By Daniel A. Kaufman
With the exception, perhaps, of those who teach at our most elite universities and liberal arts colleges, it should be apparent to everyone in the higher education business that the humanities and liberal arts are in trouble. Deteriorating numbers and declining esteem tell the story of subjects that are increasingly perceived as being largely useless to a person’s life and of essentially gratuitous value.
And yet, one also could make the case that the contemporary university – at least in its role as an undergraduate institution – exists largely for the sake of liberal education, for at the heart of every bachelor’s degree is a general education curriculum packed with liberal arts and humanities courses. Rather than simply train students to be accountants, nurses, engineers, and business managers, we also require that they take not a small number of courses in philosophy, history, English literature, and the like. Indeed, this general education comprises two years-worth of a typical four-year baccalaureate degree.
We find ourselves, then, in an interesting situation. The humanities and liberal arts are perceived as being so useless that hardly anyone chooses to major in them, but they are also deemed to be so essential that we will not send anyone out into the professions, without studying them.
The reason for this is that we’ve arrived at a point in our collective pedagogical consciousness, where the only reasons that we can think of for studying the humanities and liberal arts are essentially foundational in nature. Unfortunately, as I will explain, these reasons are not very good. Indeed, they are mostly terrible. More unfortunate still is the fact that I don’t think there are any better ones – at least, not given the kinds of reasons that we are inclined to accept, today. The value of an education in arts and letters is essentially gratuitous, and we have become the sort of people for whom a gratuitous value is, for the most part, no value at all.
I actually think that this last point is very important and gets at some of the worst features of our civilization, at least in its current stage of development, but it will have to be left to another time. My aim, here, is to describe the rationales that we commonly give for requiring that every receiver of a B.A. or B.S. have a liberal education, via the general education curriculum, and to show why they aren’t very good reasons at all.
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The Argument from Professional Competence and Virtue
It is widely believed – or at least, it is widely stated – that in order to be a good accountant, nurse, engineer, business manager, etc., one must have, beyond the obvious sorts of professional competencies, two characteristics, which it is alleged a liberal education helps to provide: the first being the capacity for “critical thinking,” which is hazily defined as the possession of a certain kind of practical rationality, and the second being “ethics,” which is even more hazily defined, but which typically is intended to mean that the professional in question is not inclined to cheat or otherwise mistreat those people whom he employs as labor or whom he serves.
What we are being asked to believe, then, is that a liberal education produces sharp, morally decent professionals, an idea, to be fair, that is not merely some invention of contemporary advocates of higher education, but is one that has some real history behind it. Notably, John Stuart Mill, in an 1867 inauguration speech, given prior to his becoming Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, said the following:
Whether those whose specialty they are…will make a wise and conscientious use of them or the reverse depends less on the manner in which they are taught their profession than upon what sort of minds they bring to it—what kind of intelligence and of conscience the general system of education has developed in them. (1)
But is there any reason to think that this claim regarding liberal education and competent, ethical professionals is true? I doubt it. In fact, I would maintain that there are a number of very strong reasons for thinking that it is false. One is that practical reason and moral virtue are not products of book and classroom learning or, for that matter, of the possession of knowledge of any kind, and to think that they are is to fundamentally misunderstand both. Another is that there simply is no case to be made, whether empirical or a priori, for the idea that the sort of knowledge provided by a liberal education produces more professionally prudent or ethical people.
Excellence in practical reasoning is a species of wisdom, not knowledge, and wisdom is both acquired and exercised in practice, not in the receipt or dissemination of information. Put another way, you get better at making choices and decisions, by making choices and decisions, not by being taught logic or by being given a list of formal and informal fallacies, and the reason is that the ability to deliberate is a kind of knowing-how, rather than knowing-that. (2) The canons of practical reasoning describe sound deliberation, they do not engender it, so the usefulness of such rules in producing good deliberators – and thus of what can be taught in a classroom – is minimal and indirect. Of course, the ability to make good professional choices depends upon the possession of some “knowledge-that,” but only of the sort that one must have to engage in the profession in the first place; i.e. one can’t make good nursing or engineering choices, without knowing a great deal about medicine and engineering.
Much the same point applies to the development of moral virtue: we must remember that ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek word ‘ethikos’, which means, roughly, “arising from habit.” Like excellence in deliberation, from which it partly derives, moral virtue is acquired in practice and not by way of possessing some body of information. It is true that many – perhaps most – people think that being morally decent in one’s professional and other affairs is a matter of a kind of instruction-following, but this is only because they misunderstand the nature and purpose of moral canons like the Mosaic Law or the moral rules that one derives from secular moral philosophies. Like the canons of practical reasoning, moral rules only describe moral behavior, they don’t create it, which means that being versed in them – even memorizing them to the last letter – will never be sufficient for being a decent person. This is true, not simply because of the inherent nature of canons and rules or because what counts as a good decision depends so heavily on the cirumstances, but because being morally decent in one’s affairs is not a matter of knowledge, but of inclination — of right sentiment — and this is only developed as a matter of habit. We’ve known this since antiquity — specifically, since Aristotle rejected the Socratic assertion in the Protagoras that to know the good is to be good (and conversely that to be bad is the result of some deficiency in knowledge) — but nonetheless, we continue to think that and act as if being good is the result of rule-following and is something, therefore, that is teachable in a classroom setting.
All of this speaks to the general question of whether anything that is teachable in a university classroom could produce competent and ethical professionals, and I have maintained that there is either nothing or at best, very little, that we do that could have such an effect, but let’s remember that the suggestion, currently under consideration, is the bolder, more specific one that receiving a general education – one consisting of a smorgasbord of humanities and liberal arts courses – is both necessary and sufficient for the production of qualified, decent professionals. Now, this strikes me as being demonstrably false, so much so, in fact, that it borders on the incredible that anyone would suggest it.
Does anyone really believe that if our businessmen would just read more Kant and Mill, we would have fewer corporate scandals and crimes? Or that if our politicians just read more Greek and modern political philosophy, we would have better governance? It’s not just that these suggestions sound absurd. We have every reason to doubt their validity. For one thing, the educated, cultured villain is a longstanding trope, which is, as all such tropes are, based in reality — think of the Marquis de Sade and of the aristocratic perverts and sex criminals that populate his 120 Days of Sodom; of Leopold and Loeb and the characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, who were based on the Chicago genius-killers; or of Theodore Bundy and the fictional Hannibal Lecter, the latter of who is a kind of amalgam of upper-class, educated serial killers — and for another, consider the fact that the sorts of businessmen and politicians, whose professional indecency has given rise to our concerns about professional ethics, are the most likely to have had precisely the sort of education that is being proffered as an antidote for professional malfeasance. Ken Lay, was educated at the University of Missouri and the University of Houston. Michael Milken received degrees from UC Berkeley and the Wharton School of Business. Richard Nixon was a graduate of Whittier College and Duke Law School.
The Argument from Civic Virtue
Aside from the argument from professional competence and virtue, the case most often made for the necessity of liberal general education is that it is fundamental to citizenship in a participatory democracy; that if we want people to play a productive part in their civil society and government, they must be liberally educated. As with the argument from professional competence and virtue, a version of this argument also can be found in Mill’s inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews:
It is thus too that minds are formed capable of guiding and improving public opinion on the greater concerns of practical life. Government and civil society are the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind; and he would deal competently with them as a thinker, and not as a blind follower of a party, requires not only a general knowledge of the leading facts of life, both moral and material, but an understanding exercised and disciplined in the principles and rules of sound thinking up to a point which neither the experience of life nor any one science or branch of knowledge affords.
Specifically, the argument is supposed to go something like this. People in a society like ours are free, rational actors, whose decisions determine who will govern them and what form that governance will take (i.e. what laws and institutions they will be governed by), as well as what products and services private industry will provide and they will purchase. It is crucial, then (so the argument goes), that we have sufficient critical thinking skills and general education to participate well — that is, to make good economic and financial choices, select competent, ethical political representatives, and support good legislation and civic and political institutions. The argument, in short, takes as its backdrop, all of the assumptions and principles that characterize modern, liberal political and economic thought, as manifested in the work of classic political and economic theorists like John Locke, Adam Smith, and the signers of the American Constitution.
The first criticisms I will offer are essentially the same as my criticisms of the argument from professional competence and virtue: The desired social characteristics to which the argument from civic virtue refers are varieties of excellence in deliberation and moral virtue, and as we’ve already demonstrated, these are not traits that are acquired by way of book and classroom learning. Some may want to suggest that the civic and political virtue required by participatory democracy is a distinct species of virtue from the kinds of moral virtue that are desirable in the personal and professional spheres of life, but here I must agree with T.S. Eliot, who maintained that any such conception of civic or political virtue is at best obscure and at worst, hopelessly problematic. Would we call a person a good citizen, who competently and actively supported his society, even if the society and its aims were wicked in nature? Would we call a person a good citizen, who competently and actively supported an ethical society, if he was wicked in his own personal affairs? As Eliot says of the citizen in a participatory democracy:
He must be adapted to it, certainly: for without being adapted to it, he cannot play a part in it… But he must not be completely adapted to it in the form in which he finds it around him; for that would train a generation to be completely incapable of any change or improvement. (3)
The good citizen, then, must act in support of his society when it is good, but must work against it, when it is bad. Furthermore, he must be good in his private and professional affairs, for it would be absurd to describe a person who was malicious and vicious in his private life as a good citizen, regardless of his public behavior. And so it seems that there really is no useful distinction to be made between the good person and the good citizen, which is why I tend to agree with Eliot that the good citizen is “simply the good man manifesting his goodness in the social context,” and that consequently, the manner in which a good citizen is produced is no different from the manner in which goodness is developed, at the personal and professional levels of our being.
There are also a number of problems that are distinctive to the civic virtue argument, and I want to discuss a few of the worst of them here, because they speak directly to the way in which our current system of higher education depends upon a significant degree of self-deception, with respect to our identities as individuals and as a society.
