A surprising number of leftists are rather wealthy and interested in living well. These types tend to hang out in academia, the home of the left. Their decadence makes for a pretty embarrassing problem in their supposed support of poor people. Never the types to worry about reality they plod ahead in support of whatever oppressed people might need them...except that oppressed people may not need them because they are often just a counterproductive problem. Norman Finkelstein summed up the problem well when discussing BDS types. "..'Let's strike a more radical pose, let's try to be really radical and more chic' especially if you've got tenure..And so they start striking all these radical poses which have no connection with reality and they are so defeatist of the cause.'" While Finkelstein was speaking about the issue of Israel/Palestine this analysis could be applied to many issues of the day. Perhaps these academics would argue that they are moving the conversation to the left. There is a certain, albeit flawed, logic to this stance. This what I personally call the Miri Regev approach. Years ago when I was working with refugees in Israel from the horn of Africa, a debate broiled about them. Miri Regev, then a prominent Israeli politician of Morrocan descent, called refugees from Africa "cancer." When she later stood by her remark, and went further by apologizing to people with cancer she was so ridiculous and hypocritical that even mainstream Israelis were pretty embarrased. Unfortunately, her remarks were politically smarter than anyone would have guessed at the time. The national conversation shifted to the point where calling for indefinite detention of African asylum seekers became a nearly moderate position. I suppose the radicals of academia hope for the same effect if in the reverse direction. The most obvious problem this idea overlooks is that in America there is really no national conversation to begin with. Anyone curious about how totally vapid the American culture is has only to look at our universities. The increasing internationalization of Universities has led to students from all over the world competing head to head. And as a friend of mine who is a professor in a rather prestigeous institution told me, there are very, very few surprises. Basicallly Western European students tend to be on average brighter than Ivy leaguers like myself who in turn tend to be sharper than state school kids on average, and at the absolute bottom of the barrel are those who attend any type of retail college whether it be down-market i.e. for profit institution or upscale which is to say those quaint small private liberal arts institutions that are mostly the preserve of the lazy children of money. Being the product of public education himself, the good professor tries to blind himself to student origins when doing the grudge work of grading papers...but unfortunately, it seems that even this exercise over many years has produced so few surprises he can count them on one hand. Sadly if American academia is the zenith of our intellectual achievement, our cultural production may be the bottom. Perhaps so many professors were too busy dipping into the cess pool of popular culture by studying porn and pop music they lost track of reality. It's probably pretty easy to do if one believes that the sociology of Miley Cyrus is worthy of even an entire undergraduate course. Keeping things in perspective Beyonce and Maddona have inspired much more academic work. Unfortunately, none of this work seems particularly informed by empiricism, statistical analysis, logic or perhaps most importantly any concern for the common people these academics hope to analize by analyzing cultural production. Perhaps it is actually in moments of insight about the frivolous drivel they produce, that professors adopt radical poses.
Let's take for example the borderless world lovefest many radical leftists advocate. Many really radical leftists want no borders anywhere which would reflect the universal brotherhood of man. Never mind that globalization brought the world three separate slave trades, and now working conditions so brutal that workers are committing suicide conveniently out of sight of Western consumers. The borderless lovefest was never rooted in empirical evidence about what might help people, it is rooted entirely in ideology. In seeking to embrace universalism, academics conveniently forget what exactly the results will be for everyone except them. This discourse of universalism has become embedded even in mundane conservative thought. This is how you get the WSJ stating that a surge in international students is a bright spot for American higher education. A report by edububble.com points out a few of the problems with this. I think the problems are actually even worse than they write. I believe this based on actual experience as opposed to ideological "theories." I spent some time on the pipette wielding chain gang that is academic science before I left for medicine. While I do not have a good statistical analysis of all scientists as a whole, a stastical analysis of my second lab, and the ones down the hall from it- rather large ones- yields a few fascinating results. About 90% of the PhDs under 55 had married money probably in part to stave off the pain of trying to live in New York City on under $40,000 a year. Imagine the calamity of September 11th in my lab considering that just about everyone was married to a Wall Street lawyer or accountant. A nonzero percent of these people actually had sexual affairs with other people, presumably the ones they would have married if they had higher earnings...or more correctly they might have not married along with not marrying their current boring high earning spouse. Among the lowest on the lab totem pole were people like myself having conversations with each other about the impossibility of paying student loans not because we were unemployed, but because we were working in science. I had so much to look forward to- if I stayed on the laboratory technician route one day my pay might have hit $24,687 a year, and if I went to grad school I might hope to score a stipend of almost as much. According to my sister my family at the time was shocked by the state of my refridgerator. I guess they expected more from the first person in the family to ever attend a prestigeos University. They deeply dissaproved of the fact that I kept my refridgerator extremely empty except an ample supply of hard liquor. What I realize now looking back was that I wasn't unlike a proletariat of lore as described by Karl Marx. And I still am not today.
