Curmudgeonous thoughts: class, status, identity and bad policy
About Australia’s foreign policy: The Keating model is an Australian manifestation of the tendency of elites in western democracies to want people to be something other than what they are - in this case that Australians should be Asian. and If the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, Australia is more so, with the highest proportion of foreign-born citizens of any country other than Israel, a trend encouraged by the Howard government with its expansion of the legal immigration program.
I prefer the term knowledge class rather than “cultural elites”, not least because it avoids all that pseudo-argument about the term ‘elite’: an attempt to sneer dissenting thoughts to death. The crucial thing is the expansion of knowledge class jobs faster than the total level of employment in the surrounding society, creating issues of status and identity.
Which connects nicely to a professor dissecting propaganda values trumping scholarly values in American academe after 9/11. (Given the degree to which American universities have become islands of oppression in a sea of freedom, not surprised the author is anonymous.)
The issue is competing views of academic virtue. The author holds to the view that academics are properly about scholarship: truth, evidence, logic, reasoning. The things which make their “intellectual capital” useful for others. The folk he is complaining about take the view that academics are about being morally and intellectually virtuous: the things which make their “intellectual capital” useful for themselves. Something that gives them a reassuring identity and status. In the race of life, back self-interest - it’s the only horse that’s trying.
Of course, the more intellectual capital is directed towards cultivating a sense of virtue and superiority for its possessors, the less useful it is for the surrounding society - which pays for it. Particularly as it is typically invested in a sense of virtue against the surrounding society, the better to cultivate a sense of higher status (and turn possession of “intellectual capital” into a ticket-to-decide). It is striking, for example, how many of the improved social indicators in the US involve rejection of ideas hegemonic in the knowledge class. But, since such ideas are not selected for on grounds of truth or consequences but on grounds of status-reassurance, they are bound to have a poor batting average. (Serial disasters in indigenous policy in Australia being a case in point; as is that migration angst in Oz being, thanks to Howard’s rejection of knowledge class nostrums, at its lowest point in decades while in Europe, where such nostrums are dominant, they are rising.)
In Oz, student numbers in the humanities are declining. Partly this is about career pressures, but it is also true that such studies are decreasingly useful for intellectual or aesthetic understanding. As for using attitudes as status-markers, the necessary cues are provided by the ABC, the Fairfax metros and related outlets and cultural products - investment in a humanities degree is not required. Humanities academics really are selling their heritage for a mess of potage.
I prefer the term knowledge class rather than “cultural elites”, not least because it avoids all that pseudo-argument about the term ‘elite’: an attempt to sneer dissenting thoughts to death. The crucial thing is the expansion of knowledge class jobs faster than the total level of employment in the surrounding society, creating issues of status and identity.
Which connects nicely to a professor dissecting propaganda values trumping scholarly values in American academe after 9/11. (Given the degree to which American universities have become islands of oppression in a sea of freedom, not surprised the author is anonymous.)
The issue is competing views of academic virtue. The author holds to the view that academics are properly about scholarship: truth, evidence, logic, reasoning. The things which make their “intellectual capital” useful for others. The folk he is complaining about take the view that academics are about being morally and intellectually virtuous: the things which make their “intellectual capital” useful for themselves. Something that gives them a reassuring identity and status. In the race of life, back self-interest - it’s the only horse that’s trying.
Of course, the more intellectual capital is directed towards cultivating a sense of virtue and superiority for its possessors, the less useful it is for the surrounding society - which pays for it. Particularly as it is typically invested in a sense of virtue against the surrounding society, the better to cultivate a sense of higher status (and turn possession of “intellectual capital” into a ticket-to-decide). It is striking, for example, how many of the improved social indicators in the US involve rejection of ideas hegemonic in the knowledge class. But, since such ideas are not selected for on grounds of truth or consequences but on grounds of status-reassurance, they are bound to have a poor batting average. (Serial disasters in indigenous policy in Australia being a case in point; as is that migration angst in Oz being, thanks to Howard’s rejection of knowledge class nostrums, at its lowest point in decades while in Europe, where such nostrums are dominant, they are rising.)
In Oz, student numbers in the humanities are declining. Partly this is about career pressures, but it is also true that such studies are decreasingly useful for intellectual or aesthetic understanding. As for using attitudes as status-markers, the necessary cues are provided by the ABC, the Fairfax metros and related outlets and cultural products - investment in a humanities degree is not required. Humanities academics really are selling their heritage for a mess of potage.