With respect to the individual, the idea that we engage both the economy and the polity as “rational actors,” who make decisions on the basis of sober and competent evaluations of cost/benefit analyses and other rational principles, has been rendered so problematic by nineteenth and twentieth century thought that it is hard to believe that anyone other than the rankest idealogue is still advancing it. Part of the problem is that the classical liberal picture of the rational actor depends, essentially, on the essentially Cartesian idea that one’s thoughts — and thus, one’s reasons, for belief and for action — are transparent to oneself; that we actually know, with a high degree of certainty, what our reasons are. Yet it is difficult to credit this idea, in light of the critiques of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and others, all of whom have argued that our reasons for believing what we do and acting in the way we do, are tangled, conflicted, largely non-rational, often vicious, even animalistic, and regardless, are largely obscure to us, without extraordinary and extended investigation. That is, the manifest reasons for why we believe and act as we do are not the real reasons, and the real reasons are largely hidden from us, and involve motivations and passions that are anything but those of the disinterested rational actor, the image of which has fueled the Descartes, Kants, Lockes, Smiths, and Rawlses of the world. Add to this the most powerful and enduring psychological paradigm of the last century — behaviorism — according to which individuals are not even actors at all (let alone rational ones), but rather, complex stimulus/response mechanisms, whose behavior is determined by nothing more than our native genetic endowment and our experience of sensory stimulation, and the human image presupposed by the civic virtue argument comes across as fantasy.
It would be easy to dismiss such considerations as mere theorizing, except for the fact that the world in which we live largely bears them out. Put another way, both our economic and political institutions now conceive of and engage the individual in precisely the way that has been suggested by the critics of the classical liberal human image, and it is a conception that has granted businesses and politicians immeasurable wealth and power. Our businesses do not serve their customers by engaging their clear, rational conception of what they want and need and then serving it; they aggressively create desire for whatever it is that they want to sell. (A fascinating example of this is the marketing campaign designed by Edward Bernays – the first to employ the principles of crowd psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in business –which convinced women to take up smoking and the society at large to accept women smoking, something for which, at the time, there was near universal disapproval.) Similarly, politicians do not follow the rationally conceived and deliberated upon desires and needs of the public. Rather, they aggressively manage public opinion, in order to, as Walter Lippmann described it, “manufacture consent” for the policies that they and the experts they employ have decided are best. (4) As Bernays put it, in his revealing and devastatingly honest manifesto on social and civic control, Propaganda: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has shown that it is possible…” (4)
The truth is that we do not live in a participatory democracy, based on classical liberal principles, and have not since the onset of the industrial age. Rather, we live in a technocracy, as part of a mass public that is managed – not governed or served – by cadres of highly sophisticated psychologists, social scientists, legislators and administrators, whose chief managerial instruments are vast bureaucracies, large-scale business concerns, and multi-modal media enterprises, which operate by way of a combination of psychoanalytical and behaviorist principles, under a façade of classical liberal institutions and traditional business enterprises, the public’s belief in which is engendered and maintained by mass public education, mass higher education, and by a shallow, but effective patriotism. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the worlds of Aldous Huxley and B.F. Skinner have been largely realized in the modern, industrialized West, and that the lives that we lead as consumers and citizens are much more along the lines described by Lipmann and Bernays than those described by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison. The ultimate problem with the argument from civic virtue, then, is that there simply are no citizens of the sort that it imagines, for whom the proffered liberal education would do any good.
The model of liberal education that is being touted as essential for good citizenship belongs to an earlier era; to a pre-industrial society, in which the franchise was limited to a “natural aristocracy” of landowners, the omnipresent bureaucracy and civil service that we currently have did not exist, the world of commerce consisted primarily of small business operations, with minimal and unsophisticated marketing and advertising, and in which, consequently, the idea of self-determination and self-rule was a far more substantive and credible one. It was reasonable, then, to suggest that this natural aristocracy, which was responsible not just for governing, but for determining the general character of the larger culture, required a common cultural background and formal education, and it should be noted, their liberal education was far more substantial and rigorous than ours, including heavy instruction in Greek and Latin language and literature.
It is simply not possible to make a similar case for the relevance of this sort of education today, living, as we do, in an industrial, mass society, where governance is overwhelmingly effected by career bureaucrats and civil servants and by professional politicians, and where the popular culture is determined by enormous corporate media conglomerates, concentrated in New York and Los Angeles. Political participation, today, even at the local levels, is largely superficial, consisting of little more than infrequent voting and perhaps, for a tiny number of people, some limited political activism, and yet we are supposed to believe that this barely-invested, thinly conceived citizenry requires an education in Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Descartes, Weber, and the like, lest their participation — such as it is — suffer. The suggestion is beyond incredible; it is preposterous.
Now, one of my colleagues has made an interesting suggestion: if a liberal education cannot support the individual and the citizen in his or her engagement with the economy and the state, because of the largely technocratic nature of our society and the diminished agency that goes along with it, perhaps it might play a restorative role, instead; one in which its task is to return a greater degree of autonomy to the individual and the citizen, in opposition to the current (technocratic) society. The, proposal, in short, is that liberal education should be reconceived as essentially countercultural.
Let me say a thing or two on behalf of the idea and on what would have to be the case, in order for it to be effective. For a liberal education to serve a countercultural role in today’s postindustrial world, it would require a radically different curriculum; one that emphasized late 19th century and 20th century arts and letters and particularly, those that serve demystifying, debunking, and unmasking functions: works by the likes of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, the later Wittgenstein, Foucault, Huxley, Orwell, etc. Why do I say this? The traditional Western canon is essentially humanistic. It consists of literature and arts that describe and celebrate a deeply and richly rendered human being and which are devoted to identifying his place in a world that is at least ideally designed for him. The world we live in today is not designed for such a human being and our current state — that diminished state of individual social, economic, and political agency that we have been discussing here — can only be described as post-human. We have a kind of world and are a kind of human being, then, about which the the Western canon has little to say. But beyond this simple and obvious point, let me suggest two reasons why a traditional liberal education is inappropriate, if one’s ends are essentially countercultural in nature:
(1) If a countercultural liberal education is essentially restorative in nature — that is, if its purpose is to return agency to the individual and the citizen; i.e. to revive the classical liberal conception of personhood — then its main task must be to undo the social, economic, and political control under which we’ve fallen; to counter the work of the Lipmanns, Bernayses, Skinners, and others who have helped to construct the systems of social management that currently obtain and which have led us to our current post-human state. This cannot be accomplished by pointing to what personhood used to mean — to what we used to be —but only by exposing the mechanisms of mystification and control that have determined what personhood currently means and what we currently are, so that they can be countered and their effects, perhaps, broken.
(2) To continue teaching the traditional Western canon — and to allow it to be co-opted, as it currently is, into the general education curriculum — is to allow the illusion to be maintained that our society is, in fact, a classical liberal, participatory democracy and free market and that in our engagement with it, we really are free, rational agents. In short, it is to facilitate the current façade and thereby support the very technocracy against which we are supposed to be fighting.
The virtues of a countercultural rationale for liberal education notwithstanding, I must say that I am quite dubious about its prospects, for two reasons. First, the humanities and liberal arts are tolerated in the current university at all – even in their diminished ‘Gen-Ed’ state – only because they have willingly accepted the role of facilitating the façade of a living participatory democracy and free market. This has been true since the university placed professional education at the heart of its mission, so for us to drop the traditional humanities and liberal arts and thereby abandon our façade-supporting role is to give every reason for the university to get rid of liberal education once and for all (and especially in fiscally tight times like those we are experiencing today). Second, our current universities and colleges are simply too intimately involved with government and private industry to ever permit the liberal arts to play the sort of sustained, effective, countercultural role that we have been considering.
The Personal Growth and Development Argument
I do not have much to say about this argument, mostly because it is never made in the absence of the previous two, but is treated, for the most part, as a kind of “icing on the cake.” Even if everyone were to agree that a liberal education is an integral part of a personally satisfying, fulfilled live, it is difficult to imagine anyone making the case that we ought to sustain the vast –and vastly expensive – system of higher education that we currently have, in order to fulfill it.
Of course, everyone does not agree that a liberal education is essential to a personally satisfying, fulfilled life, and when this point is made in the stronger form, currently under consideration, namely that an education in liberal arts is necessary for a personally satisfying, fulfilled life, it ceases to be credible at all. Philosophers might like to think that they can distinguish “higher” from “lower” pleasures – in Utilitarianism, Mill famously maintains that the pleasures of the intellect and higher sentiments are higher than pleasures of mere sensation and that human happiness only is possible through the former and never through the latter – but the arguments are inevitably question-begging or circular, and do little more than advance the philosopher’s own tastes. (5) This is precisely what we are doing, when we make the Personal Growth and Development argument on behalf of universal liberal education, for the truth of the matter is that there are as many possibly satisfying, fulfilling forms of life as there are people and indefinitely many types of endeavors, entertainments, and pleasures that might serve them. Certainly some of these satisfying, fulfilling forms of life are served by experience of the classics of Western art, literature, philosophy, social science, and the like, but the idea that all or even most of them are so served, is nothing more than self-serving.
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I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that I am against liberal education or that I think ill of the classics of art, literature, philosophy, and social science that make up the liberal arts curriculum in contemporary American universities. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Indeed, it is partly out of my love for this tradition and course of study that I feel compelled to speak out as strongly as I have. In my view, the integration of this curriculum into a system of universal, mass education has done it enormous harm. By administering it at the level of general education, which is typically provided by way of distribution requirements, it has been fragmented and watered down to the point that it is largely ineffective, and by forcing it into ridiculous utilitarian roles, like those described by the “Professional Competence and Virtue” and “Civic Virtue” arguments, it has been distorted into such a caricature, that it is barely recognizable. Moreover, our students – not to mention our colleagues in the other disciplines – see these arguments for the cynical shams they are, and this causes them to become cynical about the Western tradition of arts and letters, the result of which is that it we become a kind of pitiful welfare case on campus , and makes it less, rather than more likely that our students will ever want to engage this tradition again, once they have left the campus.
The truth, I am afraid, is that the value in studying these subjects is largely gratuitous, and we have the misfortune of living in an age, in which gratuitous values are almost completely unappreciated, with the exception of the most rudimentary varieties of pleasure-seeking. Aristotle understood quite clearly that the ultimate human good consisted in the life of leisure and in the contemplation that such a life made possible. (6) This is not an understanding that pervades the American consciousness today, and it is one that will take a lot of work – and a lot of change – to engender, if it is even possible at all.
Works Cited
- John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at the University of St. Andrews (1867).
https://archive.org/stream/inauguraladdres00millgoog#page/n2/mode/2up
- Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949).
http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Gilbert_Ryle_The_Concept_of_Mind.pdf
- T.S. Eliot, “The Ends of Education” (1950), reprinted in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).
http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf
- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863).
