News of My Disappearance Has Been Mildly Exaggerated
To those of you who have written to ask or have been wondering in silence the answer is, yes, the combination of finishing a dissertation while planning for a cross-country move and a new job and also welcoming another son into my family (born in the living room, no less) has ground to a halt what little was left of my bloggy momentum. There is, though, a piece of mine in the latest New Atlantis in which I offer a Burkean’s lament over the death of conventional wisdom, focusing on – what else? – the science and pseudo-science of food, as well as a review in the November TAC of Susan Brewer’s Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, which I liked quite a lot. I was, however, quite frustrated by Brewer’s unwillingness to face down the consequences of her research for the traditional hagiography of one Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
Least satisfying of all is Brewer’s claim—made in both the introduction and the conclusion, and in each case entirely without argument—that even deceitful state propaganda can be tolerable if the cause is sufficiently noble. Brewer notes at the start that she believes World War II—“a legitimate war,” she calls it—fits this billing. She supplements this diagnosis with her attempt to distinguish the “censorship, exaggeration, and lies” relied on by the likes of the Bush administration from the “strategy of truth” adopted by FDR. But the facts make it hard to sustain such an interpretation: from Brewer’s own account, Roosevelt lied to the public about his intended policies as he ran for a third term in 1940, censored news reports that were deemed insufficiently optimistic, and of course sent 180,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps. (“Pioneer communities” was the official term.) Even the truth-telling strategy Brewer champions was itself an advertising move, based on the recognition that “too much salesmanship” on the part of the Office of War might turn people off, while more “straightforward and practical” instructions on what to do and believe would “regain public confidence in official propaganda.” If the cartoonish film and poster campaigns of the Wilson administration are the point of comparison, then the Iraq War’s salesmen come off rather well, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that in each case the public was being dishonestly sold a war by men who would barely have to sacrifice, much less fight and die, to implement their preferred policies.
All of which raises some natural questions: Are there circumstances in which state officials are permitted to lie, suppress non-strategic facts, or otherwise distort the truth in the service of an official agenda can be licit? If so, what circumstances are those? And more generally, what sorts of threats might be posed to a democracy by its government’s ability to exploit its inherent authority by functioning as a sort of advertising agency for itself?
That’s an okay piece on food, but it paints the consumer as rather a hapless victim. The plain fact is, often, “Mom” was happy to serve TV dinners, Pop-Tarts and Spaghetti-os, because she didn’t want to spend hours cooking nutritious meals. And even among those, like my wife and me, who are leading the totally examined, balanced and integrated life, it remains the case that free-range chicken is definitely tastier, but it’s a bit extravagant when you are planning to make soup stock, and it’s nice to have the cheaper choice available.
— y81 · Oct 19, 05:36 PM · #
True, but “Mom” was also encouraged to make those kinds of choices, and told that they were nutritionally superior, by quite powerful forces, the omnibenevolent federal government not least among them. I’m 100% in agreement, though, on soup stock, which is a ludicrous amount of work to make on one’s own.
— John Schwenkler · Oct 19, 05:41 PM · #
You were supposed to show up with answers! That was the deal, Schwenks. That was the deal. Now what do I do?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 19, 05:43 PM · #
Apologies, but I do not know this “deal” of which you speak.
— John Schwenkler · Oct 19, 05:47 PM · #
Nor do I. Nor do I. (wink)
In all seriousness, good luck with the new.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 19, 05:52 PM · #
Off to where? And congrats on the thesis, have you submitted/did you walk?
— Sanjay · Oct 19, 06:08 PM · #
Thanks, Sanjay. The move is to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where family will be much closer and I’ll be on the tenure track at Mount St. Mary’s – the only job I applied for last year, and with the way the job market is right now it’s perfectly clear that accepting it was a WISE decision. I haven’t submitted yet, though; the plan (no longer just a hope!) is to do so inside of the next 6-8 weeks.
— John Schwenkler · Oct 19, 06:26 PM · #
“in the next 6-8 weeks”? That doesn’t work out. So you’re starting ABD? Then I’d say it’d better be not “just a hope”!
You get away with it of course because Cal is like the only place in the world where we don’t do defenses.
— Sanjay · Oct 20, 12:18 AM · #
PRECISELY. But starting ABD wouldn’t be the end of the world; just a bit of a salary cut for the first semester.
— John Schwenkler · Oct 20, 12:39 AM · #
In general I have to say, I think the absence of a defense is a bit of a joke; I’d not have minded doing one. As far as I can tell nobody fails their defense or even takes a lot of heat at it unless he/she is a complete fool; I remember seeing folks invite their families to their defenses, which is not something you’d do for your quals or prelims (NB I think ours was the only group at UCB for which those two things are not the same).
But the defense serves a useful function for publicly outing incompetents and therfore giving yourself cover to fire them after the quals, which would normally be verboten. In this context I’ve heard one of many amusing Kary Mullis stories.
As a grad student of course Mullis has a reputation for going around stoned most of the time. So at some point he turned in a Ph.D. thesis — I think on bacterial siderophores — and I guess it was crap, so his committee gave it back to him and said, try again. And next semester he submitted the exact same thesis.
So they saw where it was going and gave him a pass. The defense would’ve been their opportunity to get the whole department to throw him out but failing that all that could’ve happened is his advisor just fires him, and basically some advisors will do that, some will do it in extreme circumstances — and some won’t do it at all. Mullis had a reputation also for being smart and I guess the prof in question felt like his hand was forced so that was that.
— Sanjay · Oct 20, 02:07 PM · #