I recently spoke with a fellow traveller who asserted we needed more equality in society. he said that garbage collectors should be more equal to doctors for example. I just couldn't agree more. Garbage collectors have pretty bright financial pictures compared to myself. Unionization and indespensability have worked out well for this work force. Garbage collectors are pretty much by definition local people. When I peruse ads for scientists, I understand why a lot of scientists are almost by definition foreign. The State University of New York's open positions near New York City offer a fascinating example. Midcareer specialized PhDs and medical doctors are offered under $40,000 and no overtime pay with the implicit understanding that they will work overtime every single week. This sad salary is actually in line with market results. These kinds of salaries are probably why my limited statistical survey of all the scientists I have worked with yields that most are foreign born, and partially foreign educated. Specifically foreign educated in countries where science education is free. There is a word for the work these foreign scientists do in service of capitalism: Scabbing. Foreign and local scientists are pitted against each other in really sad race towards the bottom that ends near a point where they pay to work. Many American doctors I know have confessed to me that they worked unpaid for a year or more in order to get into the American medical system. A system that would then hand them shifts of up to 24 hours and expect them to be grateful the shifts were not 48 hours like the bad old days. I honestly thought things could get no worse, but recently I noticed all kinds of pay-to-work schemes cropping up. Even if you ignore this nonsense as the lunatic fringe of a weird hyper-capitalistic world, you can't ignore the facts that 9 out of 10 American doctors would discourage anyone from entering the profession, and more and more of us seem to be killing ourselves every year. Even if you gloss over the fact that about 10% of us have a substance abuse if not addiction issue, you can't ignore numbers like the female physician suicide rate (multiples of that of the general population).
My best guess is that physicians are not in fact so special. It may hurt my ego but on some basic level I'm just another worker. We are in the same squeeze as every other American trying to slay the dragon of raising a family in relative safety or alternatively at least not be a financial drain on the family we were born into. Whether you are taking about surgeons or auto mechanics, you are talking about lots of sensible people who's work is directly tied to reality. Few people come up with lunatic theories in medicine or auto repair because they just won't work. There is unfortunately no such stop on the academic left. The delusional theories of leftist academics may work well to convince 19 year olds that their professor is really hip; but they aren't yielding results in the real world. Perhaps most embarrassingly, when those spouting such theories come in contact with people outside of the hallowed halls of the ivory tower, conflict ensues.
I first started to catch on to the quiet conflict years ago after I befriended an elderly gay and lesbian brother sister duo. The pair were die hard progressives. They taught me about what is was like for them to be gay before it was hip or cool and mostly involved dire poverty in New York City punctuated by nasty ostracism and even condemnation by the medical community who dismissed them as mentally diseased. And then one day they talked about something even more interesting than that: they hate academics. At first I protested mentioning that I hold a terminatory degree, and I'm not that bad. "No...that's totally different...your a scientist..we hate academics..."Sadly, I realized the begining of the problem was the academic left's problems with science. For "real academics" science is just another discourse. One my ex-husband, who wanted to be an academic, used to look down on me for working in even though he noticed I could do his work efficieintly even if it wasn't remotely close to my field. Editing his work introduced me to to the people he idolized up close and personal through their writing. Consider the following commentary " The Einsteinian constant [c] is not a constant, not a center. It is the very concept of variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of some thing-of a center from which an observer could master the field-but the very concept of the game." Lest you think C is an esoteric concept of quantum mechanics, I'll brush you up on the fact that C is a constant related to the Newtonian laws of gravitation as they apply in an updated understanding of space-time. Einstein's constant - THE Einstein contant
....You could be forgiven for thinking the above drivel about c being the" concept of the game" was written by an undergraduate who smoked a lot of marijuana. It's actually written in the published work of Jacques Derrida. I guess I'm just bitter I can't become a world acclaimed academic by making claims that imply, among other things, that there is no gravity anymore. I actually want to knock my books off the table and watch them float into outerspace; but they keep falling down and hitting my feet.