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mill1863.pdf
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC).
Comments
57 responses to “On Some Common Rationales for Liberal Education (and why they aren’t very good)”
Much of this rings true to me. But it’s clearly a personal statement also and I respect that. One senses a degree of … what? Anger? Frustration? Disillusionment?)
Anyway, a powerful piece.
The countercultural rationale is, I agree, a non-starter. “… [O]ur current universities and colleges are simply too intimately involved with government and private industry to ever permit the liberal arts to play the sort of sustained, effective, countercultural role that we have been considering.”
Not only that, students pay fees, and who is going to pay fees to get a radical critique of the society one is living in and trying to get on in? If you want counter-culture you do it yourself for free, no? You join a radical movement or drop out and join a commune or something.
“Post-human” seems a bit strong. Post-humanist, perhaps.
Also, I suspect Aristotle’s ideal of contemplation only really makes sense if you have (in some sense) a religious view of the world. A modern, secular version might be the reflective spectator, the curious person, the watcher of the passing parade.
Mark: Sensitive and perceptive observations. I will have more to say in a bit, in defense of “post-human” and Aristotelian contemplation.
Hi,
At the onset of the industrial age, slavery was legally practiced in many US states.
Madison, Jefferson – slave owners. Locke, investor in the slave trade.
Classic liberal principles.
Robin:
Well…yes.
A curriculum for ‘a radical critique’ could have several meanings. For the ‘Freedom Caucus’ Republican, ‘radical’ could mean baptizing students in Ayn Rand, the ‘Austrian’ economists, and all that sort of stuff. For the ‘Progressive Caucus’ Democrat, if could be Richard Rorty, pragmatists (or even existentialists) of the Left, and so forth. ‘Radical’ is values-relative.
Impressive Daniel. I do find this hopeful. First it illustrates that you have the freedom (mentally and beyond) to offer rebellious criticism rather than simply be herded along. You are not beholden to any religion that I know of, and I now presume that your university position must be reasonably secure. Good!
Secondly I find it hopeful that you see great problems in society (given the effects of “big media” and so on as discussed). I have less to say about how a non-watered down liberal arts education would counter such dynamics, not having one myself. Since you do have such an education (I presume), you might tell us more about its countercultural virtues. I’m not entirely sure, however, that you’re suggesting this to be “a final cure,” though perhaps still a step in the right direction.
I have what I consider to be “a final cure,” and so would hope for you to consider adding it to your pot. I believe that our mental/behavioral sciences must formally begin to ask, as well as reach agreement upon, that which most essentially constitutes good/bad existence. This ultimate measure of value would represent the essential motivation which drives the conscious entity, and thus without it I doubt we should expect much from psychology, psychiatry, sociology, cognitive science, and so on. I believe that such theory would actually found these fields, somewhat as Newton founded physics. Observe also that this would bring us “a scientific ideology” from which to lead our lives, as well as structure our societies…
I concur with Mark, this is a powerful piece that reflects the heartfelt emotions of an educator in distress.
“see these arguments for the cynical shams they are, and this causes them to become cynical about the Western tradition of arts and letters, the result of which is that it we become a kind of pitiful welfare case on campus … Aristotle understood quite clearly that the ultimate human good consisted in the life of leisure and in the contemplation that such a life made possible”
‘Cynical sham’, ‘pitiful welfare case’. That is putting it very strongly. I read your arguments but what I really heard was a cry of distress. It would seem that what you believe in and what you stand for has been devalued or discarded.
This is a painful place to be and your post was an expression of that pain. You then advocate:
“The truth… is that the value in studying these subjects is largely gratuitous…the ultimate human good consisted in the life of leisure and in the contemplation that such a life made possible”
i am guessing here but it would seem that you long to retreat from the source of the pain into the protected cocoon of leisurely contemplation. Like Mark, I question(for different reasons) your vision of the ultimate human good.
I see the ultimate human good as being a net contributor to society. I am a member of society and I derive great benefit from that membership. I have therefore a reciprocal duty to contribute to society, if possible more than I receive so that I am a net benefit to society, ensuring that it grows, thus providing increasing benefits, and to compensate for those who are net deficits to society. My contributions should foster its harmony, values, productivity and aesthetics since all are necessary for society. At the same time I should do it in a compassionate way that recognises the needs of the unfortunate. I should do it in a loving way that reinforces family and strengthens the bonds of friendship. I should do it in a responsible way, recognising the needs of others and of society.
This I suggest is a simple, coherent narrative of human good that is available to all. Each person can contribute according to his means, station, aptitude and skills. By contrast your vision of the ultimate human good is only available to a small, protected elite.
Your description of the putative values of a liberal arts education would seem to be coloured by your distress and thus it is unnecessarily pessimistic. To explain why will take another comment.
Freedom, rationality will always be approximate, “best-effort” propositions. Was there ever a time and place where, in general, there was more freedom and rationality than there are now? I don’t know, but I doubt it. We could do much better, but there was no golden age of freedom and rationality.
If we are the post-humans, then maybe post-human represents the best we can do so far.
When my kids were in primary school, I tried to be helpful and told one of them something I knew about a project they were working on. The response “Thanks Dad, but I can’t use that – you are not a source”.
I don’t think I could even spell bibliography when I was nine, but these days they have to have a properly formatted bibliography with everything they hand in. More than that they need to be able to justify why it is a good source, distinguish between primary and secondary sources etc.
That is because the bureaucrats who design education programs decided that kids need to learn good habits about evaluating evidence as early as possible. And yes, the kids do get it.
Bureaucrats don’t get into that line because they want to doom us to some Huxleyan hell – in general they want to help make the world a better place, as most of us do. They are under very many pressures, politics, business, corruption and so on. But in general they want to help and the evidence is that they often come through.
In my country today, when a senior cabinet minister is gay she does not sneak around furtively, she posts pictures on social media of herself and her partner joyously celebrating the birth of their child.
If the Western canon celebrates a world which has no place for Senator Wong and those of us in her world, but only celebrates a world where the rich elite say that their fellow humans must have individual liberty and then makes slaves of them, then perhaps it deserves to die and to make way for something new and which does speak to us.
But I doubt the premise that the Western canon does not speak to us.
@Labnut:
“This I suggest is a simple, coherent narrative of human good that is available to all. Each person can contribute according to his means, station, aptitude and skills. By contrast your vision of the ultimate human good is only available to a small, protected elite.”
This makes Kaufman sound as though he is pining for some bygone aristocracy. This is inaccurate. He seems to make clear that the primary problem with the humanities is that they are simply out of place in the sort of world we have today. Given what the humanities are, given the sort of leisure required (and the disposition to use the leisure that one has productively), and given all the countervailing pressures of a mass consumerist “democracy” I think his diagnosis a reasonable one. Your description of yourself and your perspective is no doubt accurate, but I find extending it to the public at large to be (if I may say so) a bit naive. If anything, it is even worse than Kaufman describes, because an increasingly problematic aspect of teaching any humanities courses at all is that one can no longer necessarily rely on even a baseline cultural/historical literacy amongst students.
@Robin Herbert:
Yes, there was never a golden age. However, those Locke was referring to were by definition mostly a small, wealthy demographic (life, liberty, property and all that). The notion that we could take that small group and its rational/cultural characteristics and simply expand them to create a mass democracy of rational citizens was madness from the beginning, as Bernays and Lippmann knew very well. Are some things better now than they were? Undoubtedly. Does that mean that the old “deserves to die”? That’s looking at it the wrong way. We as a society may simply not be able to appreciate the humanities in general and that is for the worse, regardless of the fact that there have been advancements in other areas (and those advancements themselves are sometimes (not always, though) historically conditioned.
Well Labnut, that seemed to add a bit of uncomfortable weight to this discussion, though I do suppose that we’re in the company of friends anyway. Everyone feels down from time to time, and especially by means of our strongest passions. Daniel’s passion for academia is quite well known, so yes it is possible that he’s currently a bit down in this regard.
Let’s imagine this to be the case. Here I’d hope for him to appreciate your provided “altruism” advice as a token of your goodwill, though I doubt it would truly help. The “Let’s all be good to others for the sake of everyone!” meme must be among humanity’s most prolific. I see this essentially as a social tool which we use in order to (selfishly/ironically) rid others of their selfishness. Furthermore, observe how much more difficult it is to effectively sell insurance, news programs, politicians, cars, and so on, without playing upon the standard altruism meme. (I do wonder if it goes unnoticed by many, simply given its prevalence?) While you may indeed be quite altruistic Labnut, in order for this to be a useful ideology in general, wouldn’t socialism need to practically function better than capitalism?
According to my theory, there are two sensation based mechanisms which drive our behavior — hope and worry. We all know “the whip of worry” bearing down upon us, but it’s “the carrot of hope” which gives our lives fulfillment. If it’s true that the structure of academia provides Daniel with more worry than hope right now, well I must admit that this does suit me — I have tremendous problems with it as well. Nevertheless I do find great hope in my own project, and would love to interest him in it as well. What isn’t speculative however, is my great need for someone exactly like himself for guidance!
Can we really give Bernays credit for inventing what religions and monarchs have been doing for millennia?
Bernays was an amateur.
We are a tribal species, we believe as a mob, and that makes us open to manipulation.
It has always been thus, they are just trying to sell us different kinds of pups now. At school I told my classmates that they only smoked for an image that the tobacco companies were selling them. They said “nonsense” But when we went on a school excursion skiing, they all switched to Alpine.
So, again, we can just do what we can, uncover and resist the manipulation. The propagandists also have their failures, there is quite a lot that Rupert Murdoch is striking out on and the faceless men are quite often just making their clients look ridiculous.
mpboyle,
“This makes Kaufman sound as though he is pining for some bygone aristocracy”
Dan-K is a master craftsman with words so it is generally safe to assume he means what he says and that he has said it clearly.
“Your description of yourself and your perspective is no doubt accurate, but I find extending it to the public at large to be (if I may say so) a bit naive”
On the contrary, it is an accurate description of the process that sustains our society.
