. These agencies become
the enemy, representatives of the Liberal Left according to
their story.
Many of the "legitimate" professions are nothing more
than "management science", which definitely manages
people (the object -- a.k.a.: "subject" -- populations),
but is not scientific, and in a way knows this, by making
a point of the objects ("subjects") *not being aware of
wht is being done to them*. Tell a billiard ball the
laws of physics, and its behavior will not change one
iota. Tell a human guinea pig what the purpose of the
experiment is, and they may do all sorts of things which
spoil it.
I'm reminded of a friend doing research on fish behaviorat the New York
Museum of Natural History. He is a
psychologist and quit the team because he said that he
had no way of knowing what the intent of the behavior
was that he had been given to document. How the team
believed they knew but had no way of truly knowing.
[snip]
The only thing we read about the Italian government in our press
is that they change alot and allowed an elected female
prostitute to urinate in Parliment.
I have not heard about this. Do you have details?
I can't remember her name but she was very popular andserved the role of
the jester in a parliament that needed
ridiculous comic relief. Can you imagine our Calvinists
having the good humour to be amused by such a thing?
The Italians have strippers we have Jesse Ventura, the
fake wrestler but the form is the same. Except the media
totally misrepresented the Italians but now elevate Ventura.
Frankly I relate more to the woman.
I do recall that once when I was in Tokyo, there was
a news item about the Prime Minister urinating against
the wall of the Parliament ("Diet") building. It wasn't
really a "big deal" (certainly nothing to censure him for),
and I think Japanese professional men relieve themselves thus
in semi-public fairly often.
[snip]
Instead I would suggest that Frederick Jackson Turner was
on to something with his Frontier theory as motivation, but
that his imagination was too limited. Space, for instance,
can be a tremendous frontier to challenge the human spirit.
[snip]
I believe I have previously reported my observation
about the imaginative horizon of many PhD computer
scientists being bounded by the latest eposode
of Star Trek. No "peregrinatio in stabilitate" for
these couch potatos! Although I also remember one of
the people I worked with at IBM Research posting the
following on his office door (as best I cah
remember):
Three things are not possible:
The desire of the rich for always more,
There is very little sacrifice or creativity to come from theoffspring
of this group.
The desire of the sick for something different,
What would the Doctors do for a living?
And the desire of the traveller to be any place but here.
If you have the itch it is very hard not to scratch. Pleasurefor me,
is to be found in
