Yeah, but they don't always have to be postmodernist ecological marxism 101

One course that really didn't help me in any way, but which was massively enjoyable, was a film studies survey course, taught by a former screenwriter. We basically just watched a bunch of his favorite movies on a big screen (along with some classics like Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, etc.), and listen to his amusing (and profanity laced) anecdotes about the film industry and life in general. One of the more memorable experiences of my sophmore year.

OK, I have to come clean here and admit that I myself took that course for the easy A. Heh.

Philosophy, economics, and linguistics all counted as arts at my school. Just a lil lifehack.

rofl

I was required to take all of those courses so I could have a "rounded education." I forget what it was exactly, but I had to take something like 60 units (it took 196 to graduate) of bull**** "general ed" courses like theater, religion, philosophy, geology, health, women's studies, geography, English, foreign language, chemistry and - my favorite - basics of internet research (this was in 2002).

Please understand me when I say I disliked college, and was entirely unwilling to take any courses that weren't a necessity to graduate as quickly as possible.

(Except weight training, I took that pretty regularly because I liked working out in the gym after hours and getting "free" personal training)

um actually western society isn't patriarchal, it is in fact based on an unspoken caste system. try reading about the trifunctional hypothesis some time.

citation for those who think finding stuff on vBullitain is a pain in the ass

So basically the tripartite division of the city in Plato's Republic into a ruling class, a military class, and an economic class was an accurate and descriptive representation of the basic hierarchical structure of ancient societies, and that structure has persisted from then up until the modern era.

Well, basically the disused rigid caste system of Plato’s distant ancestors became so engrained in our language, culture, and mythology, that any other arrangement than worker/soldier/priest/[unperson] was inconceivable to him. If you give someone the same task today they will instinctively invent the same caste system, as can be easily seen in any fantasy novel written by a white person.

Why’s soldiers gotta be considered above workers? It’s manual labor, they should be considered workers.

Why’s engineers gotta be in the economic caste? Why can’t there be a higher caste for inventors and planners, the people who see to the decisions that aren’t either defense or faith.

Why’s it always gotta be 3 castes?

Just think about it for a second and it all falls apart. It’s silly that a fantasy race or a fantasy government would use the PIE caste system, but it’s where people are stuck. You actually have to get people to think, really think, about why the divisions the way it is, before they even realize they do it.

Culture is weird.

fwiw DS9 is the only work of fiction I can think of that did something different with castes, but really, the Bajorans had so many of them that I’m not entirely convinced the writers meant castes instead of occupational surnames.

I don’t know if it’s quite that inveterate. For example, I think you could say that a key presupposition of technocratic governance is that engineers should be made part of the sovereign ruling class.

But look, I’m not knocking the hypothesis. But it is the sort of thing that can be difficult to falsify.

For example, in a book about the American Revolution, Gordon Wood describes pre-revolutionary American society. He describes the hierarchical relations that existed between various classes, and also the distinction between patricians (or gentlemen) and plebeians. It’s really, really fascinating how similar the society he describes is to Plato’s Republic. In light of Wood’s work, Alexander Hamilton’s fixation with honor doesn’t seem like a personal idiosyncrasy, as much as a sign that he belonged to a social class that effectively reproduced many of the norms of Plato’s guardian class (and of course you can see how the mores and norms of that class were preserved by the feudal age — or at least you can imagine it).

But the thing is also that Plato is influencing how Wood is telling the historical story, even if only indirectly. If you look at his footnotes, you’ll see that he often cites Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, which draws heavily from Plato and Aristotle and preserves a lot of their distinctions. In other words, they’re an indirect influence on Wood that shapes how he built up his story about pre-Revolutionary American society.

So I’m not sure that many of these ideas are quite as sticky as you claim. It could be that among academics certain texts are difficult influences to shake off once they’ve been read, but that those ideas have less of a grip on people who aren’t as familiar with them. After all, there are all sorts of other schematic reasons why a person imaging a society from the ground up would, for example, not think of military folk as laborers. It could be, for example, that they see military labor as a public service, thus making it have more in common with political rule than other forms of physical labor.

So don't personally read anything that's not peer reviewed. Simple.

Don’t like the absence of gun control restrictions in the US? So don’t buy a gun. Simple.

Going back to the trifunctional hypothesis:

There’s not much justification for the claim that in modern society the military class is “above” workers. There isn’t a vertical relationship between those two classes. They have a horizontal relationship.

On the other hand, there are vertical relationships between various classes that make up the broader economic class. It’s not clear to me that the trifunctional hypothesis has much explanatory power when it comes to modern states.

sacral-martial-economic-[unperson]

capital-political-worker-[temporary foreign worker]

I reread this page and I can’t find where anybody claimed the military has supremacy over the workers in modern society.

Yeah, I’m a little confused about why you’re using the word supremacy now.

1. I haven’t used the word supremacy either; I’ve used the phrase vertical relationship, which is exactly what you implied exists between laborers and military when you said:



(Italics mine.)

2. However, in Plato’s Republic, in the well functioning city, the military class does rule over and maintain the order of the economic class.

I’m sure your posts would be interesting enough by themselves that you don’t need to invent a discussion to win.

This is getting pretty childish, Reid.

Well, this post pretty clearly implied that the trifunctional hypothesis has persisted in western society in more than just fantasy novels:



But anyway the adequate (and less rude) response to me was that in modern societies cops/law enforcement have a vertical relationship to workers that resembles the relationship between the guardian class and the economic class in the kallipolis in Plato's Republic, but w/e.

