It's past well known that until the passage of the Reform Acts and the Corn Bills, all of Aristocracy's power was firmly based on its near exclusive ownership of land but how did the decline in such land-based power effect how the rest of us viewed Mother Nature versus Man ?
It is worth remembering that under this old system, only the younger sons of land-rich aristocracy got a nearly free pass into even such minor elites as the military, medicine, public service or the university-based church ministry.
But fairly quickly after the passage of these Acts, great and not-so-great families were giving their children their inheritance while they were young - and it wasn't a piece of Pa's farm.
Instead they got 25 years of highly expensive education : tutors, educational toys, books and Grand Tours, prep schools, the best in university education paid for right into post-doc status if need be.
Only the very smartest of the untutored geniuses among the poorer sorts could push their way against this phalanx of the tutored un-genius children of the older aristocracies who came to dominate all the new as well as old professions - particularly in the sciences and amongst the university teachers.
Paralleling this, I argue , we saw a massive lowering of the cultural and political worth of Natural Science , science done by amateurs delving in and living close to Nature.
Instead the professional tenured lab scientist cum Natural Philosopher became the esteemed one : doing mind experiments on a chalkboard or with a few flasks and beakers in a laboratory.
Once cut free of the initimate connection to the land, this aristocracy of the mind lapsed quickly into synthetic autarky, convinced that modern civilized Man no longer needed Mother Nature's bounty.
The atom smashers could make anything and everything out of bog-ordinary atoms of useless rock.
Plenticide the Plentitude of Nature and we'd all be better off.
We've already done the Dodo and the Passenger Pidgeon - why not start work on the Slav, the Roma and the Jew ....
Showing posts with label reform acts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reform acts. Show all posts
Friday, February 20, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
Tenure track & Auschwitz track
My job, as I see it, is to convince you over the course of the life of this blog that the tenure track, intellectually speaking, is not that different from the track at Auschwitz, the one with the little girl in the red coat.
Both tracks were designed to keep overwhelming numbers of untutored geniuses from competing for the too few good jobs that the tutored un-genius children of un-tutored geniuses regarded as their own - by simple birthright.
(Most educated people today are half aware that large numbers of bright, driven Jewish scholars tried to get some of the relatively few academic jobs available in the 1920s and 1930s .
And that this badly rattled the the equally bright but not so driven Aryan and WASP students expecting those same jobs as their birthright.
Columbia University's solution was quotas ; Chelmno used gas.)
Open commensality, in fact global commensality, is the inevitable end result of the unconscious process of modernization.
In self conscious reaction against modernization a new form of the ancient black art of closed commensality, one involving hierarchical selection and certification procedures, arose.
As much against the simultaneous and self conscious ending of a land-based noble aristocracy as against the unconscious arise of modernization.
Thar reaction we now know as the supra-ideology of Modernity.
Today's tenure track and peer review - together with yesterday's Auschwitz train track, are the very pinnacles of achievement for Modernity.
The retort that 'to a hammer everything looks like a nail', has never really lost its sting because so many of us have seen it ring true in the lives we live.
Let us see how accurately it describes Modernity's science.
The passage, beginning in the 1830s, of the various Reform Acts in Great Britain, then the globe's leading edge power, signalled the slow death of a land based noble aristocracy.
I do not consider it at all a coincidence that, at that very same point in time, the student bodies of universities and colleges began to rapidly change their character, becoming dominated by the driven and the competitive.
No longer did Daddy extract the rents from thousands of acres of prime farm land to buy an Army commission for his surgeon son.
Instead wealthy, connected Daddy bought 25 years of extremely expensive education, from childhood tutors and holiday foreign grand tours, prep school, the best university money could buy its way into, grad school and post-grad specialist training overseas.
Then surgeon sonny got a commission in the military, after displaying his considerable credentials and passing a tough series of exams - open to all (with similar extensive credentials) - 'on his own merits'.
Science had once been an amateur activity, open to all who loved it - allowing untutored geniuses from poor families, people like Michael Faraday, to secure world fame for their discoveries.
Jealous tutored un-geniuses envied the untutored geniuses that the open commensality of amateur science threw up.
They tried (successfully) to create a scientific world where 'who you knew' (who was your academic mentor, what institutional letterhead was your grant application written upon) once again became far more important than 'what you knew' (the actual discoveries you had made).
Soon these would-be professional scientists had created a closed commensal hierarchy of worth.
At the top, the only ones with a good salary, a secure job for life and a direct line to the media and the powerful were the full professors and department heads at the biggest research universities.
These positions had been obtained as much by luck as by effort, family money and genius.
Connections, dad's money, sheer hard work and raw genius could only take one so far.
For one had to also have the acute political sense of what were likely to be the up and coming sub-disciplines when one was forty, paddle to those pools and always swim well within their circumscribed intellectual worlds.
Espousing the 'wrong' intellectual theories - in their eyes - before tenure was fatal. After tenure, you remained alive. Remained alive as an associate professor for life - just barely tolerated by your ever collegiate colleagues.
