I began fully-listening when Ellis Cashmore appeared as a ‘witness’. Cashmore is ‘professor’ of Culture, Media and Sport, surely the Andrex of academic disciplines. You can listen to him on the website – it’s the programme about celebrity – he appears at about twenty minutes. You may need a new laptop as these machines don’t take kindly to being flung across the room. The gist of what Cashmore said was contained in his line ‘Cultures are no better or worse than each other’. Right then, Prof, here’s my time machine and, woosh, here we are in Tiananmen Square during Mao’s Cultural – geddit? – Revolution. You, being an intellectual, are about to be stamped to death for the entertainment of the peasants. Luckily, I am on hand to, first, console you with the thought that all cultures are equal and, secondly, to operate the time machine and whisk you off to Germany in the thirties. I, having a Jewish mother, am being dragged off by Brown Shirts, but, luckily, you are on hand to console me with the thought that all cultures are equal. Sadly, you cannot operate the time machine. … Who are these people? What are they for?
– Bryan Appleyard listens to the BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze
Bryan, beautifully expressed. No doubt if the time machine were to whisk Mr. Cashmore to New Guinea when cannibalism was in style it would be a delight to hear him protest the unfairness of making him the Sunday roast. I would love to hear the chef reminding him of the equal worth of all cultures. Personally I would recommend to chef lots of peppers, green and red along with the garlic and onions with a dash of hot sauce.
Good old Richard Feynman here, talking about social sciences.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZcpTTjjXY
At first I was quite taken with the phrase “the Andrex of academic disciplines”, but on reflection I think it is too kind to the good professor of Culture, Media and Sport and his ilk.
After all, toilet paper is cheap, has its uses, and can be flushed away after use.
Professor Cashmore, not so much.
What’s worse, of course, is that we have a whole government department of Culture, Media and Sport sucking from the public teat, being ‘advised’ by tossers such as this, and who would find his views completely agreeable.
Kevin B
Yes, I agree with you about Andrex. People often use toilet paper to say that something is worthless, but toilet paper is useful.
I once went on a trip to Communist Poland. Having been warned I took some Andrex. At the end of my short stay I offered the remains of my Polish money, and the remains of my Andrex, to my Polish hosts. Their reaction made it entirely clear which was more valuable to them.
“Their reaction made it entirely clear which was more valuable to them”
Surely, as the economist would point out, they were perfect substitutes?
But, of course, all cultures are equal if, and this is the unspoken assumption upon which that assertion is based, the values by which cultural attributes are judged are totally subjective.
This is, I suspect, the speakers’ core belief, held and asserted relentlessly even when he contradicts it in the next sentence when he unequivocably condemns western culture and capitalism and all the other bogeymen of academic elites and chattering tranzis around the world.
Such is the intellectual and moral “3 card monte” con game that predominates in an era of multi-culti nonsense and politically correct lunacy.
veryretired,
You can find out about his core beliefs if you follow the links to his homepage, and have a look at some of his publications.
But I’d advise against it if you don’t like blatant anti-white racism.
You can get the essential gist from this précis on his book about Mike Tyson.
It’s not the West and Capitalism he seems to be against, but white people.
I presume he doesn’t count white racism as a ‘culture’, otherwise his quoted comment looks very strange in view of his opinions.
On the other hand, nobody is completely bad. 🙂
Pa I fucking posted that on the Kitty Kounter recently. You sneak thief, you!
You top gent though. The more the public see RPP say that the better.
OK, I have a mate who did an English degree. He wanted to be a Shakespearian actor. What he got instead was taight an unmitigated collection of crap by the likes of Tom Paulin. he once, through no fault of his own had to do a course on feminist criticism.
Apparently writing on a word-processor is feminine because the text gestates on the womb-like hard-drive. As a computer tech and heterosexual I can find no significant parallel between a uterus and a 250 Gig Maxtor but then what would I know? Only having two degrees in physics! Of course writing with a pen is masculine because it is longer than it’s wide and therefore phallic and because “pen” sounds a bit like “penis”.