“We as a society may simply not be able to appreciate the humanities in general and that is for the worse, regardless of the fact that there have been advancements in other areas”
This post is in effect a continuation of the post on philosophobia. Perhaps we should call it ‘humanophobia‘. I was going to repeat my reply from that post but Gretchen Busl(Assistant professor of English at Texas Woman’s University) says it rather better than I did, so I will confine myself to quoting the relevant parts of her article(see http://bit.ly/1W0cmCw)
“The academy itself is partly to blame for this image problem. The inward-focused nature of scholarship has left the public with no choice but to respond to our work with indifference and even disdain, because we have made little effort to demonstrate what purpose our work may have beyond the lecture hall or academic journal.
The traditional academic model does not reward public humanities scholarship. Rather, humanities scholars are saddled with the expectation of producing peer-reviewed articles and monographs published by university presses for tenure and promotion. This antiquated system encourages scholars to write and speak only for an audience of peers, keeping graduate students from branching away from the proto-book dissertation model and faculty from exploring popular venues for their work.
…
Humanities scholars need to take what feels – right now – like a risk, and engage in more public scholarship. After all, we are the best qualified to talk about our own work. And we need our chairs, our deans and our provosts to afford us the support and incentives to do so.
The payoff will not only be in increased visibility and perceived value for humanities research, but the opportunity to make an impact that is much greater than that offered by the solitary scholar model.”
“…(if I may say so) a bit naive”
When you call someone naive you are expressing an attitude, but is your attitude interesting? It is much more useful to make an argument.
I am really gratified by the really high quality comments to which my little essay has given rise. Let me say some further things, which I hope will both advance the conversation and also reply to some of the queries and challenges that have been posed:
1. I have substantial experience of both the top higher education institutions and the run-of-the mill variety, the latter in which the overwhleming majority of American college students are educated. If one is ensconced in the first sort of place, it is very easy to think that talk of the sort I am engaging in here is overheated. (I am not suggesting that those of my interlocutors, like Mark English and Labnut, who have accused me of being overheated, are doing so for this reason.) That is because the liberal arts and humanities are doing just fine in these institutions. Schools like NYU, Princeton, and the like, employ literally dozens of philosophers and sustain luxurious graduate programs, while also enjoying healthy undergraduate enrollments, and what goes for the philosophy programs is even more true of programs like English, History, etc. There is no humanities/liberal arts crisis in these places.
The problem is at the rest of America’s universities, and here, the problem is acute, and my language, I am afraid, is not overheated — far from it. I am watching, at my own institution — a large, state university — as the study of foreign languages entirely disappears from the campus. The Classics program has been shut down. History, religious studies, sociology, and other such programs are struggling to keep their majors and minors — philosophy struggles to keep between 25 and 40 majors, this on a campus with 20,000 students. Programs like ours are terrified to deny anyone tenure, because we have no idea whether we will be permitted to do a search for a replacement, or whether the faculty line will be frozen or taken away from us. Increasing emphasis by administrators and accreditors on objective, outcomes-based assessment further jeopardizes our position, because such assessment really isn’t possible with regard to disciplines like ours.
So, yes, we have become pitiful welfare cases on campus, praying that people will continue to think us essential, at least for Gen Ed purposes. That is not hyperbole.
2. This situation has made everyone rather desperate, and you can bet that when people are desperate in this way, they will do anything. The arguments for liberal education that I have described are so common that you can find versions of them in the Gen Ed mission statements of universities across the country. These arguments are terrible, for the reasons I described and even more reasons, which I did not describe, for considerations of length. If they are not cynical, then the people making them are really quite dumb, something that I am not inclined to believe. Hell, I’ve had to make these sorts of arguments myself, in certain interactions with administrators and other powers-that-be, and always felt dirty afterwards.
This is just a start. More to come later.
@ Robin Herbert:
Who said Bernays invented manipulation tout court? What was referenced were his pioneering techniques combining the principles laid out by scholars like Trotter and Le Bon (crowd psychology) and his uncle’s (Freud) theories concerning behavior and motivation, which in the most basic sense are at odds with the Enlightenment model of rationality. Your generalization re: all religions and all monarchies is both too broad and disanalogous given widely disparate historical contexts. As for pups, some like Lippmann would say that we have some of our own which we happily sell to one another, viz. his point that “We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude.”
@ Labnut:
“On the contrary, it is an accurate description of the process that sustains our society.”
Really? Because I would beg to differ, given the empirical data (and resulting depression) I encounter every time I go to Wal-Mart or turn on the TV.
“When you call someone naive you are expressing an attitude, but is your attitude interesting? It is much more useful to make an argument.”
Huh? I was describing what I perceive as the disconnect between your belief and my daily observations. Furthermore, while the academy can do better at communicating with the public, to ignore the fact that the public itself has grave difficulties misrepresents reality. Even if we were to hypothetically assume there were no communication problems from the direction of the academy, that says nothing about the deluge of garbage being pushed at the public by the most sophisticated techniques our consumerist society can devise, various economic pressures being felt by institutions, and the fact that the baseline rationality mass democracy starts with is not nearly as great as we would like to believe.
First, let’s remember that, despite justifications or lack thereof, we’re only going to see incremental change in most universities and colleges. The academy is entrenched and the economic structure supporting it may wither slowly away, but is unlikely to be dismantled. In my life, the most serious challenge in the academy came from the ‘Reagan Revolution,’ but this only institutionalized a long-standing conservative belief that the humanities belonged to the wealthy and education for the masses need be reduced to training. The business model the Reaganites introduced didn’t succeed at total transformation, because the Academy is a very peculiar business – ie., eg., who is the real consumer? What is being produced? Answers to basic market-theory questions are not readily forthcoming in the academic arena.
Let’s consider the historic origins of the humanities as fields of instruction. The 18th century saw the rise of the bourgeoisie as the dominant social class. This rise was fairly rapid, and by the mid 19th century the bourgeoisie found themselves with two unexpected issues to deal with: excess wealth (wealth not needed for commercial re-investment), and leisure time. Their religious inheritance told them that the excess wealth should go into charity and that they should spend their free time reading the Bible – but who really gets rich to become a saint? So they instead chose to inherit not only the wealth and power of the aristocracy, but it’s culture. Not its religion, but its arts and literature. Thus the humanities were born. Suddenly artifacts of ‘Truth,’ ‘Beauty,’ ‘Pleasure,’ and ‘Universal Meaning’ were to be made available to all those who could afford them.
By the 20th century, it was becoming clear that industrialization would soon allow at least a broad segment of the working class some political power, and, of course, leisure time. So it became necessary to inculcate their children into the same cultural inheritance, to insure continuity and social control. Thus the humanities developed into an educational imperative – literally mandatory in the secondary schools.
We should note that such cultural mandates are both necessary and inevitable. Any large, complex, developed culture needs ideological indoctrination to maintain social stability. It doesn’t matter whether we believe or even understand the ideology as a whole (thus hypocrisy is built into such a system). What matters is having a shared set of signifiers that can be used to explain social behavior. Such will change over time, both in presentation and interpretation. It’s possible that the humanities, as such a set of signifiers, have outlived their usefulness. But social/economic inertia assures their place in the academy for the time being.
If I may, a follow-up to my previous comment:
My doctorate’s in English; one of the things I learned (as something of an outsider from the working class), was that there’s pretty much nothing more to say about the ‘Canon’ of Western literature as it then existed (it’s been considerably expanded since). There really is just so much that can be written in criticism of a Shakespearean sonnett or a novel by Joyce, and by the ’80s such had already been written. One reason for the popularity of Deconstruction that decade was that it promised to generate new criticism of old texts through reversal of values of previous critical readings. This sounds nefarious, and conservatives argued it was, but that misses the point – namely, that Deconstruction offered a means to produce journal publications all important to academic careers.
In surveying the academy as a whole, I realized that the academy itself, not just any one field, has a profound problem with justification, despite all the money poured into it by both public and private resources: No field of research needs the huge numbers of researchers the academy produces. Universities produce thousands of humanities scholars, scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, etc, than are actually needed. Many of these leave the university system, as I did, but many thousands remain in the academy where – *as researchers* – they do little more than dot some older scholar’s ‘i,’ or provide a comma to some esoteric formula – and of course, collect a check. (The amount of cynicism one finds among some academics is distressing to anyone who truly values learning.) This situation has actually been known for some decades, and the implication is clear, namely that to remain socially useful, the academy needs to make a claim, not on the value of research, but on the importance of its teaching. But this it always does half-heartedly, because, frankly, that’s not where the money is, and the system is really not set up to reward good teachers. So university departments survive on the justification they can make, not to the society they presume to educate, but to the agencies providing them grants and donations.
We should note that the social pressure on the academy, to provide any justification, is actually part of the ideological usefulness of the academy. It’s grounded in economics, and thus re-enforces a faith in marketing, and assures us that even knowledge is a commodity to be produced and sold. The conflicts within the academy, and any presumed crisis such conflict produces, merely re-assures us that the only ideological value we all share is that of capitalism.
Dan-K,
“those of my interlocutors, like Mark English and Labnut, who have accused me of being overheated”
I’m sorry if I gave that impression. No, I don’t think you are being overheated but I do think you are distressed and for good reason too. This is a very fine essay that deserves careful consideration. As an employer I have been on the receiving end of the problems you mention. Business is a social activity that is critically dependent on the quality of communication between its members. I have become worn out by the crude, muddled, confused, inarticulate, sorry excuses that pose as memos, reports, investigations, proposals and analyses. Their inability to communicate clearly and precisely adds substantial noise and distortion to the communication channel. The result is widespread inefficiency, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Easily half of our meetings were wasted time because of this. Perhaps one third of my time was wasted by trying to parse the confused documents that came over my desk.
But there were even bigger problems, chief of which was a lack of imagination. They seemed live in the here and now, with no sense of history or context. Lacking a sense of history or context they were exceedingly poor at imagining the future. This was compounded by a kind of know-it-all arrogance that had no time for nuance, alternatives and possibilities.
There is no doubt in my mind that a good liberal, humanities education is crucial to addressing these problems.
You criticised the common defences of the humanities but never really offered up a better defence. That is a pity because I think a really strong defence can be made.
Hi Dan, this was a very nicely written piece. I actually like the idea of having a counter-cultural motive, but your argument about its possible success seems true.
But I want to press back just a bit on the nonutility of liberal arts courses. Even in the sciences I tend to view courses as a chance to spend time exposing oneself to techniques that might not be available in one’s life normally, as well as the ability to fail.
