Leonard Colquhoun
Are (our) intellectuals not very bright ?
Are (some) academics a bit thick, unable to handle complexity ?
Are they too prone to a one-theory-fits-all mindset ? And simplistic ones at that. Does individuality spook them ? Square pegs who can’t cope with round holes ? (Much less dodecagonal or ellipsoidal ones.)
Take a fairly straight-forward matter like learning to read and the teaching reading.
Until the second half of the 20th century, this seemed a relatively simple matter of matching squiggles on paper to sounds we mouth and hear,
“as easy as ABC”, and, by and large, tens of thousands of teachers in the Anglophone countries succeeded in teaching millions of schoolchildren to read and write. Granted, they may not have had a very deep understanding of some of what they could read, and they may not have been all that much removed from Goldsmith’s “mute, inglorious Miltons”, but they could, at that basic, fundamental level, read ‘n’ write. Gosh, some of them, without even realising it, would go on to “deep” or “critical” literacy.
But some never did dig this A B C stuff, no matter how many cuts of the strap or how much loving pedagogy, and eventually evidence emerged that a minority learned differently, responding to words-as-a-whole, as if they were pictograms, rather than in the more usual alphabetically linear way.^
The intelligent thing would’ve been to acknowledge that little people, being individual works-in-progress, would need a variety of approaches in how they learned and how they were taught to read. But what did academia give us ? Rather than being complementary to it, whole language theory supplanted phonics. Result: recent generations of school-leavers appear to have poorer basic reading skills than their grand-parents had. Cause: herd-following academics, unable to cope with “both-and”, who plumped instead for “either-or”. Complexity proved too much for the intelligentsia.
Indulligentsia ?
Take rote learning, as another example.
Yes, there was a lot of it around in the schools of, say, the 40s and 50s, and OK, pupils should have had a greater variety of lessons some of which were more active and enquiring. The varied types of pedagogy would be complementary, with each retaining its virtues. But what we got was a swing of the pendulum to the other extreme. Of all the people in all the world, the very last to subscribe to extremes of thought would, you’d reckon, be academics.
Acadumbics ?
Another example – economic rationalism.
Originally a fairly sensible attitude that we should arrive at economic decisions rationally, by examining all the factors involved and finding best-fit arrangements, it degenerated into yet one more dumb –ism, producing idiocies such as running hospitals and hospices as profit-making ventures. Mid and late-90s Victoria was the setting for some of the most egregious stupidity produced by this Right-wing dogma, which operated on 1984-style polar-opposites: private enterprise Good, public operation Bad.
Premier J Kennett (recently reincarnated for Tasmanians as President Kennett of the “Tasmanian” Hawks) introduced what he called competition into Melbourne’s mass transit* fixed-rail systems: each network, the trains and the trams, was subdivided into two, with two different companies (whose names we need not bother with – one of them’s already nicked off) operating half each, the Good-Idea-at-the-Time being that each company would vie with the others to provide better service. But the mythical Jack the Blind Miner or primary schoolkids with network maps could’ve told anybody that Carl and Carlene Commuter from Melbourne’s SE were unlikely to drive 25 or 30km N to take advantage of lower fares or a more frequent and / or punctual train service from Melbourne’s NE. (Note: even this nonsense failed to match the idiocy of the previous government’s “scratch’em” tram and train tickets.)
Then there’s George W Bush, President of the US of A.
OK, he doesn’t come across as being all that bright, but the reactions he evokes in many of his critics make him look a definite Einstein.
Take the Iraq War.
If the first casualty of war is truth, next on the list would have to be sense, reason, rationality.
Much of academia and the commentariat don’t like Dubya, and strongly disagree with the War, and there are many valid reasons for doing so, and for opposing his Eye-rack adventure (and hoping that he’s gone before an Eye-ran adventure). But does that excuse the simplistic nonsense from his critics which equates misbehaviour at Abu Ghraib with Saddam Hussein’s systemic brutalisation of a nation ? That has the US directly responsible for the now countless atrocities perpetrated by various Arab Muslim sectarians on each other ?
Intellectuals would be the first to sneeringly dismiss the Devil-made-me-do-it defence that sometimes pops up in the more benighted southern States of America, but seem ready to accept a Dubya-made-us-think-it rationalisation of jihadists blowing up kindergartens, school buses, local hospitals, often with no overtly military objective at all.
It’s the result of failing to appreciate complex distinctions such as remote and proximate causes. Yes, the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship produced the authority vacuum which enabled lawlessness to thrive, but, no, those who kill women, children, non-combatants, are themselves responsible in person for these crimes against their fellow-Iraqis. Ascribing every one of these horrid crimes to one single Dubya-made-them-do-it cause ought to be put in the trashcan of illogicality, particularly by critics wanting to be seen as intellectuals.
