A quick comment on The Science™
Plus a little "free" Ivan Illich on schooling and ritual
“It was already surprising to me twenty-five years ago, as a father of children who were not sent to school, that people again and again would express anxiety to my wife and me about the ‘socialization’ of our children. No one expressed concern about their education - I think because most knew that this could go on as well or better outside school - but many worried that they would be misfits.”
“The person who believes himself free of religion, who perhaps even despises religion as a con game, still faithfully attends services, just not in church.”
Both of the above are from David Cayley’s new biography of Ivan Illich, also titled “Ivan Illich”. And yes, if Cayley was homeschooling his own children, in Canada, twenty-five years ago, I suspect he might have been seen as quite the odd bird indeed.
Quick comments on Science
I thought about writing a quick post last Friday about Science… but apparently unlike Elon Musk, I know that if you write something with the idea that at least some people might read it, you don’t publish it on a Friday night!
I wanted to respond to this tweet from Eric Sorensen, a newly elected Democratic congressman from Illinois.
A few thoughts if I may.
One, as a rule just don’t, please don’t, get your understanding of science, or probably anything else in the world, from self-interested congressmen. Thanks.
Two, and my biggest immediate reaction, was that this is how people talk when what they really want is a new infallible priestly class, and they are trying to press science, a tool wholly unsuited to that use, into the role. You can’t disagree with scientists about science? That would be news to a whole lot of scientists. (And, if we’re playing the credentialism game here, it would also be news to many other people who, indisputably, understood the data during COVID better than some of our highest public health officials.) Ah, how many things are downstream from the decline / rejection of traditional religion.
Three, and both humorous and sad, @KelleyKga, a stupendous independent COVID data hound, analysis person, and mom, who has been mentioned on this page before, informed me that not only is this a not-smart thing to say… he also stole the comment wholesale from someone else.
Of course on top of everything else, it would also be a stolen comment. Of course.
And then, four, it did also strike me that it isn’t even a coherent comment, and the good physics professor Edward Hamilton said the same.
He further offered that “semantic satiation is a standard propaganda technique”, a phrase I had not heard before, and offered this article.
The term “semantic satiation” was introduced back in 1962 by a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii. Leon James performed studies that showed brains employing a defense mechanism to counter the effects of the increased energy required for neurons responding to oft-repeated words. Each time a word is repeated, the neurons, in an attempt to prevent themselves from overworking and causing eventual fatigue, will give less attention and significance to each iteration. In other words, the more we hear a word, the more it loses meaning.
…
Let’s take it a step further, then, and consider that in anticipating the effects of semantic satiation, a campaign puts an additional strategy into play. What if, as expected, a word or phrase has eventually lost its meaning, but then, by design, is reshaped and repurposed to mean what the associated speaker wants it to mean in a given situation? With its new meaning, it’s now being used somewhat differently (even inaccurately at times), whether semantically, historically, ethically. etc.; but again, it suits the speaker’s intention. Think of meaninglessness as a precursor to propaganda.
It may be a defect of democracies that they select leaders who may have no skills at all except for skill in manipulating others, the one skill they need to get elected and stay elected.
OK, I’ve done my duty per science for the moment now.
A little more free Illich
And now, let me share a couple more quotations from the Illich biography if I may, about ritual. I shared part of the first quotation from Illich’s book “Deschooling Society” before and said “read this and think about mask mandates”. And I’ll say again “read this and think about mask mandates”, but it is also a fascinating comment about the self-justifying nature of ritual.
“Ritual”, Illich says, is “a procedure whose imagined purpose allows the participants to overlook what they are actually doing… [T]he idea that the rain dance will bring rain eclipses the social cost of organizing the rain dance and makes the dancers feel that if rain doesn’t come then they ought to dance all the harder.” Ritual, when defined in this way, is an undertaking that cannot fail because it is self-justifying. Its inherited and imputed significance, along with its compelling theatricality, generates a belief that is doubly invulnerable: the belief is usually stronger than any confounding empirical evidence, but should any empirical evidence leak through, then the performance of the ritual itself can be faulted.
But Illich was not thinking about mask mandates… at the time he was thinking about schooling, and especially compulsory schooling, a worldwide ritual that Illich thought quite religious actually, and derivative from two millennia of catechetical ritual instruction in Christianity. “The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual’s life”, he wrote. (And readers here will understand that Illich was emphatically not against education, and sometimes described himself as both an educator and as an intellectual - he did however have serious concerns about the institutionalized, mandated “knowledge industry” with its “institutional treatments” for “problems”.)
Illich did not like the lessons the compulsory schooling ritual was teaching - for example, the belief that learning was the result of institutional instruction only and therefore if you wanted to learn something you’d better set yourself down in a school1, and the related belief that you are an inferior human if you do not make it through the institutional system. (People who didn’t make it through the formal education system, he said, were “stupefied by the procedure, were actually told they couldn’t learn on their own and became disabled and crippled.”) As previously there had been no salvation outside of the Church, now there was no salvation outside the school, and probably no job either if you didn’t get the required certificate (even if your father had done the same job just fine without it).
Working in late-1950s Puerto Rico, he seemed to conclude that before compulsory schooling, the poor were poor. After compulsory schooling, the poor were still poor, but now they also saw themselves as failures with an “interiorized sense of guilt”. The modern poverty was therefore worse than the ancient poverty (a repeated theme from him, actually). I’ll give you just one more quotation I appreciated.
Schools are expensive, and expensive in the particular open-ended way of modern institutions of whose services there can never, by definition, be enough. This open-endedness is an escalator to utopia, and Illich warned “developing countries,” as they were then called, to stay off it. In fact, he argued that poorer countries, by mobilizing the ingenuity of their citizens to invent alternatives to costly and open-ended institutional treatments, might even help the richer countries to overcome their debilitating addiction to packaged solutions to reified social “problems”.
Anyway, I am enjoying the biography.
It is interesting that, as Cayley says, the concerns Illich raised about schools in the 1960s were never really “met”, resolved, or refuted… but we have changed our opinions about schooling nevertheless. For one, schools are not looked upon today in the same sort of cheery, utopian way that concerned Illich at the time - actually, many people today are quite cynical about the government school system, which Illich would likely see as an improvement. And then, of course, just from technological changes, everyone recognize now that you can learn and learn well outside of the school building.
Malcom Muggeridge was also rather dubious about the benefits of education:
"Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility."
When I read this a decade ago, I thought it absurd. Now I see it as a spot-on analysis.
Notice the (probably intentional) implication: If you, a non-scientist, disagree with a statement of fact made by a scientist, you are by definition wrong, *even if it later turns out that you were right*.