Unfortunately, so do the half-baked ideas of many academics. As academics strike more and more radical poses, they seem to do less and less of the boring quantitative work it would take to overpower the blatant stupidity of conservative idiots convinced there are no problems in our current economic and political systems. Sometimes the work is as simple as subtraction. I recently read yet another moronic David Leonhardt column about how student loans just aren't so bad. His reasoning was that the premium made by people with college degrees has never been higher. Of course, I thought, and that fact probably almost entirely reflects just how many people in the lower class are making just about $0 a year. Am I supposed to be glad I'm making infinite percentages of that $0 salary; or might reality dim my mood when I realize that my educational debt will effect every major life decision I ever make quite possibly until the day I die? At the last I checked NYTimes had not published my admittedly sarcastic equation laden talkback about this, and no one else had pointed out what I consider to be a mathematically obvious truth. Liberals frequently forget that one of the best tools for progress is as simple as documenting reality. You can argue opinions, but you can't argue facts. There is no reason simple citizens like myself can not accumulate data and use it to challenge government's official (and utterly nonsensical) narratives. Europeans, Indians, Israelis and Africans have all caught on to this. Citizen audits of issues as diverse as housing stock and sanitation issues have probably been the most powerful tool normal people have taken up to fight government negligence and de-development. While many professors were off striking radical poses for undergraduates, slum dwellers were carefully tallying up the functional toilets in their slums, and painstakingly amassing and analyzing data often teaching themselves statistical analysis along the way. In my own formerly impoverished now gentrifying neighborhood in Haifa people powered neighborhood groups found important satisfying roles for even people who claimed they just "couldn't do math." For example some headed ad-hoc committees which would visit neighbors when they went to the hospital. Such committees not only brought cheer to bed bound patients, they gathered extremely important qualitative data, that later informed our quantitative analysis on the effects of the smog producing mess of an oil refinery put smack in our city by our ecologically illiterate government. But in truth, I discovered that many people can do math if you patiently teach them. Some of my own research, which hinted that Haifa's babies may be born pre-polluted and therefore endocrinologically altered, was aided by the newly developed data skills of an unemployed historian and a part time cashier without whom I never could have crunched through the data on hundreds of prenatal ultrasounds in the city (at least not while working). They did such a good job I received a special honor for my work from my academic medical system. Lest our Haifa Hadarist agendas get sucked into the ethnocratic policies of the day tearing our co-existance community apart, we actively, purposefully sought to include every subculture of our neighborhood from Ethiopian to Palestinian to Mizrachi to Russian to Ashkenazi. We were Haifaists protecting ourselves, and as to the Professors, we knew where to find them for some expert opinions because some were fighting right alongside of us. After all, they had to survive the city as well. I'm afraid American professors aren't living in the same cities or even the same planet as us the people.
I recently tried to start a sort of citizen audit of childhood debt. I was keen on learning from groups beyond Israeli ones how this stuff gets done. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to because some academic types actively sought to disinclude me. I'll save the story for a future blog perhaps not even written by myself. After all, I'm a humble stupid worker who according to some more radical people "know[s] nothing" at least according to one email I started reading on a Strike Debt listserv. I didn't bother to finish reading it, because I couldn't be bothered as I was busy figuring out when I would get paid for editing a paper about myocardial infarctions. I'll never fit into the lunatic left. It's rather ironic, and might even be understood under Freud's ideas about the narcicism of small differences; except that there is an unfortunate large difference. I actually suffer from the issues this lunatic left claims to care so much about, and many of their loudest voices do not. Maybe most people already figured out this weird scheme of radical pose striking out, and this is why they are quietly defending themselves in many corners of the earth.
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