This seems true for liberal arts as well. I think these courses give students the chance to encounter many ideas or skills of evaluation in a short period of time that they might not have otherwise. And so practice, and fail, in a safer environment.
I just wanted to put in my two cents. This post really stuck a chord with me. While I found it provocative I have to agree with the general assessment of our culture, and the general failure of a typical liberal arts education to sufficiently penetrate the top down influences. I had such an education, yet the last 10 years has been a process of coming to terms with my ignorance and trying to rectify it to some degree on my own.
I am not sure removing the idea of a general liberal arts education and putting more emphasis on trade training is going to help the situation however. I am less pessimistic I think about general human nature than Dan. I say this as I think in the right environment most human beings can be induced to develop an intrinsic motivation to value the development of a more than superficial wisdom/understanding. So I’m with Labnut that I think we should not give up on that ideal, but I agree that are current system falls far short. I think progress on this goal requires many cultural shifts, and some re-calibration of our education system can play a role, but can’t do much as a single adjustment.
Thanks Dan for an essay I am going to want to re-read a few times to allow it’s ideas to sink in.
Continuing…
3. The essay is about the rationales for liberal education that one typically sees trotted out, by professors and administrators. Those rationales are almost entirely foundational in nature, in the sense that they all have to do with basic skills that are alleged to require a liberal arts education to acquire, and this is why American college students, overwhelmingly, only ever encounter them in the general education curriculum.
Beyond discussing why I think these rationales are largely bogus — and there are more reasons for thinking this than just the arguments cited — I said nothing about what the value of the liberal arts consists of, other than characterizing it as being ultimately gratiutous and associating it, in some unspecified way, with Aristotle’s contemplative life.
Both Mark English and Labnut have questioned this. Mark thinks the contemplative life is largely unattainable, without a strongly religious view of the world, and Labnut thinks that it represents a kind of withdrawal from what he takes to be the chief good, which is the life of civic virtue and particularly the life engaged in service to others.
In an essay that I posted on my previous blog, Apophenia, I described the experience of beauty and meaning that comes from our engagement with the tradition of arts and letters — along with the experience of connectedness with one’s people — as engendering my entirely non-supernaturalist sense of the sacred.
http://daniel-kaufman-rpur.squarespace.com/blog/2015/3/13/religion-without-spirituality
So, to Mark, far from contemplation being unavailable to or impoverished for the person whose consciousness is essentially naturalistic, to my mind, the contemplative life is precisely that which enables us to sacralize our world *without* a need for the supernatural.
To Labnut, I agree that the life of civic virtue is a human good, but I do not believe it is the human good. Once we have the healthy and productive polity that the life of civic virtue provides, the question still remains as to what it is all for. There is an instrumental quality, ultimately, to the value of the life of civic virtue. It is my belief that once our material needs are met — and I mean “material needs” in the broadest, most substantial sense, which will also include all manner of social goods — there is one remaining need for it all to be significant in some way. To mean something. This is just the need for a life and a world that are sacralized, and I believe that the tradition of humanities and liberal arts can play a central role in that sacrilization.
This is why I characterized the value of the humanities and liberal arts as being ultimately gratuitous in nature. ‘Gratuituous’ as in “without reason.” All Ends are — in truth — gratuitous, and the value of our experience of the tradition of arts and letters is as an End. Unfortunately, Ends are exactly what no one wants to talk about or pursue degree programs in. Only means. We have trying to characterize the value of the study of philosophy as a means to various ends, and it is precisely these characterizations that I have held up for criticism in my essay.
@ mpboyle56
Bernays was a very good propagandist and that, in itself, should give us reason not to believe too readily the myth he made for himself. Bernays’ greatest PR success was Bernays.
Freud’s theories were never useful at all in evidence based treatment of mental health, so I don’t see why I should accept that they were efficacious in mass psychology, especially as the field is just a continuation of something long established..
The Scots were sold a belief about Scottish nationalism a century earlier which we still find hard to shake. We can look, too, at the way the British sold their wars against France and others, that are still part of the consciousness of the British and the states with British heritage.
Bernays was hired by a tobacco company to take advantage of something that the company had already picked up on, in fact women smokers had been fairly commonplace by that time. We really have no idea of the effectiveness of his campaign.
So, yes, we are manipulable and manipulated and we always have been. But I don’t see it worth getting all gloomy about, there is nothing special about the way we are manipulated now. The British propaganda machine at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar was perhaps more sophisticated and effective than any in the 20th and 21st century.
But if the shambolic dogs-breakfast of competing opinions that is today’s society, is the result of sophisticated scientific mass manipulation, I can’t help thinking that they’re not doing it right.
Robin: I’m afraid that what I’ve read about Bernays’ smoking campaign does not match up with your description.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/
http://www.mediainstitute.edu/media-schools-blog/2014/02/edward-bernays/
There’s a lot more.
Dan
“Mark thinks the contemplative life is largely unattainable, without a strongly religious view of the world… ”
Not necessarily *strongly* religious. What I said was: “… (in some sense) a religious view…” The position you outline in the comments here (and the linked Apophenia essay) is certainly not a “strong” religious position, but it could be seen to fit my description. You certainly talk a lot about the sacred and sacralization.
“… the experience of beauty and meaning that comes from our engagement with the tradition of arts and letters — along with the experience of connectedness with one’s people — as engendering my entirely non-supernaturalist sense of the sacred…
“So, to Mark, far from contemplation being unavailable to or impoverished for the person whose consciousness is essentially naturalistic, to my mind, the contemplative life is precisely that which enables us to sacralize our world *without* a need for the supernatural.”
I suggest that even the ‘secular sacred’ is not attainable for many today. Good old fashioned patriotism I understand and I’m moved by national anthems but any good national anthem will do, so it’s not very deep with me! I don’t really belong to any country or ‘people’ – and I don’t think I’m very unusual in this. Just as religion is no longer a live option for many today, nor are the secular ‘sacralizing’ traditions of which you speak.
Even literature, art, architecture, music, etc. I have doubts about in this regard. You say (in the Apophenia essay) that these things sacralize the world in a general way. But I think that this sort of talk only works if you have a certain (Platonistic?) aesthetic, a certain faith in – or view of – art. Iris Murdoch (whose views I once shared but no longer do) comes to mind.
For me art is certainly an end in itself, but then so is ordinary entertainment. Sure, some forms of writing, music, cinema are clearly better and more interesting than others. ‘Sacralizing’ needn’t come into it, however, and generally doesn’t for me.
Hi Dan,
I don’t see how those links contradict what i said. The earliest involvement shown for Bernays in tobacco PR is in 1929, a time when the “elegant lady with a cigarette holder” image was already a dated cliche and a time when cigarette companies had been ferociously marketing to women for some years. The Malboro “Ivory Tips” campaign, in which Bernays had no involvement, started in 1925. You can see images of women smoking on the street from before that.
And where is the evidence that there was “near universal disapproval” of women smoking at the time? A couple of government bodies vote to prohibit women smoking in public and some group lobbies to prevent there being images of women smoking in films. That is hardly evidence of universal disapproval.
Bernays’s biggest PR success with regard to tobacco marketing appears to be his success in taking credit for it all.
@Robin Herbert:
Yes, persuasion is old. So is wheeled transport. That doesn’t mean there aren’t substantial differences between pre-industrial versions of persuasion and our own, especially in the context of all the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, the development of the social sciences, technology, etc., etc.
Freudian clinical success has little to do with the insights of psychology leveraged to create desires. At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, and that pudding includes the actual developments within the ad industry in the 20th Century. A good place to start (besides Bernays’ own book Propaganda, cited by DanK), would be Merle Curti’s “The Changing Concept of ‘Human Nature’ in the Literature of American Advertising” Business History Review 41:4 (1967): 335-357. Curti was one of America’s most respected historians and documents in detail the impact of the social sciences on advertising, in particular the switch from regarding the consumer as rational to viewing them as irrational and designing ads accordingly. Basically, confirming much of what Bernays discussed in 1928.
Here is a quote from the Stanford research into tobacco advertising:
You can see a set of images here where women are clearly being marketed to indirectly by 1912 and directly by 1918 (ie with cigarettes specifically designed for women and the woman in the advertisement actually holding the cigarette), in fact it is by the “American Tobacco Company” which in 1929 hired Bernays to do the Easter Parade campaign.
http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st023.php&token1=fm_img0495.php&theme_file=fm_mt012.php&theme_name=Targeting Women&subtheme_name=Early Years
Dan Kaufman,
I posted my comments on viewing the whole matter of the American academy and the humanities from a broadly historical perspective, because my own responses to the problems you rightly draw attention to, have been somewhat mitigated over the years by just such considerations. My first response to your essay was to cry ‘bravo!’ But this would have left the issue unclarified for me. The point of my comments was that the place of the humanities in the university is both a product of history, and at play in historical trends beyond itself that *any* argument – sound or otherwise – cannot properly address or effect. That’s no consolation, but does provide a moment to ask where in this stream we are swimming.
Throughout my education, from 2nd grade to doctorate, I was recurrently reminded by teachers, administrators and peers, that, coming from the working poor, I was extremely fortunate to have access to learning that really wasn’t intended for those of my background. Indeed, I was. 200 years ago, I probably would never have learned to read; 500 years ago, I would not have been allowed to learn to read. The books of the tradition before the 19th century were not written for my eyes, the music before then was not composed for my ears. The notion that art and literature has some universal value that we all have a right to, is historically false. (Which is not to say that I dismiss pre-Modern arts and literature, or reject their availability: I’m quite sincere in saying I consider myself lucky to have had this opportunity.) Nonetheless, I remain suspicious of claims that some necessary human truth is delivered us through the traditional arts (beyond the undeniable truth that people who can paint or write or compose, etc., will do so when they can).
But while there is a great deal of class-based ramblings in Western philosophy, there is very little of it in Buddhist philosophy, and Buddhism has a surprising track record of sages who came from humble origins. Becoming a Buddhist, I fully realized the truth of Aristotle’s claim that the richest life would be that of contemplation.
Buddhism also insists on engagement with others to alleviate suffering. But for me, philosophy – east and west – has provided the richest experiences of my life. I don’t believe this can be taught – but it can be learned. Perhaps the best argument for the humanities is that they provide opportunities for learning. That may not sell many student loans, but it may persuade some young people to rethink what they expect from a college education.
