the academy

book came in, via alex, via anton. always nice to trace out debts, previous 'owners'. there are no owners of ideas, though. like going to the great library, next to Tollinton market, flicking through the beautifully hand written cards, stumbling across all sorts of antiquated books that no-one's ever read, or maybe ever will read, checking the back-flap of another to see that the last time the book was issued was 1957. the quality of a person assessed in terms of how they write their '2's'. that's lost on the internet.

well, i'm trying to read this in conjunction with Putnam's book on jewish philosophers, and Hadot's, which i've just got in but not sure if i'll ever have the time to read (as with most of my other books). no matter. but i was struck by the 'critique' of Rorty and by these lines...

[see! one has to use the word 'critique' to make it sound fancy!or 'discourse']

well, it may not come as a great surprise to you, but i don't think academics are particularly clever people. i mean, this obsession with debunking, originality (one has 'discovered' that so-and-so was actually a homosexual or that he likes marmalade on his toast. hurrah!). marginal critiques, incremental knowledge, the torturous, convoluted prose ..all to say what is bleedin' obvious.

perhaps i could be more specific?

economics.

do economists realise how spectacularly narrow their approach to reality is? what do they know? very little, i suspect. certainly in proportion to what they claim to know. yes, yes, one understands that they have fantastically sophisticated 'techniques' up their sleeve but a frog at the bottom of a well won't get very far in his description of the world if his axioms are wrong, no matter how good his reasoning thereafter is.

"the first principle of economics is that humans are motivated exclusively by their self-interest" That was back in 1881 when the love affair with physics, mechanics, was infecting the subject.Edgeworth, in case you're interested.

that is "human nature", that is rationality. what we are and what we ought to be. How else can we model reality..the world is too complex for us! To invert Keynes' saying: better to be precisely wrong than to be vaguely right.

And also, one meets lots of very bright people on one's way but they often are, not to put too fine a point on it, major league assholes. No, not the petty politics (that's everywhere, i guess) but the hugely inflated egos and one-upmanship that comes as a result of thinking one has something important and intelligent to say, the disdain for ordinary, simple pleasures.

i met one person over the summer, sharp as pins. really is. but when he went on about how he was using the techniques from economics to look at the hajj I had to wonder: are you serious? No, there's a good data set...
another is doing a game theoretic analysis of Hitler. I kid thee not.

and then one of the 'gods' here says to me in his smarmy, smirky, self-confident, trickster way: it's crucial that we participate in the production of knowledge. yeah, okay, where's my spanner. production?!

yes, you know, the 'knowledge economy' and all that.

Oh, you mean human capital and other barbarisms?

Anyway, here's the line:

After all, people lacking in experience are childlike in many ways, and fables are appropriate to a childlike mentality. Consider Rorty's utopia and his ethical theory...In fact, Rorty's injunctions are little more than the stock lessons of children's literature.