StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?_r=1&hp

It is easy to imagine that at breakfast tables, lunch rooms , dinner tables and even at swank dinner parties in the suburbs of the capitol, the political homilies of Mr. David Brooks are the subject of many conversations, many disagreements,  many small debates, that provide some mealtime diversion to the participants. They can feel a sense of partaking in the intellectual life of the Republic, of defining by their activity the actuality of citizenship. In his latest column The Planning Fallacy, Mr. Brooks exercises his dissent on the notion and practice of policy making and policy planning: in essence he says that any attempt at policy planning is essentially doomed to failure giving as his example:

“When the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman was a young man, he led a committee to write a new part of the curriculum for Israeli high schools. The committee worked for a year, and Kahneman asked his colleagues how long they thought the rest of the project would take. Their estimates were around two years. Kahneman then asked the most experienced among them how long such work took other curriculum committees. The gentleman pointed out that roughly 40 percent of the committees never finished their work at all.But what about those that did finish? The gentleman reported that he had never seen a committee finish in less than seven years and never in more than 10.This was bad news. They might fail to finish a task that they thought would be done in three years. At best, the project might consume eight or nine years. Yet this information didn’t affect those on the team at all. They carried on, assuming that though others might fail or dally, surely they wouldn’t. As it turned out, their project took eight years to finish. By the time it was done, the Ministry of Education had lost interest, and the curriculum was never used.”

Mr. Brooks only refers to the works of well accredited experts, with impeccable intellectual pedigrees. Mr. Kahneman’s attempt to write a new curriculum was completed after eight years and never used. But what is germane is that this prolonged story of a single failed attempt to write a new curriculum is used as a long and tendentious introduction and rhetorical frame to the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats, as presented by Mr. Brooks, hardly a disinterested observer or reporter. In essence both parties are mired in their respective narratives of economic recovery and neither can emancipate themselves from those narratives, that is, without the political wisdom of our Solomon like pundit. And his cynical conclusion is that policy can only aspire to fix small things, make small changes, that benefit some. But one could answer with the successes of the New Deal and The Great Society, although Mr. Brooks manages to describe one of these grand policy attempts as a failure.

Let me take a moment to quote some of Mr. Brooks’ irresistibly trenchant bons mots:

“The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside.”

“Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.”

“Optimistic people rise in this world.”

“The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good.”

Political Cynic

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html

Perhaps you thought that the Right Wing attack on the Academy had lost some of its steam, its power to accuse scholars, teachers and other academic figures of cultural, if not political subversion of the most heinous kind? The charge has it basis in the idea of a betrayal of the vested interest in an undying canon of Great Works, although that notion could be and is being broadened by the inclusion of other works, that simply offer another set of viewpoints, as a way of apprehending, more clearly, our common heritage: a conscious act of political, historical, cultural, and literary clarification.  The notion of the diversity of the literary endeavor and the ineluctable value of that diversity, to produce works that reflects a broader range of possible narratives, in the production of that work, hardly seems worth a question. But being that The Wall Street Journal is a Murdoch publication, this sub rosa attack on the academy has at its root an attack on the Academy as purveyor, indeed publisher, of the relativist propaganda that seeks to subvert the notion of the unchanging, immortal canon .One can see quite readily that the Conservative idea of Originalism, in the interpretation of the Constitution, is analogous to this idea of an eternal, immutable set of literary works: as the reading of the Constitution could be based, on a politically inspired phenomenology, having its ground in thinking within the political/ethical parameters of the Founders. Although this might be considered an impossible act or thought experiment subject to a real subjectivist bias.

The author of this book review titled What Killed American Lit. is Joseph Epstein, a Contributing Editor to The Weekly Standard, and a writer for The New Criterion and Commentary. So, should we be surprised at the ease with which Mr. Epstein goes about his task, of fomenting a  low grade hysteria against the English Teachers of American Universities?;  although he does manage to modulate his tone for the very respectable readers of the once staid Wall Street Journal. Mr. Epstein doesn’t mention the names of Foucault or Derrida, or the vogue of French theory, that has swept the American University English Departments, since the translation of On Grammatology into English.  For the political intent of this review is simply to attack the English teachers of the American University as sclerotic, disloyal and subversive to the Conservative Ideal,  that remains the great undefined quantity of this essay. But it most assuredly exists, since it must exist because Mr. Epstein makes it the basis of his faith. Or is that the central problem with this broadside?

American Littérateur                       

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) is in a tizzy. Why you ask? The sky is falling? Hold on to your hats! The Younger Generation is going to the dogs, morally. (Does anyone remember Harold Hill?)  They don’t even know what morality is! Or even how to answer a question properly, with the requisite comprehension. And the proper respect for the world of Patriarchal privilege that CP grew up in, and holds most dear, is utterly lacking in the younger generation. Perhaps they watched too much Fox News? Or was it an early exposure to Rush Limbaugh? Oh! And the science quoted was at best debatable, being that its’ conclusions were tested against what criteria? This is after all science. Then we have the magic words in Right Wing circles ‘moral relativism’, it is so hackneyed. It has lost its power to shock, even with the two old war horses trotted out for the occasion, Allen Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb, to testify, albeit mutely, to the pernicious effects of a surrender to that vacant ideal of Liberalism, as interpreted by our resident moralist. No one need point the finger at CP as a right wing intellectual clown; he rather handily demonstrates that reality.

Political Cynic