I need more time to read in depth
But, to start?
Classroom learning isn’t either practice, or at least instructions on how to practice? Or per religious training, catechism class or similar isn’t? I’m sure priests, pastors and rabbis disagree with this thinking, too.
Unlike many others here, and despite an appreciation for the powerful intensity of sentiment expressed, I found this post to be rather ponderous and plodding at times, i.e., it flirts unwittingly with self-parody in the selection of strawmen it attempts to erect to establish its argument. But, granted, you are above board and transparent in your choices, even though these seem dictated by your own appreciation of the tropes you’ve been inculcated with in your personal experience of America’s academic proclivities. I’m particularly bothered by the phrase “gratuitous values,” about which I think you take too much for granted on the basis of your personal experiences in American academia. I wonder how much of your disenchantment with same is simply a reflection of the missteps of an “American” pursuit of what it means to be broadly educated and intellectually experienced. With this in mind, I appreciate the somewhat differing viewpoints expressed by labnut and Robin Hebert on this topic since, unless I’m mistaken, they are the two most outspoken “outsiders” on your post.
I found this post to be rather ponderous and plodding at times, i.e., it flirts unwittingly with self-parody in the selection of strawmen it attempts to erect to establish its argument.
————————————————
Not the best way to start a dialogue with another person. I will leave you to converse with others.
SocraticGadfly wrote:
“Classroom learning isn’t either practice, or at least instructions on how to practice? ”
————————————————————-
No, it isn’t. An example of practice based learning would be an apprenticeship.
As for the point regarding “instructions on how to practice,” that was the whole reason for invoking Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that.
Robin: I am far more positive about depth psychology than you are, so once again, we are just going to have to disagree on this. Ditto regarding the efficacy of modern marketing and advertising techniques. You see no difference between these techniques and their effects and the methods of persuasion that institutions have been using for millennia, whereas I see — as Aldous Huxley and others did — an enormous and game-changing difference.
Ejwinner wrote:
many thousands remain in the academy where – *as researchers* – they do little more than dot some older scholar’s ‘i,’ or provide a comma to some esoteric formula – and of course, collect a check.
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Quite uncharitable and not at all descriptive of the hard work that I see my colleagues doing day after day for what — comparatively speaking and given the enormous amount of schooling required — is actually very little money. Your remark, here, is the sort of thing that one hears Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity say, on a regular basis.
Robin Herbert: We can trade articles all day long.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/specials/bernays-obit.html
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer.aspx
But it all strikes me as rather of the “missing the forest for the trees” kind of thing, frankly.
Ejwinner wrote:
Indeed, I was. 200 years ago, I probably would never have learned to read; 500 years ago, I would not have been allowed to learn to read. The books of the tradition before the 19th century were not written for my eyes, the music before then was not composed for my ears. The notion that art and literature has some universal value that we all have a right to, is historically false.
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Fortunately (or unfortunately), W.E.B. DuBois disagreed with you (as do I):
“I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.”
From “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903)
“Not the best way to start a dialogue with another person. I will leave you to converse with others.”
Dan, you do this repeatedly in the face of simple criticism (a la SciSal and Coel and some others) and neglect to account for my “an appreciation for the powerful intensity of sentiment expressed.” As a result, you stifle criticism by means of some idealistic notion of proper etiquette in these exchanges. This approach just reinforces a hierarchy of a self-fabricated academic agenda, dismissive of general consumption. You might prefer phrases like “a cry of distress” instead on my directness. So be it. But it doesn’t align with my personal experience of learning from uncensored critiques when I was attending college. I find your position here, inasmuch as it attempts to constrain dialogue to your talking points, to be directed at your personal experience of a liberal arts education as presented by one largely concerned with the status of same in America.
Thomas Jones:
Sorry you feel that way. I stand by my characterization of descriptors like “self-parody,” “setting up straw-men,” and the like.
As for “stifling criticism” I think you exaggerate my influence. And what you refer to as an “idealistic notion of proper etiquette,” I call basic norms of civil discourse. (To which the internet has done much harm.)
I’m happy to engage in a discussion of ideas. I will not defend myself against charges or reply to insults. For that sort of thing, you’ll have to talk with someone else.
@ Thomas Jones:
“…a hierarchy of a self-fabricated academic agenda, dismissive of general consumption.”
That’s about the only substantive thing I’ve derived from your posts, beyond vagaries and insults. Kaufman laid out clearly why he thinks that, at an institutional level, a humanities education as currently conceived can neither inculcate ethical standards nor promote civic virtue, as well as why our current societal configurations hinder any substantial appreciation of the humanities. Instead of waving your hand at nebulous strawmen, why not try and engage substantively with the points of the argument? I also love the attempt to put the blame on the guy who provides you with free content of a high calibre because he refuses to engage someone who addresses none of his points substantially but merely performs an act of rhetorical defecation and insists that his own individual experience suffices to refute all. And those “uncensored critiques” you compare DanK so unfavorably to? Why not go visit their web pages instead? Oh, yeah, they don’t have any.
Dan Kaufman,
“Quite uncharitable and not at all descriptive of the hard work that I see my colleagues doing day after day” – I’ve never doubted that many academic professionals believe in what they do. But there are some, and I met too many of them, who, faced with the disappointment over the failure of realizing their motivating dreams in the academy, simply see it as a job.
But this misses my main points: The universities produce too many researchers; the stronger claim for public support would emphasize teaching and learning as inherent goods; this claim is often set aside in favor of attracting research funding. I see that as a problem.
“‘So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.’”
Very romantic; but I doubt few love Shakespeare and Aristotle much more than I do. And I understand the sense of meeting great minds through the artifacts of the past – this is exactly why I consider myself so fortunate.
But the fact remains that a writer or artist composes for a particular audience. It oft takes considerable hermeneutic interpretive skills to draw out just what older texts mean. (That is one of the arts of research we learn in universities.) And there are many truths that are only truths for a given time and a given culture.
Shakespeare has Hamlet remark that foreigners think of the Danish aristocrats as drunkards because of their love of carousing. This remark was probably intended as a sly dig at the Elizabethan court – the Queen herself was known as rather fond of ale. Reading it this way, I’ve always found the remark amusing. But what is the eternal truth here? The wealthy and powerful should practice moderation? Don’t drink heavily before foreigners?
“‘Gratuituous’ as in “without reason.” All Ends are — in truth — gratuitous, and the value of our experience of the tradition of arts and letters is as an End.”
There is no resolution to the means-ends dilemma – every end can be argued to be a means. If DuBois wishes to “dwell above the veil,” the literature of which he writes is a means to that end; and why would he want to “dwell above the veil?” Answering that question reveals the end that dwelling above the veil is a means toward achieving. And so on.
But because I know where you’re coming from and even largely agree with you, I suggest a different tact – one that has concerned me for some time: namely that in America, having accomplished vast amounts of wealth and power, never previously dreamt, we’ve had virtually no ongoing public discussion of what might constitute ‘the good life;’ a discussion the Athenians were very good at, and which is implicit in a great many religiously informed societies, but which here only gets indirectly raised in commercials, and in arts critical of commercial culture. How to raise a sustainable open discussion on this issue is unclear, but every effort, including this essay, is certainly welcome
This comment is going to be about some of the previous comments, as I catch up to speed. My next comment will be about the body of the piece.
First, on depth psychology?
Really, Dan? You give that much credence to it? Freud was bad and Jung was worse. Both were unethical as part of that. Freud stopped pursuing what was actually behind many cases of “hysteria” when he discovered that what that was, was child sexual abuse in many cases, and came up with sexist “answers” instead. Jung slept repeatedly with one patient that we know of, invented New Agey myths, and was a huge Nazi sympathizer. (I cannot recommend strongly enough the bio, “The Aryan Christ,” about Jung.) James wasn’t quite as bad, but, as a rich white American of leisure, he was “self-allowed” to have what Freud would have labeled “hysteria” had it occurred in a young woman, and quasi-Jung, lent his name and credibility to spiritism, etc.
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As for modern marketing? I agree more with Robin, at least until the rise of behavioral economics in the last 20 years. Before that, marketing wasn’t that much more advanced in the 1920s than in the 1720s. It was differently configured, in that, in the West, it had to appeal to democratic societies to generate enthusiasm for war, not needed in the 1720s, and that, it had to sell products to a middle class, unnecessary in the 1720s. But, until 20 years ago, it had little more scientific backing than in the past.
Given that you and I disagree on the value (and presumably, on the scientific standing) of most depth psychology, we’ll likely disagree on this, too.
Huxley’s “soma” is kind of a shotgun scattershot compared to today’s targeted marketing, so I don’t really think he supports your take, either.
On the smoking issue? The NYT does note, per the link below, that New York City had laws against women smoking, but the story is from 1922, not 1929. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9902EFDD1639EF3ABC4051DFB5668389639EDE
In addition, Wikipedia (it’s got links backing it up, Dan, allowing for your aversion to it), notes that cigarette companies were marketing especially to women by the middle 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_smoking
Per Michael, I don’t think that Bernays’ ideas were predicated on a rejection of Enlightenment values of rationality.
So, depending on where we cut off “modern,” I either mildly, or else fairly strongly, agree with Robin.
I very much agree with Robin that Bernays’ biggest client was himself.
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The academy and overpopulation, per E.J., and Dan’s responses.
It’s arguable that we are, in many fields, churning out too many graduates. A variety of issues is at fault.
Credential inflation is one, whether this is driven in part by the poorness of the US K-12 system or not, or how much, is still unclear. (That said, I’ve argued in newspaper columns before that the biggest reason for the K-12 gap between the US and other Western countries is the failure of the US to match them with a school year of 200 days or longer. (And I’ve had superintendents — off the record — agree.)
The university as big business is another. Entering freshmen are, if I may be as crude as E.J. was alleged to be, “raw materials” to feed the maw here.
Professors as rock stars, in selective cases, is connected to this. University presidents justify asking big donors for even more money by stealing rock star professors from other universities.
Meanwhile, hypercapitalistic corporations try to get the US government to expand STEM-related visas, even though there’s no need for that.
Per all of this, it’s arguable that the non-liberal arts part of US collegiate education is of little more avail, if we’re going to take a bottom-line utilitarian stance, than is the liberal arts part of it.
