I hope this guy never googles my name

Several of my friends don't use their real names on their blogs. Sometimes I wish I'd done this. By attaching my real name to this blog, I've made it tough to talk about my actual experiences. For example, I'm in this class this semester that is literally driving me crazy. Here's why:

The prof is a generally like-able guy. He doesn't really lecture, so the classes follow a very conversational, informal format. He claims to adhere to John Dewey's ideas about education and learning by doing and so on. All good things.

The problem is that it's a total scam. If you put aside what he says he does, and look at what he actually does, he's a total authoritarian. I've realized now why I can't stand the class and why nothing ever seems to get accomplished in our frequent discussions/arguments: the guy doesn't make arguments. Not in the rational, logical sense of laying out a progression of assumptions, claims and mechanisms by which these claims link together to form a coherent position that can be challenged and defended through rational debate.

The guy simply makes claims. When asked to defend those claims, you don't get an argument, but you get either a) an appeal to authority of some sort or b) a quasi-theological, slippery slope appeal to the inherent purity or impurity of some idea. The authority is typically him and his experience, or one of his forbearers in his field of study (who can do no wrong) or someone important he had a conversation with once. Of course, I don't reject right away that these people may, in fact, be authorities, but the way I would verify this is by looking at the logic of their arguments and the strength or weakness of their evidence. These are not provided. If you ask for them, he reverts to the second tactic: the quasi-theological appeal to purity. Now, I'm not actually saying that he appeals to God - he doesn't. In fact, he spends much time talking about his concern over the religious right and their attacks on public education. What I'm trying to say is that the logic of labeling something "pure" or "impure" is the same. So, for example, he really, really dislikes arguments about an "innate" human nature. So any claims about human instincts, no matter what the argument or evidence supporting it, get the same response: that even entertaining the idea that there are "innate" things leads you straight down the road to Eugenics, the Holocaust and slavery. Of course, forget the miles and miles of slippery slope between "certain traits are innate to human beings" to "people deserve to be rewarded/punished for their innate traits" and then to "particular groups of people are inferior/superior and inequality among them is justified." All we need to know is that, in the past, people have used the idea of innateness to do really bad things...now listen to the wise professor, damn-it.

Today, however, I got the example that really pushes him into Flat Earth Society territory. He gave the example of Multiple Sclerosis and suggested that it may be "a contextual pathology" that is the product of "orienting stories" we tell ourselves that prevent us from "turning off" the symptoms (I'm quoting directly his writing - no, it's not published...). His example is loss of memory. Ok, now my family happens to have some experience with MS, and multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease where your immune system gets overactive and starts attacking the myelin that coats your nerves. This, as you can imagine, causes problems. Many problems - the list of symptoms for MS is huge and no one person experiences it the same way. However, there are things all people with MS have in common. They can do MRI scans of your brain and spine and you can see the lesions from the MS. I know lots of people with terrible memory, but if they don't have MS, they do not have these lesions that cause it. Moreover, they have medicine now that is effective at slowing the rate of the occurrence of flare-ups (for most people, the disease is "relapsing-remitting," meaning that you go through phases where you're more or less fine and then stages where you get flare-ups and, often, the onset of new symptoms). Now this medicine works because it treats MS as a biological phenomenon, not as "a contextual pathology" resulting from "orienting stories." This is absurd. Of course, context matters - when women are pregnant their symptoms tend to go away and people in certain climates tend to develop symptoms less than people in others. But to suggest it's simply a "pathology" that people could talk themselves through if they had different "stories" is just absurd, not to mention a total insult to the people who have MS. But, in his view, to approach the problem as a biological problem is to start the long walk down the slippery slope to forced sterilization and slaves. Any discussion about things being heritable, innate or not a result of our social interaction with one another is dismissed out-of-hand. It's impure and can't even be considered. If you have evidence that suggests innateness, then it must be wrong because people are too stupid to make the distinction between empirical facts about the way our bodies work and what the moral implications of those facts should be.

Of course, these standards of argument don't apply to anyone else. When people ask legitimate questions, he regularly shuts them down by saying things like "That doesn't come into play here" or "Nobody's really saying that." Someone today in class was corrected for discussing how an embryo "grows." He corrected them, saying he prefers "change" to "growth" because it doesn't imply imposing notions of progress on the change. Just moments later, however, he made an appeal to his authority by virtue of his long life experience - the "you'll see" tactic, just like when your parents told you that you'd change your mind about whatever disagreements you had with them once you got older and more mature. I pointed this out - asking if this implied that he had some sort of "growth" that had made him more knowledgeable than us. Another student in the class (the other students in the class, by the way, are great) said that of course, he has more experience and this gives him a valuable perspective. I agree experience gives you valuable knowledge, but how can his "change" be "experience" and an embryo's just be "change"?

I'm sure if he read this, he'd say I've got him all wrong. But remember what I said above: look at what he does, not what he says. His claims often contradict each other. For example, today I started quoting him back at him. Saying, nearly verbatim, exactly what he's said throughout the semester (and he's ridiculously repetitive, too, so this isn't hard) and he replies saying "I never said that." Perhaps forgetfulness is his problem. Maybe that's why he's always making claims about the research that "nobody has even done yet." A short list of what "nobody has done": paid attention to Darwin's later work on emotions in humans and animals (false - cited like crazy...by the "innatists" he demonizes), paid attention to the role that mothers play in the "emergence" of their child's self (sure, no one does research on parenting...), paid attention to sociability in animals prior to the 1920s (not true) and I could go on.

His favorite impure Satan is Steven Pinker, whose book "The Blank Slate" is basically an argument for a) why the findings of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology suggest the existence of an innate human nature and then b) that these findings about nature do not imply reactionary, conservative morals and politics. In fact, the most consistent message throughout the whole book is that people shouldn't make the "naturalistic fallacy" - that because something is natural, it is therefore good. Likewise, they shouldn't make the "moralistic fallacy" - that because something is morally desirable, it is fact. Today, another student basically said just this and I agreed and he was like, "That's the first good thing you've said." Of course, the fact that it's the main point of a book he criticizes daily by grossly misrepresenting what the author says (I read the book last week - I also recommend it) suggests that either a) he hasn't actually read it, or b) he exercises about as much intellectual respect for professors at Harvard as he does for his own students: little to none.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I made the quick caveat "I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but..." when questioning him about how his "change" implied "growth," and he replied with "Oh, you don't have to try." So, let's recap: questioning the logic and evidence of the instructor's claims: disrespectful. Instructor being intellectual dishonest about work by other academics and hypocritically applying a standard to his own students he doesn't apply to himself: okay.

Yeah, typical Deweyite...