That's never stopped him before.

It was very obviously sarcastic.

Except they don’t, I don’t think that, and I wouldn’t respond with that because I don’t think it.

My earlier post invoked the PIE caste structure as an example of how our culture works to reinforce the power of the randomly successful. And it is really interesting to me how the PIE caste structure has influenced our fiction and how it’s mutated over thousands of years.

But Plato was 4000 years removed from the formal PIE caste system, enough removed that he clearly thought his idea was novel. It hasn’t existed in an explicit, formal way for a long time.

You won't find many classicists who say that Plato thought his kallipolis was a novel invention. There's a prevalent view amongst classicists that Plato was very self-consciously trying to retrieve an older form of political organization as a corrective for what he saw as the deficiencies of Athenian democracy. He wouldn't have wanted to see the kallipolis as "novel", anyway. For many moderns (especially after the Romantic era), being able to claim that something is new or innovative is a way of legitimizing it. But in the ancient world -- and no less for Plato -- being able to claim something's antiquity and its origins in a primordial past gave an idea or a cultural meme legitimacy.

But yeah, funny how the way you're talking about the way in which the PIE caste structure exists in our collective unconscious effectively makes it a kind of Jungian archetype.

People publishing things without peer review doesn't cause the same harm that unrestricted gun ownership does.

I don't get what your point is, RJ. My first point was that Eversor's comment about universities is a silly stereotype. Now you're somehow mad about peer review in women's studies? You all have some of the weirdest ideas about academic culture ever. Like apparently nobody should be able to create a journal unless it meets your standards. Why? Is it really damaging society that badly for crappy journals to exist? Would we be better off censoring them? Like yeah it's not the best, but I don't see why it's worth being upset about.

An idea set exists that I disagree with, better dekulakize the campuses.

Do you still stand by this?



Because it seems pretty obviously false to me. You don't need to understand my points about scholarship to understand that certain departments skew far left.

Whether or not something should be done about it (as conservatives would like) is one thing, but to pretend that what they are complaining about doesn't even exist is something else entirely, which I can't quite wrap my head around.

Lol, what you just described is called "being rejected from a journal". Crying "censorship" sounds a bit like conservatives who ***** and moan about not being able to spout off at college campuses after being uninvited.

Also:



Yes. C.f.: the entire history of pseudo-science in medicine, economics, etc. In fact I'm not sure if I can think of anything more harmful. Lol

"Most everyone is liberal".. so like, yes, I agree and literally said that. Universities are mostly populated by liberals. What I was speaking to was whether we are actually that politically expressive within the department. And, no, we aren't. People tend to not talk politics. I've never explicitly discussed politics with a professor as far as I can remember, and only sometimes with graduate students.

There are also conservatives in my department, and we don't push each other button's politically.

What I mean is, in my experience I have felt zero pressure from anyone to believe something politically. Eversor was kind of implying that this culture pressuring people into one mindset exists, I don't think it does.

I also said that might not be true of other departments. Maybe in gender studies they all force everyone to swear on Das Kapital that they renounce their privilege and will never vote Republican.

Or not. I tend to think these departments tend to attract people who already have strong beliefs. I think there's evidence to suggest this, too: liberals tend to value higher education over conservatives, who value getting a good job. So competent conservatives self-select not going into these departments. Then other conservatives notice and complain.

You're confusing emphatic attempts at clarity with being upset. In fact I couldn't care less about the issue of peer review, but only brought it up to ridicule an idea you wrote. The only emotion I am experiencing here is impatience.

This is not too important to our discussion, but this is another ridiculous idea you are suggesting here: that if I am predisposed to a certain point of view, that view won't be reinforced by a group whose literal mission is to show me how to take that view even further than I already did myself? Come on. Have you even been to church?

Yes.

But let's not lose track of the main point of contention here: that it's impossible for conservatives to "have a point". Whatever that means in this context, I don't even know, but I do know I couldn't care less. However, I do know bull**** when I see it.

There's a difference between actively pressuring people towards certain views and a culture of common understanding. Churches actively tell people to believe certain things politically.

NASCAR races on the other hand have a common understanding of culture, but NASCAR isn't trying to make you conservative.

Lol! You don't think that happen in universities? For a second I thought I was being too harsh, but you make this too easy.

They're both right and they're wrong. The intuition of the complaint has some truth, but I disagree with the expression. The way it's expressed is often that there was a conspiracy by radical gay feminist communists to take over things, or something. It's a narrative which creates an enemy class of people who are disrupting and invading the previous correct status quo.

I agree with Chomsky when he disregards postmodernism, but I disagree with the alt right when they mention cultural Marxism, despite the two pointing at similar issues. Is that clear?

In my experience, no, that's what I keep saying.

I'm not sure one has to be "alt. right" to acknowledge that universities foster a certain culture that skews politically. Unless by invoking the phrase "university culture" you meant something so obscure that it's beyond my ability to understand in plain English.

It's true that you probably won't be kicked out of class for contradicting the prevailing ideology of the department. But you'll probably get terrible marks on your papers or be denied tenure. You're also liable to be shouted down by student activists whose radical political views have been reinforced by the faculty.

When I said you were being childish, you had asked why one simply couldn't just "not read" papers that haven't been peer reviewed. I actually already answered that question earlier, but since it's relevant in this context I'll repeat it here: so I could pass my class.