Speaking of “credentialism,” that ties with E.J.’s functionallist take on what education has become. For many conservatives, it is a “functionalist” stance, and it’s becoming that way for many neoliberals, too, especially ones who have drunk too much Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.
But, this gets back to Dan’s topper: An Ivy League degree, even if one got nothing but gentleman’s C’s (or, with grade inflation, gentleman’s B-pluses today), is still a functionalist tool that, especially in certain industries (business, law, political science) tops the best degree, with all the studious rigor a student can apply, at State U.
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As for Ryle, and Dan’s response to my first comment? First, I don’t think knowing how, and knowing that, separate so easily in academia, at least not in the liberal arts, versus, say, the sciences.
Indeed, Ryle himself notes that the two are not always, nor are they necessarily, separate: “There are certain parallelisms between knowing how and knowing that, as well as certain divergences.”
(Having had Dan Dennett as my primary intro to much of modern philosophy, and having gone back to Dennett’s mentor [I’ve read Ghost in the Machine, and browsed sections of The Concept of Mind], and gone beyond Dennett [Ryle’s dead, so we don’t know his thought on this] to reject a Cartesian free willer as well as a Cartesian meaner, I appreciate references to Ryle.)
So, I’ll stand behind what I said. And, within the philosophical world, I don’t think my stance is out of place.
And, with that, because it leads to the body of Dan’s piece, I’ll move to my next comment, with a sidebar note
OK, on to a review of the body of what Dan has written, in more depth, by subject.
1. The professional competence and virtue argument.
Dan first works to refute this with the statement:
First, I shall crank a bit of a petard up.
Dan, do you teach an ethics class as part of your philosophy rota? If so, other than E.J. and his paycheck comment, per your second argument against, why?
Second, I think your first point is wrong. This gets back to my first comment.
Had you injected the word “solely,” to say:
I would have agreed.
But, I don’t accept your blanket exclusion.
You then note:
But, per Ryle, and his chess-playing analogy, I think this gets to where the two aren’t totally separate.
Or, to bring in linguistics, one more readily learns how to use a certain language by knowing that words of type A are nouns, words of type B are verbs, etc. In short, to hint at yet another philosopher whose name you know, one learns more easily how to play the rules of a certain language game if one first learns that particular rules for that game exist and what they are.
Or, looking at biology, this may be analogous to a long-held false dichotomy between nature and nurture.
Then there’s this:
No, but I do believe that if they read more of this and then practiced it, we might. Again, you’re wrongly separating things into black and white dichotomy.
Do you really believe it’s no more difficult to reset the timer on your VCR or DVD without first reading the directions?
And, zeroing in on a DeSade as the exception that proves the rule is a logical fallacy, Dan, and I think you know that.
2. The civic virtue argument
Just as your first arguments against are based on section 1, so I shan’t repeat my responses.
Second, the portion where you introduce Eliot seems to me to be a straw man. Who are the “some”?
Third, to follow on my first comment, about other comments on Freud et al? Marx propounded scientific socialism; he couldn’t have believed our reasoning was too tangled. Nietzsche should have applied that criticism to himself first. Freud was right and wrong on that; right in that we are non-rational, but wrong both on most details of how we’re non-rational, and as already noted, refusing to follow up some specific issues of non-rationality, even though, as sexual abuse, they involved his pet subject of sex.
The big issue, though, is: “We’re less than fully rational. And, so?”
Getting back to knowing-how and its ties to knowing-that, this could be used to refute any ethical instruction in general. Let’s just, rather than teaching ethics in religious instruction, or professionally in philosophy, let’s just follow Rousseau and roll people out into the wild.
This again gets back to PR. Even if we’re better at the details of manipulation, the fact is that such manipulation has existed for centuries. Ergo, we shouldn’t have taught liberal arts 350 years ago. As soon as James Watt invented the steam engine …
You even acknowledge that yourself, here:
So, why teach today, or in 1800, these subjects, even as …
You say the 1800s would be a good “reversion point” for a restorative role for the humanities. Why not today?
It almost sounds like you’re engaged in a New Left critique of the traditional canon, but for non-New Left reasons.
As for why the humanities are “tolerated”?
No, even if a university president didn’t pick up on his name, I think the idea of Santayana and repeating history’s mistakes is why, for some humanities.
3. Personal betterment
I think this stands more independent of the other two arguments than you acknowledge. And, I think it does so in K-12 education, too, not just collegiate education.
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Finally, on “mass education,” you make it sound as though you feel the modern university is a Bernays-type sausage factory. Well, the humanities still has a chance of fighting that, I think.
And, to the degree it’s an uphill struggle, to the degree you’re right about some modern civic thought, just because our society commodifies so much of education doesn’t mean we need to further surrender to that — or to search for possible intellectual justifications for either surrender or appeasement.
Dan-K,
thanks for the clarification. This is a great essay – a provocation, a puzzling hint and then the denouement. Your provocation served you well, inspiring us to think and engage with the subject. The puzzling hint led me astray but finally your denouement clarified the subject beautifully. I thank you for that. I deliberately use the word essay, and not article because the word ‘essay’ conveys so much more.
I hope I understood you correctly, but I think you are saying that there are several well known functional roles for the humanities but these, by themselves, are not a sufficient justification for the humanities. You are saying, in effect, that sacralisation is the capstone of the humanities. This capstone is what supplies the final meaning and makes it an End. Without sacralisation the traditional justifications are like the columns of a building, lacking a roof to give them unity, form and final meaning.
I agree with you but most will not. That is because the sacred has drained out of our WYSIWYG world. What is left is superficial, like a dessicated exoskeleton, drained of vitality. That is because abundance has become a trap that has left us stranded in the sticky marshes of pleasurable hedonism. Surfeit has depleted our will to explore the higher levels of our capacity for enjoyment. These are, starting with pleasure:
1. Pleasure
The experience is gratifying.
2. Enjoyment
A cognitive experience. Mental pleasure is derived from the gratification.
3. Fulfillment
The pleasure is seen as rewarding and worthwhile.
4. Joy and gratitude
It is a form of delight and elation touched by gratitude.
5. Exaltation
One’s spirit soars and sings on the wings of an experience that seems mystical in its intensity.
6. Sacralisation
It is an opening of the mind that allows it to see the world in a wholly new way, one that is infused with awe, wonder, ecstasy and a sense of the numinous. Life acquires a new dimension that gives it meaning in its own right. It is the peak of exaltation.
7. Devotion
This, the final level, perceives God and sees meaning in serving and loving God. Atheists will deny this level but they should at least recognise that theists experience this.
Thus we can ascend the levels of pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, joy, exaltation to sacralisation and as we ascend these levels we discover a world increasingly suffused with meaning.
CS Lewis used this excerpt from Wind in the Willows to describe sacralisation, our sense of the numinous, the presence of the sacred:
”
Asceticism is the belief that the first stage, pleasure or gratification, is a trap that prevents progress through the remaining stages of the hierarchy. Asceticism is a counter-example to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Great article despite the pix.
By the way, I never said, as some have suggested, that all methods of persuasion are the same.
For example I said that the actions of the propaganda machine of the early 19th century British government were more sophisticated and effective than those of any advertiser. In a very difficult position they instilled a kind of brand loyalty that advertisers can only dream of.
And yet most people have trouble even associating the early 19th century British government with having a propaganda machine.
And that, of course, is one of the hallmarks of a good propaganda machine.
@ Socratic Gadfly:
You may want to investigate “The New Unconscious” which is a movement in cognitive science since the 1980s that has rehabilitated the notion of the unconscious and beefed it up with empirical research. This is not an obscure development. CalTech theoretical physicist Leonard Mladinow wrote a bestseller on it (Subliminal) back in 2012. For more academic material, just do a simple google search or start with Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh’s The New Unconscious (Oxford University Press, 2005).
With respect to marketing, it is clear from both testimonials within the ad industry as well as its success that social science has contributed enormously to the successful selling of goods. How else would one explain the successful marketing of a Nazi brand (VW) by Bill Bernbach’s Creative Revolution in advertising beginning in the 1950’s which established this brand as an iconic identifier of the generation of peace and love? I’ll go with the principle of parsimony combined with the new research which validates the idea of unconscious motivation. In any case, for the backstory on Bernbach, see The Conquest of Cool (University of Chicago Press, 1997) which (among other things) details the rise of anti-advertising advertising.
On Bernays and Enlightenment rationality:
“In the days when kings were kings, Louis XIV made his modest remark, “L’Etat c’est moi.” He was nearly right. But times have changed. The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school, that trio of the industrial revolution, have taken the power away from kings and given it to the people.” (19)
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.” (20)
Michael, I’m not arguing that the social sciences have not contributed to marketing and advertising success. As a newspaper editor, I’m well aware of that. I am arguing how scientific such contribution was, and when.
Subliminal marketing had its original 1950s claims (about the one frame of popcorn in a movie, for example) refuted, and even shown to be, itself, PR, per Robin’s observation about Bernays being his own best customer.
Ditto on Bernays’ comment about Louis XIV and modern democracy and the rationality or not of the human mindset. Until Tversky et al, marketing and PR assumed, like economics (and like many economists still do, sadly), the existence of a Homo rationalis. That degree of rationality may have been presumed to be relative, not absolute, and more subconscious than conscious, but, until the advent of behavioral economics and behavioral psychology, I’ll stand by the idea that the marketing field still made a fair presumption of rationality. I’ll stand by even more my larger point that, until recently, to the degree marketing/PR did operate off an idea of H. irrationalis, it did NOT know how to scientifically change irrational behavior. Details on priming and other things didn’t even start to really emerge until the 1980s, if not later, therefore ,Bernays et al were “scattershooting” before then.
And, I’ll stand by, so to speak, on other things, too.
@ SocraticGadfly:
“Until Tversky et al, marketing and PR assumed, like economics (and like many economists still do, sadly), the existence of a Homo rationalis.”
Sorry but your assertion is flatly contradicted by academic historians. The switch occurred roughly between 1910 and 1930. Prior to this, the rational model of human nature prevailed. Afterwards, the irrational model. Merle Curti, a historian and specialist in the America history of Ideas, documented this in detail in 1967: “The Changing Concept of ‘Human Nature’ in the Literature of American Advertising” Business History Review 41:4: 335-357.