He had to trudge through this mire. No choice. He was once told by his tutor, Paulin, that he was “talking shite”. Talk about pots and fucking kettles.
Another tutor of his, Simon Shepard, once bawled him out for an essay on “Eroticism in Spencer’s Faerie Queen”. Nick was a straight-man and had written about the heterosexual aspects which Shepard dismissed as “just not erotic”. Well, he would. His office was decorated with Mapplethorpe prints including the one of a bloke with a bull-whip up his arse. Shepard had just written a biography of Joe Orton called “Because we’re Queers”.
The sad thing is that an arts degree ought to be about discrimination and judgement. I mean Hamlet is objectively better than Eastenders isn’t it?
Nick now runs a company which brings Shakespeare to kids in the West Midlands. Good.
I disagree with the ‘Professor’ and mostly agree with the good people here. But I think we should be fair to him and make it clear that he was asserting a relativism of aesthetic choices, not moral or legal ones. He may also believe in the latter, but it’s quite a stretch in reasoning to suggest equating Bach to Beckham is no different than equating due-process to gas-chambers. The latter involves a breach of the law and of fundamental human rights, while the former is a subjective choice and a matter for the individual. I believe myself that there are certain objective criteria to bring to aesthetic judgements, but I will admit that the matter is debatable; principally because there need be no collective judgement of an individual experience. The same is obviously not true of the question of relativity between legal codes and ethics.
Thanks for the Feynman link.He did do a speech on cargo cult science which went into detail on just how muddled the “social sciences ” are.
To be fair to the “social sciences” knowledge outside the method of the physical sciences is possible.
Logic exists (so such things as philosophy are real subjects – not just people wasting their time).
Also history exists as a real subject (and a subject which should NOT be approached in the same way as physics) – as such writers as Oakeshott proved.
As for economics – well the “Human Action” and other writings of Ludwig Von Mises are certainly not relativist or feather brained. But they are not physics either – because the method of physics will not work well for economics (Milton Friedman and others to the contrary).
Still back to the quote that Brian cites.
It is a very good one Sir, and you (as so often) have done good by pointing attention to it.
Paul,
Knowledge is certainly possible outside the physical sciences – you only have to consider the progress humanity made before the scientific method was fully developed. And there are a few aspects of social sciences that are genuinely scientific. But to some degree, the social sciences have taken the (genuine) excuse that their subject matter is far more difficult than that of the physical sciences and used it to justify an unbounded lowering of standards to the point of absurdity. And when challenged, claim that science-like ideas of truth and rigour are not applicable, are only one way of understanding the world, and not necessarily even the best. Hence post-modernism.
Logic is a branch of mathematics, and thus fully encompassed by the methods of the physical sciences. But philosophy is not the same thing as logic – and while some parts of philosophy are good stuff, and others are at least interesting, a great deal of it is just people wasting their time (and everybody else’s).
Personally, I love philosophy – but it also encompasses vast amounts of unmitigated crap, which survives on its intellectual pretensions.
I don’t know what Oakeshott proved, or how he did it. A quick Google doesn’t reveal anything approaching a proof, but I’ve only spent about ten minutes on it. Perhaps you could be more specific?
I’m not sure what you mean by the methods of physics not working well for economics. By ‘not working’ do you mean they give the wrong answers? Or no answers at all?
But I think there is no argument being made here that non-science subjects have no value. The complaint is over how the lack of standards of rigour in social sciences has allowed corrupt academics to mix in their own personal unproven/false political theories and present them as the results of solid research, to grant them vastly more authority than they merit. Moral relativism is just one illustration.
Pa Annoyed, replying to Paul:
Paul and the man he quotes are able to speak for themselves quite well. However, I’m going to take a stab anyway.