Always, always there were endless peer review gatekeepers to ensure the continued purity of the sub-discipline's sacred flame.
Peer gatekeepers always were about : busy deciding who got into graduate schools, into tenure streams, got the grants, the conference invite, book contracts from the biggest university presses, invites to honour-based academic societies, calls to serve on government commissions.
On and on.
You and I could take all this as a bit of a joke - the sort of things that we tutored un-geniuses simply must do to live happy and fairly productive lives.
But when science's peer review hammer heads out into nature to do some real work , trouble ensues - for now every looks like a nail.
Survival of the fittest, normal and deviant, lives worthy and unworthy of life, lower and higher fungi, virulent and avirulent bacteria are just some of many similar sounding modernity era scientific concepts.
And today - to me - they all seem like direct echoes of the selection processes that so dominate the lives of the academic and professional scientist then and now ...
Both tracks were designed to keep overwhelming numbers of untutored geniuses from competing for the too few good jobs that the tutored un-genius children of un-tutored geniuses regarded as their own - by simple birthright.
(Most educated people today are half aware that large numbers of bright, driven Jewish scholars tried to get some of the relatively few academic jobs available in the 1920s and 1930s .
And that this badly rattled the the equally bright but not so driven Aryan and WASP students expecting those same jobs as their birthright.
Columbia University's solution was quotas ; Chelmno used gas.)
small "m" modernization
Open commensality, in fact global commensality, is the inevitable end result of the unconscious process of modernization.
In self conscious reaction against modernization a new form of the ancient black art of closed commensality, one involving hierarchical selection and certification procedures, arose.
As much against the simultaneous and self conscious ending of a land-based noble aristocracy as against the unconscious arise of modernization.
Big "M" Modernity
Thar reaction we now know as the supra-ideology of Modernity.
Today's tenure track and peer review - together with yesterday's Auschwitz train track, are the very pinnacles of achievement for Modernity.
The retort that 'to a hammer everything looks like a nail', has never really lost its sting because so many of us have seen it ring true in the lives we live.
Let us see how accurately it describes Modernity's science.
Land aristocracy almost instantly replaced by Professional aristocracy
The passage, beginning in the 1830s, of the various Reform Acts in Great Britain, then the globe's leading edge power, signalled the slow death of a land based noble aristocracy.
I do not consider it at all a coincidence that, at that very same point in time, the student bodies of universities and colleges began to rapidly change their character, becoming dominated by the driven and the competitive.
No longer did Daddy extract the rents from thousands of acres of prime farm land to buy an Army commission for his surgeon son.
Instead wealthy, connected Daddy bought 25 years of extremely expensive education, from childhood tutors and holiday foreign grand tours, prep school, the best university money could buy its way into, grad school and post-grad specialist training overseas.
Then surgeon sonny got a commission in the military, after displaying his considerable credentials and passing a tough series of exams - open to all (with similar extensive credentials) - 'on his own merits'.
To professional science , every natural event looks like a tenure procedure...
Science had once been an amateur activity, open to all who loved it - allowing untutored geniuses from poor families, people like Michael Faraday, to secure world fame for their discoveries.
Jealous tutored un-geniuses envied the untutored geniuses that the open commensality of amateur science threw up.
They tried (successfully) to create a scientific world where 'who you knew' (who was your academic mentor, what institutional letterhead was your grant application written upon) once again became far more important than 'what you knew' (the actual discoveries you had made).
Soon these would-be professional scientists had created a closed commensal hierarchy of worth.
At the top, the only ones with a good salary, a secure job for life and a direct line to the media and the powerful were the full professors and department heads at the biggest research universities.
These positions had been obtained as much by luck as by effort, family money and genius.
Connections, dad's money, sheer hard work and raw genius could only take one so far.
For one had to also have the acute political sense of what were likely to be the up and coming sub-disciplines when one was forty, paddle to those pools and always swim well within their circumscribed intellectual worlds.
Espousing the 'wrong' intellectual theories - in their eyes - before tenure was fatal. After tenure, you remained alive. Remained alive as an associate professor for life - just barely tolerated by your ever collegiate colleagues.
Peer review gatekeepers guard the sacred flame
Always, always there were endless peer review gatekeepers to ensure the continued purity of the sub-discipline's sacred flame.
Peer gatekeepers always were about : busy deciding who got into graduate schools, into tenure streams, got the grants, the conference invite, book contracts from the biggest university presses, invites to honour-based academic societies, calls to serve on government commissions.
On and on.
You and I could take all this as a bit of a joke - the sort of things that we tutored un-geniuses simply must do to live happy and fairly productive lives.
But when science's peer review hammer heads out into nature to do some real work , trouble ensues - for now every looks like a nail.
Survival of the fittest, normal and deviant, lives worthy and unworthy of life, lower and higher fungi, virulent and avirulent bacteria are just some of many similar sounding modernity era scientific concepts.
And today - to me - they all seem like direct echoes of the selection processes that so dominate the lives of the academic and professional scientist then and now ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...