This is my sabbatical year, so I’m not going to be getting those fawning adoring messages
from any students this year. I am so accustomed to being held in reverence, as a kind of saint, like this:
“I only now [received] your beautiful and exquisite message… I thank you for your infinite understanding and sensitivities which are always beyond measure.”
Those are the words of Nimrod Reitman, in an email to his Ph.D. advisor, Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University. As many now know, Ronell was found by NYU to have sexually harassed Reitman.
Oh, wait. I never get those. It could be that I’ve never written a “beautiful and exquisite message” — I tend to be brief in email — or it could be that Ronell built a cult-like relationship with her professional dependents. That’s an ugly outcome, and part of a deplorable pattern. Your students are not your acolytes, and that sort of behavior should be discouraged, a point the author of the article makes strongly. But then, unfortunately, he goes on to write this:
Many commentators on social media express have expressed familiarity with the kind of dynamic at play in the Ronell case. Yet I did notice that many of these commentators were not in academic philosophy.
I suspect that the culture of argument in academic philosophy helps counter tendencies towards sycophancy. We show respect to each other by posing the best challenges we can to each other’s ideas. Putting tough objections to philosophical heroes is something we are trained to (love to) do.
Well, gosh, good thing the mode of thinking in my discipline makes that behavior unlikely. We are above all that, so it’s unlikely to be a problem for us.
I’ve heard that kind of argument so many times before, and it’s a sign that someone in that discipline is about to fail spectacularly. “We’re skeptics, we rigorously criticize bad ideas so that’ll never happen to us” or “We’re scientists, science is objective and impartial so abusers can’t thrive in our ranks,” and then whoops, boom, pratfall.
I’ll go so far as to say that having the attitude that the culture in your little domain of thought makes you immune to the foibles of those other poor thinkers over there is exactly the kind of arrogance that makes you susceptible to failure. It’s a fallacy to think that rationalism makes one resistant to bad ideas — we’re all human here, which means we’re all going to fuck up. Rationalizing away your fuck-ups just means you’ll repeat them, and make them increasingly worse.
At least, that’s what I’ve learned from many decades of involvement in groups with a tendency to praise their own rationality. It’s not a promising development.
You’re very badly misrepresenting Weinberg. Leaving aside the bits you skipped over between the first and second quotes, which would clarify a bit, here’s the very next sentence:
“Fantastical,” he says.
I’ll just take this quote from you as a general remark, which perhaps (as doubtful as it is) you didn’t intend as a criticism directed specifically at Weinberg:
First of all, nobody had been talking about (small-r) “rationalism,” nor about being “resistant to bad ideas,” nor about connecting the two in some fallacious way or another. It’s not clear where you think you got any of that. Sycophancy toward your academic superiors is perhaps related in some indirect way, but at best, you just skipped over a whole lot that would have connected the dots.
Suppose you wanted to explain what “rationalism” is supposed to be about here. What is it? Sounds like a silly question maybe, but it’s not hard to say, in a few more words and preferably without too much circularity, how it should be understood. It’s something like endorsing the idea that we should have reasons for the things we believe are true. Right? That’s what rationalism is, in this context. Spelling it out and showing your work can be very helpful, and this turns out to be a decent example.
Is this -ism supposed to be some kind of a guarantee that a person who is rational will be “resistant to bad ideas”? No, it obviously isn’t. As it was just said, it means you give reasons. Maybe your reasons weren’t sufficiently good and you still ended up with bad ideas. That happens. But let’s not underestimate how valuable it is, even if it isn’t a foolproof, money-back guarantee that you personally will possess some kind of resistance to whatever-the-fuck. We’re not making commercials here, so that’s okay. What it does buy you is that other people (as well as yourself) at least have the chance to think about them logically and perhaps in that way make some progress on the matter at hand. That’s not nothing, and doing that sort of thing is definitely not part of the problem, for fuck’s sake.