Physics lends itself well to controlled experimentation. You can formulate a hypothesis, slide a puck across an air hockey table twenty times, measure each movement to the eleventh decimal place, and compare your data to your hypothesis. Even someone as dull-witted as the sociologists at (Large Big-Eight Diploma Mill that Graduated Me) can look at the data and tell you whether your hypothesis predicted your results or not.
Economics, OTOH…no. There is only one United States with 300,000,000 people all buying and selling and trading. You can offer a hypothesis about anything you want, but you don’t have one country to use as a control group and another one where you can fiddle with the money supply to see what happens. Did the price of corn go up because the dollar is worth less because there are more dollars per ear of corn, or did the price of corn go up because Iowa is now Lake Iowa?
My own field, ecology[1], has the same fault. There’s only one Lake of the Ozarks. If you decide to introduce nurse sharks to see what they do to the largemouth bass population, well, you have no control group. Therefore, there’s no way to tell whether the decline in bass is due to hybridizing with the sharks, or due to a decrease in solar emissions, or due to the female bass focusing on their careers and not spawning until later in life?
So, to answer your question, I would submit that there is no good way to tell if the answers are actually true or pulled out from somewhere.
FWIW.
[1] That’s the one on my diploma, although my current profession also can offer examples. Did burglaries decline because more homeowners have guns or because fewer of them have anything worth stealing? Or because legalized abortion 20 years ago caused fewer burglars to be born?
Sunfish,
Physicists have the same problem – the real world is messy – which is why they test their theories with air hockey pucks in a lab instead of throwing bricks across the parking lot, or whatever. Physicists only have one universe to experiment on, too!
Physics is very much used to dealing with approximations of systems too complicated to calculate properly. It works with what it has. But it’s basic approach is not to throw up its hands and say it’s all too big and complicated, but to break it down into simple components. It experiments on the components until it has some idea of what they do, and then puts just a few of them together to understand how they interact. When it’s got that far, it might start making predictions about bigger systems, and gradually scaling up its experiments to confirm it is still on the right track.
So for your shark experiment, the scientific ecologist doesn’t work from experiments on whole ecologies, they construct their model based on simpler principles. This species of shark will eat this list of prey animals (individually testable) which are in the area at this measured density with this variability distribution (observable by sampling) which the shark can catch at this average rate and variation (based on the shark’s search strategy and some hairy statistics) which will meet its calorific requirements with this probability, which will mean the shark population is related to prey density by this stochastic differential equation. And we do the same for the prey, to get a system of coupled differential equations, which we can attempt to solve. And that ought to tell us whether there is a stable relationship, population oscillations, chaotic variations, or whether one or the other just goes extinct.
I want to make clear, every step of this is hard to do. Science is not easy. But you don’t need or want to be able to do experiments on whole ecologies, you only need for the behaviour of the whole to be a consequence of that of all its parts, and for the parts to be sufficiently understandable that the whole can be approximated.
Physics took centuries to get where it is today, and the social sciences are harder. The modern mathematical study of population biology is something nearer to fifty years old, and sharks are a lot more complicated than hockey pucks. But they’re not incomprehensible, either. (And nor are economic agents.)
That’s all very well, but people always want answers today, so the temptation has to be to go with the half-baked, untested theories you’ve got. That’s fine, so long as you don’t pretend more certainty or authority for them than is justified. And so long as you don’t pretend that the work doesn’t need to be done – that the need for rigour before you can really know something somehow doesn’t apply to you – that you have a special way of obtaining true knowledge that bypasses all that.
And so long as you don’t use this state of uncertainty to find some way of “proving” your desired conclusion that it’s all down to over-fishing and wicked mankind’s fault, (or that it isn’t,) when you know no such thing. That’s just simple dishonesty.
Ecology???!!!
Pa is correct, Sunfish. The reason why the scientific method cannot be applied to economics or criminology, is that both have to do with human behavior, which is absolutely unpredictable.
Those career bass females…LOL!