Steven Pinker Is Half Right On Education - Road to the Middle Class

HARVARD PSYCHOLOGY professor Steven Pinker is a standout contributor to our national dialogue. When Pinker talks, people listen. What he says about Harvard’s once-in-a-generation review of its course structure is important.

And what he says tells us a lot about our intellectual elite and the way they experience the world—and more crucially how they impress their opinions on the rest of us.

Pinker looks at the university’s “Report of the Committee on General Education” and finds a couple of problems. First of all he doesn’t like the tone of the committee’s approach to Science and Technology, and secondly he doesn’t like the approach to Reason and Faith.

On Science and Technology he worries about the introduction:

“Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative.”

Well yes, life-saving medicines and nuclear weapons, “and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers.”

To Pinker, the committee is missing the point.

Missing from the report is a sensitivity to the ennobling nature of knowledge: to the inherent value, with consequences too far-reaching to enumerate, of understanding how the world works. For one thing, it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.

Exactly, Dr. Pinker. The knowledge we have gathered in the last couple of centuries about the natural world is nothing short of miraculous. And the more we know, the more mysterious the universe appears.

But Pinker is also worried about the juxtaposition of Reason and Faith.

[T]he juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.
...
Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization.

Oh dear, Dr. Pinker. The reason that reason and faith are juxtaposed is because they are a Yin and Yang: the “Is” and the “Ought,” the facts and the meaning of the facts.

It’s all very well to amass a pile of facts about the world, but what do they mean? And what do we do about it? Faith or Religion is the process by which we breathe meaning into facts and form a judgment about “what is to be done.”

In fact, we can never “know” what is to be done. Everything about the future is uncertain, and that uncertainty is encapsulated in the findings of Kant that we cannot prove the existence of God, nor can we prove the non-existence of God. Similarly in the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel came up with his incompleteness theorem that states that the consistency of the axioms (the givens) in a system cannot be proved within the system.

That means that in order to prove the validity of the axioms of a system you must build a bigger system that tests the axioms of the smaller system. And so on.

Humans have come up with an ingenious system to deal with this radical uncertainty: Faith. We live out our lives on faith, assuming that certain things are true even though we can’t prove them to be true.

And even more radically, we have faith in reason. Why should reason and the application of reason in science be absolutely true? All we know is that reason works, provided it is confirmed by experiment, in all the science we have done thus far.

Reason is a very human tool for living in the world. How do we know that it is universal? We don’t. We just have faith in it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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