Here’s how my thinking goes at the moment. When Trumpists, Petersonites, creationists, and their ilk blurt out irrational garbage, then scorn the rest of us for not thinking like them, what we can tell them is that they should give us a reason. Conceivably, that could happen and we may all be better for it. In any case, the conversation has only just begun (like it or not), when some person asserts things like this. It is not over. Not because they say so, think of themselves as important or your superior, are believed to be trustworthy, are believed to be on your side, etc. You should still ask questions like “why do you think that?” and “how do you know that?” It’s not like you can answer these the same way as “is this the sort of guy I’m supposed to trust?” or “will I cause trouble if I don’t play along?” or whatever.
It’s not like it matters if you trust anybody (for example) to tell you the truth, whether they’re journalists or experts or spirit guides or however they may style themselves. That’s not a necessary step, when you are actually reasoning about things yourself and attempting to gain some understanding of them. And if (who knows why) you were only interested in following the leader and believing all the shit they happen to spew, then of course critical thinking and such wouldn’t be necessary then either. They’re very different processes, obviously, and there is no difficulty at all in seeing which one is better.
So, look… When Admiral Ackbar said it was a trap, he was referring to a real honest-to-goodness trap that was genuinely dangerous/risky (not to mention totally obvious). He was right about that: it was a trap. Is there something wrong with thinking that you can/should give reasons for your beliefs? No, there isn’t. However, thinking that you don’t need to approach things this way (or that it’s hopeless, nobody is logical, etc.) would be a dangerous trap indeed, as should be fairly clear every time you read the news.
One of the issues I’ve come to have about the atheist and skeptic communities is how many people have built their identities around being “rational and logical”. Where that becomes a problem is that if an identity is built around those, then any beliefs and any feelings the person has are assumed by that person to be rational and logical. “I am a rational, logical person. I don’t like feminism, ergo it must be rational and logical to dislike feminism.”
consciousness razor to PZ:
I don’t follow Pharyngula quite enough to have very precise ideas about commenters “day jobs”, but this comment suggests to me that you are a (professional? in any case, well-trained) philosopher; in any case, the comment makes it clear (to me) that for you the word “rationalist” has a precise, technical meaning, and that (for you) PZ’s use of the word is incorrect. I’m not a philosopher (I’m a mathematician), and am not trained well (or at all) in philosophy; and my memory is not as good as it used to be. So I may have forgotten (but more likely hardly ever was aware of) the precise meaning of “rationalist” that underlies your critique of PZ. So it is as a naive reader that I assume(d) that PZ was using “rationalist” in a more colloquial way, referring back to his post’s title (Beware the trap of imagining that you are a logical, rational human being) and forward to his later pseudoquotations (“We’re skeptics, we rigorously criticize bad ideas so that’ll never happen to us” and “We’re scientists, science is objective and impartial so abusers can’t thrive in our ranks”).
That is (as I read him), his statement
in his summing up could be expanded, without changing the meaning much, to something like “It’s a fallacy to think that, just because we rigorously criticize some bad ideas, and are objective and impartial about claims of fact in some domains, we therefore are protected believing all bad ideas and are objective and impartial about claims of fact in all domains.”
PZ can of course, if he likes, tell me that I’ve badly misread him; and with considerably more authority than I can tell you that you’ve badly misread him!
Excuse the typos and infelicities of phrasing. I really did mean to click on “Preview”, not on “Post Comment”, and if I had I hope I would have caught them…
<blockquote=>Well, gosh, good thing the mode of thinking in my discipline makes that behavior unlikely. We are above all that, so it’s unlikely to be a problem for us.
Which of course is NOT what Weinberg was saying at all as consciousness razor pointed out in comment 1.
We don’t even need to talk about sexual harassment in academic philosophy as a hypothetical. Just last year we had accusations against John Searle.
Although, AFAICT, Searle didn’t demand sycophancy, he would just assault people without warning.
Holyshit. I read the facebook post and it blew my fucking mind. How the hell these types of people can hold a job as professor? What the actual fuck???
https://www.facebook.com/louisgeoeges.schwartz.9/posts/502782386861277
Oh, is THAT what that gobbledygook was about?