Indullectuals.
The up-to-date intellectuals’ very own “The Devil made me do it” rationalisation of all responsibility for everything is neatly expressed by a resident of North Fitzroy in a letter to The Age, Thursday 21 June 2007: “The violence between Palestinian rivals in Gaza was inevitable once Israel and the West refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas Government in January last year”. The letter went on to ascribe all responsibility to, in descending order of magnitude, and in the style we’ve now come to expect, the West, the US and Israel.
Nothing so complex as criticising the sending by old men of pre-pubescent children to suicidal mass-murder in its opponents’ kindergartens and at their bus stops. Not the faintest inkling of the notion that, as in Iraq, those who actually pull the triggers have some degree of responsibility for their actions. Not a passing thought as to whether these tactics actually work.
Almost every parent has experienced the Battle of the Back Seat, you know, the one that intersperses with “Are we there yet ?” It goes like this: “He made me hit him, ‘coz he’s pickin’ on me”. In the world of childhood, it’s never my fault, it’s always “Shaz made me do it”. In the simple-minded fantasy world of so many Western academics and intellectuals, it’s never an African dictator’s fault, nor an Arab terrorist’s, not an Islamist mass-murderer’s.
It’s a grown-up’s version of the child’s “He made me do it, ‘coz he’s pickin’ on me”: the cause of every international crisis, tragedy and disaster is invariably ours, “ours” as in Western society, culture, capitalism and politics, with the pure-minded pundits excepted, naturally. One can imagine their offspring trashing a North Hobart latte bar, and being excused with “It’s all Bush’s / Howard’s / Lennon’s fault”.
But the world that real leaders have to make decisions about, the world that real people have to lead their lives in, is much more complex than a child’s. “Israel / George Bush made me do it” is no more credible an excuse for killing than “The Devil made me do it”.
The second Bush administration had its own intellectuals, remember. They were the neo-cons, whose grasp of complexity was just as slippery as was, and still is, those of their progressivist opponents. And equally, the Iraq imbroglio is what exposes them as equally dull.
Indullectuals.
Then there’s the ‘100% or nothing’ argument so beloved of ideologues.
OK, Houston, we have a problem. We’ve got, say, an RHH which is under-performing, an LGH which is under-funded, outback indigenous settlements which are in all sorts of trouble. Someone, usually someone who is subject to severe ideological disapproval, proposes that a start can be made if P, Q, and R get done – it’s not a complete solution, mind you, and may not be at starting at the basics: it’s just a start. It’s at least a start, and we have to start somewhere, and this is what’s feasible right now.
So, what’s the reaction from safe, comfortable, healthy and well-off Theorists, whether in the people’s republic of intelligentsia or the church of the moral high ground, both well established in leafy inner suburbia ? “Not good enough: it’s not solving the whole problem, not a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, not sufficiently revolutionary, so best to do nothing until we have a holistic solution”.
This is supremely dumb on at least two counts.
First, effective and lasting improvements generally come in small increments, accepted and acted on by thousands, even millions, of bottom-rung individuals, they who have to actually live with whatever changes (‘reforms’ is the usual weasel word) are made. Imposition from the top rungs down hardly ever works. But it’s a lot easier for academically trained screen jockeys to issue edicts and ukases, rule a line under that, and move on to the next Big Thing. Go to a hospital corridor with all those awful smells, or all the way to a desert settlement with more awful smells – don’t you know who we are ??
Second, it’s ‘gainst nature still, as Ross said to Macduff, the day after Macbeth murdered Duncan.
You know how everything has to be “natural” these days, how all kinds of stuff is promoted as beneficial because it’s “natural”, how we’re supposed to overlook the “naturalness” of, say, hemlock and the anopheles mosquito – well, how does “evolution: natural, revolution: unnatural” sound ?
Like other animals, we humans, and our societies, seem to progress better by small evolutionary steps; cultures which have evolved workable institutions over long periods of time seem to make better progress than those which have “progress” dumped upon them in one take-it-or-leave-it lump. But incremental change (like infrastructure maintenance) is neither sexy nor a headline-maker, rather, it’s a spinmeister’s black hole. It requires an ability to understand and appreciate that people, and their societies and cultures, are highly complex organisms, not susceptible to simplistic ideological slogans and the mantras of idée fixe fanatics.
One size does not fit all, and you’d reckon such an attitude wouldn’t pass muster in academia. Except that it does in acadumbia.
^ a former colleague of mine, whose son was dyslexic, told me how he found it easier to read the Chinese he was learning at school than his native English.
* this American term is used here, as it does not have an assumption of government (“public”) ownership and/or operation of such system; if offended, just get over it.
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
October 2007