The subliminal Maldinow is refering is that being documented currently by cognitive science. According to you, I’m supposed to believe that because psychology was less sophisticated, Bernays efforts yielded little result. That sharp Madison Avenue businessmen couldn’t see that people like Bernays and psychoanalyst Ernest Dichter were all smoke and mirrors when they looked at whether the bottom line had improved. Sorry, don’t buy it (no pun intended). One doesn’t have to have that sophisticated an understanding of psychology to use emotions and connotations to trigger behavior and to realize that people often aren’t fully aware of why they buy what they do. In addition, Bernays was no fan of academic psychology. In fact, he had little patience for it. He took the broad insights and ran with them.
@mpboyle56
You contradict your earlier claim and support mine by saying that the switch occurred in 1910. As I showed images of marketing indirectly to women from about 1914 and directly from 1918 and all throughout the 1920’s and yet the credit is given to Bernays.
You have no trouble believing that Bernays could subvert the rationality of a generation of women and yet you can’t even seem to grasp the idea that he has managed to fool a few people about his own importance.
Let us get this clear – Bernays’ first foray into cigarette marketing was in 1929. Companies had been directly marketing at women for at least 11 years by then and indirectly for nearly 20 years.
The real pioneer of explicitly using psychology in marketing was the behavioral psychologist John B Watson, who was hired by J Walter Thompson in 1922 and did research throughout the 1920’s, including research on tobacco buying behaviour. He demonstrated the phenomenon of brand loyalty, something which even surprised him. But, as I point out, brand loyalty is just a version of something which has been exploited by propagandists for centuries.
But the idea that these techniques have been so dramatic as to change, even, the type of being we are is something I will need to see evidence for.
Often companies are unaware of the extent to which modern consumers are aware of the techniques, advertising agencies still think that things “look and feel” tie ins to their corporate image and wording tie ins to their slogans are not consciously detected by us. In Australia, recently, a very expensive marketing campaign by a major company was permanently closed down within an hour of its launch by social media. They couldn’t comprehend it, they thought they had flown in under our barrier.
I think that this is the wrong way round anyway. It is the fact that the old and ancient literature and art does speak to us, shows us that we are still the same.
A poet from more than two thousand years ago felt loss of a friend with whom he had spent long days talking. A Roman Emperor had much the same everyday concerns that we do. A medieval Italian poet knows how it feels that, midway through our lives we find ourselves in a dark and lonely place and our very nature, it seems, conspires to keep us there. An Elizabethan writer was lifted out of a dark and self loathing mood by the thought of the one he loved. They can tell us these things in ways that spark recognition in us. Part of what makes them great art and literature is that they spoke, not to a certain time and place, or to a certain kind of person, but that they spoke to something that is basic in all of us.
But we can’t take it all for granted, increasingly it is stored on a much more fragile medium than papyrus or parchment. While papyrus or vellum might take decades or centuries to crumble, an electronic copy can vanish in the blink of an eye. While a terrorist may blow up the surviving copy of some precious ancient document, some accountant might switch off the hard drive that holds the facsimile to shave a few dollars off a budget.
We have to value it and care about it and keep it still alive and happening, the new art, literature and philosophy which is being written and created all the time.
The humanities in the academy are, to a certain extent, ends in themselves, just as science and mathematics are. But they are not just an end in themselves, they are a vital part of society, they tell us who we are and what we were. They help us see what is good and bad in us.
I can’t tell others what to do, but I would like to be able to say that I want them to keep on doing it and value it, not just as an end in itself (although that has great value already) but as part of who we all are.
Also, I can’t tell them how to do this, because I am not qualified and no more talented in that way than any human.
@ Robin Herbert:
What are you talking about? Curti’s time frame is a rough estimate based on a systematic analysis of one of advertising’s major in-house trade publications. He never says that all of a sudden, magically, there was a wholesale switch in 1910 such that every advertiser woke up one day and declared human nature irrational.
Between 1910 and 1930 the tide had turned and by 1930 a majority believed human nature was irrational. They now prevailed, as I said before. Bernays began his firm in 1919 and did a lot of work throughout the 1920’s. Was he the only one pushing the notion of the irrational individual? No, of course not. But his name was among the most important, important enough that by 1924 he even had Calvin Coolidge as a client.
“You have no trouble believing that Bernays could subvert the rationality of a generation of women and yet you can’t even seem to grasp the idea that he has managed to fool a few people about his own importance.”
When did I ever say that I had a dog in this chronological fight over tobacco advertising that you keep jabbering on about? And why does this matter so much, given the larger point of DanK’s piece? Really, there are trees and then there’s that giant forest.
“The real pioneer of explicitly using psychology in marketing was the behavioral psychologist John B Watson, who was hired by J Walter Thompson in 1922 and did research throughout the 1920’s, including research on tobacco buying behaviour.”
Sorry, but I would disagree. Yes, Watson is important. Of that there is no doubt. However, Walter Dill Scott was there already a generation earlier.
And no, I never said that Bernays was the pioneer of using psychology in advertising. What I did say was that his techniques combining insights from Freud, Trotter, and Le Bon were pioneering.
Lots of good, meaty comments here. Too much to go line-by-line, so as before, I shall try to expand upon and clarify a number of points, which, I hope, will also serve as responses to my critics.
1. Re: Depth psychology — as far as I am concerned, the crucial insights (which go, at least, as far back as Nietzsche), are absolutely spot on. That we vastly overestimate the extent to which we are conscious of our own reasons for acting; that we are far less rational than we like to think; that we are as much mysteries to ourselves as to others; that civilization is largely an exercise in combating our baser instincts; all of these things are not only true, but essential to a complete understanding of our nature.
2. Re: the humanities and basic skills. Some of my critics seem to think that I have said that the humanities are entirely useless, in terms of basic-skill acquisition. What I actually said was that the value of such studies, from a skills-perspective, is minimal and largely indirect. Does reading great novels have a positive effect on one’s own writing? Sure, but it is minimal and indirect. Far more effective is a workshop, in which one does a ton of writing, under the guidance of a good writer.
3. Re: this point about classroom learning and practice. Aristotle himself made pretty much the same point that I have — namely, that with respect to the inculcation of moral and civic virtue, the value of a traditional classroom education is highly limited. Skills that are largely a matter of “knowing-how” are primarily dispositional and are best acquired by way of apprenticeship, which emphasizes practice, rather than by being taught lists of principles and rules. And yes, being a good reasoner in real situations and being morally and civically virtuous are primarily dispositional.
Finally some over here, as well as over on Massimo’s blog, where this has become a topic of conversation, are characterizing my essay as the expression of a “midlife crisis” or some kind of “cri de coeur.” I must admit that I have no idea what to say, in response to such a charge, other than to chuckle and shake my head.
mpboyle56
Oh dear, I appear to have upset you. It seems to me that you responded to me, so perhaps you should have apprised yourself as to that, on about which I jabbered. first. Here was the original claim from the essay
So we have established that Bernays’ original foray was in 1929 and that there was not near universal disapproval of women smoking in 1929, far from it. And that marketing of cigarettes to women had been common for some time by 1929.
So the claim is wrong.
And so I am to accept, what? That although this widely repeated story about Bernays turns out not to be true, I should accept that some other more general claims about him are true? That his techniques based on Freud’s ideas were so devastatingly effective that we are to be considered, not humans but, post-humans?
Even though Freud’s techniques have proved completely useless and even dangerous when treating real psychological problems?
Yes, I doubt not that you can link to many people who make this or similar claims and I am not seeing some alleged would for some unspecified trees.
But in my experience many, many people, even clever people, believe many, many things and you would be surprised as to how little of it turns out to be true. Especially the stuff with no evidence and for which specific claims about it turn out to be false.
Anyway, I am through jabbering on, call me one of those irrational post-humans.
But I am at a loss to understand how any human at any time could have been such a damn fool as to trust his or her own rationality, not to have realised that we do things for reasons that are not apparent to us and that we can be manipulated to do things or believe things at an entirely unconcsious level. Isn’t it bleeding obvious?
Robin: My bad for not catching Mike’s “jabbering” comment. Mike Boyle: I won’t allow something like that through again.
@Michael: Per Curti and this Google Books link, the idea that human nature is malleable is not the same that it’s de facto irrational. Was there a transition during his second period? I wouldn’t argue that. I would argue that there was not an abrupt shift, and secondly, as shown by other cultural changes across the Western world, that such changes didn’t really start until after 1918. Curti, whether deliberately or not, also seems to lock into a simple thesis-antithesis-synthesis idea. https://books.google.com/books?id=tCFxM82-w10C&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=Merle+Curti+irrational&source=bl&ots=zBDUijXJaC&sig=0U2ZkrZR49_Ju_hcEWWCiEyhAAs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBGoVChMI9sXn8bPjyAIVxfAmCh1ScQgF#v=onepage&q=Merle%20Curti%20irrational&f=false
As for Bernays, one can gain empirical insights without a driving scientific theory, and even be successful. Edison comes immediately to mind, so Bernays’ real-world successes may not have any bearing one way or the other on his scientific insight, whether inside or outside the academy.
I otherwise stand by what Robin has said in response to you on dates and other things.
@Robin: Thanks for bringing behaviorism into the picture.
@Dan Well, as noted, two of the three originators of depth psychology were clear ontological dualists. Freud may have been right on the unconscious in general, but his specific theories, above all that all unconscious desires are sexual, is of course, unscientific.
At least you didn’t mention Rudolf Otto, who’s behind one biologist’s claim that chiimpanzees are religious. http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2015/10/are-chimpanzees-religious-bad-science.html
Also, for anybody who doubts what I have already said about Jung, here’s the link to “The Aryan Christ.”
An excerpt from the Amazon overview:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Aryan-Christ-Secret-Life/dp/0679449450/ref=cm_cr_pr_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8
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As for ideas that our conscious selves aren’t all there is, and that we may at least potentially have something below the surface?
I don’t need depth psychology, and I can go back more than 100 years earlier, to the man who arguably was in some ways the world’s first psychologist.
I’m of course talking about Hume and his famous “whenever I try to grasp myself” comment. There’s an indirect lineage from that, arguably, to Ryle, then to Dennett, etc., on the philosophical side, and to modern neuroscience on the scientific side.
Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” is one of the books on my shelf to which I have returned again and again and always found valuable insights.
Ditto for Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents.”
As with all things, YMMV. Which is why I don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince others that they shouldn’t find value in certain authors or works.