A discreditable crisis

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 282008
 

Last week, the most farsighted market players were flabbergasted, even as they comprehended that they were witnessing a capitulation to some kind of greater truth?that Wall Street had got caught up in a pyramid scheme of its own devising.

That’s Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker . He puts it more succinctly than anyone I’ve read so far. But I’ve yet to read an informed commentator who doesn’t say pretty much that. Here, luckily, the market is too small and the players too few for a comparable efflorescence of bullshit. But we’re taking our share of the damage, both directly, in the collapse of slick imitators like Babcock and Brown, and in what matters much more, the collapse of confidence in market values. So we have perfectly sound companies with actual products and no significant debt trading at price-earnings ratios that translate to no future earnings, ever.

In Australia we ought to be furious, both with the initiators of all this and with their local avatars. But we’re not. For most people, it seems, the operations of the market are like weather, uncontrollable, or nuclear physics, unintelligible.The professional commentators are too cool – or too frightened – to get angry.

A good deal of this represents generalised apathy about the workings of the world, but some of it surely is down to an education system for which the operations of the market are either sacred or shameful. Our economics departments teach the theology, our commerce departments (much more popular nowadays) teach the rituals. Over in humanities the market economy is what kinky sex used to be, a shameful practice that we don’t talk about. (Kinky sex, of course, is now a burgeoning area of study.)

It was good to be reminded this week of a more generous vision.

For more than half a century [John Kenneth] Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, that the work of economics is far messier than the blackboard mathematical models that claim hegemony, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and center both the factors of power and the narratives societies use to tell their economic stories.

_ Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 2005, p. 653

OK so that’s one busy lens in the metaphor, but it’s times like these that remind us that the market is not the forbidden turf on which only specialists may walk: it’s a common.

 Posted by bruce at 11:56 pm  Tagged with:

Grauniad gets it wrong again

 science  No Responses »
Sep 222008
 

It turns out that Professor Reiss was not speaking for the Royal Society after all – well anyway, they’ve sacked him – and may have meant only that science teachers should be courteous to the pre-scientific element in the classroom. Why am I not surprised that Reiss’s day job is in an Institute of Education?

John Connell reckons Reiss has a point but argues for an aggressive approach: let’s shine a light into these poor kids’ darkness. I think not, not out of respect for creationism – we are not called upon to respect wearily-familiar folly, except in blood relations – but because faith thrives on direct attack. Every well-brought-up fundamentalist has been taught what sorts of things the wicked world will say. Best not to buy the script. Some kids will get the real science, others won’t, most will learn both how to pass biology and please the parents.

Meanwhile over at the Institute of Education where Professor Reiss puts in some time, the matter is turned into flummery, like this:

Here we would want to acknowledge that in science classrooms in both schools and universities, there is a diversity of social, cultural and faith groups. Teachers and academics need to be aware of this diversity to develop appropriate and inclusive practices, whether natural or social scientists.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

 Posted by bruce at 9:41 pm  Tagged with: ,

Rimbaud takes creative writing

 writers  No Responses »
Sep 222008
 

American poet, August Kleinzahler, writes:

? I, for one, have never in my lifetime seen the situation of poetry in this country more dire or desperate. Nor is the future promising. Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture, along with the prospects of the very, very few?it is always only a very few?poets who will matter down the road. What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path.

Let me put it starkly: the better animals in the jungle aren?t drawn to poetry anymore ? Just as the new genre of the novel drew off most of the brilliant young writers of the nineteenth century, movies, television, MTV, advertising, rock ?n? roll, and the internet have taken the best among the recent crop of young talent. Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same?

 Posted by bruce at 9:01 pm  Tagged with: ,

Go to hell, go straight to hell

 science, unreason  No Responses »
Sep 172008
 

I suppose it had to happen, the Royal Society recommending that creationism be taught in schools. From the Times article it seems probable that the decision has been made to show ‘sensitivity’ to guess who, Muslims and fundamentalist Christian students. The Royal’s director of education says as much.

Professor Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, said: ?Just because something lacks scientific support doesn?t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson.”

Expect astrology soon, and lab sessions in casting the runes and an incursion of witches. Ridiculous, you say and you’d be right, because there’s no influential, well-funded and in the Muslim case, scary lobby group pushing for them.

 Posted by bruce at 4:24 pm  Tagged with: ,

What are the stars made of?

 science  No Responses »
Sep 162008
 

Then again ? suppose the Italian lady’s husband were the kind of scientist who bats on about his research in dense jargon until she wants to scream. And suppose that the hands-across-the-cultures man told his spectroscopy story colourlessly ?

“Learning the stuff of which the stars are made ?” It sounds as if it ought to be exciting enough, but – and this is something many academics find difficult to grasp – bare facts do not speak except to those already in possession of a context and able to grasp their significance. (CRICK: “It’s a double helix!” WATSON: “Call Stockholm!”)

Gustav Kirchoff is certainly not a name like Albert Einstein or James B. Watson. He was however, a very distinguished scientist indeed. This is a piece of the Wikipedia article.

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (March 12, 1824 ? October 17, 1887) was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term “black body” radiation in 1862, and two sets of independent concepts in both circuit theory and thermal emission are named “Kirchhoff’s laws” after him.

But the article as a whole does nothing to inspire readers or lead them to see why Kirchoff’s spectrocopy laws opened up the universe. For that you need context, you need eloquence, and you need a rhetoric that bridges the gap between the scientific and the general reader. On my shelf are two recent general histories of science, John Gribbin’s Science: a History 1543-2001 (2002) and Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). Neither delivers. Bryson has nothing on Kirchoff himself and nothing, even, on spectroscopy. Gribbin covers Kirchoff, but the detail of finding sodium on the sun is just another detail in an evenly-paced exposition.

The moral is simple: we need someone to write up the story of how we discovered what the stars are made of – and the cultural story, for there’s bound to be one – of how the new knowledge was received in the period. Did it just add weight to the story of a mechanistic universe that unfolded from Newton on? I guess Kolb’s own book is the first place to go.

I don’t mean to find fault with either history, just to note that in a very small sample of widely-available readings (I roamed around the Web, as well) there’s nothing to bring a sparkle to our Italian lady’s eyes.

 Posted by bruce at 12:15 pm  Tagged with: ,

Shut the door and bar it

 universities, writers  No Responses »
Sep 082008
 

A last word about the growth of creative writing courses (previous entries here and here) before their demand for paper deforests the world.

Unless compelled, the students will not read. According to Michael Wilding, who introduced creative writing at Sydney University:

Most of the people studying it and teaching it are deeply committed to writing, but many have little or no interest in books by other people. They all want to write, but have little interest in reading.? ? _ [Weekend Australian, Feb 9-10, 13]

An honorable exception, Alan Wearne at Newcastle University, will have none of that: he makes them read and what’s more limits the intake to 35. To get in there you need demonstrated talent. Elsewhere, the enrolment figures are in the hundreds, and the reading requirements slight or non-existent.

A surefire way of reducing the anxiety of influence, of course. It seems the creative writing people are adopting the educational approach favoured by our art schools from about 1970 on, with results now familiar.

 Posted by bruce at 3:13 pm  Tagged with: ,
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