The TBOE and two definitions of "authority"

Perhaps the best-known speech from one of Shakespeare’s least-known plays is this one by Ulysses in Act I, scene iii of Troilus and Cressida:

O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

Clearly, ol’ Ulysses is upset about something, here, but, Gentle Reader, you might not be quite able to figure out exactly what it is that’s bothering him. The fact that I can help you out a little is in fact somewhat related to what I want to talk about in this essay. Let’s start with what the passage means, then move on to what I mean.

“Degree,” here, can be interpreted roughly as “respect for authority.” In this specific application, Ulysses is talking about the power of military commanders to have their orders obeyed without question—hence the observation on SparkNotes that “The speech is a perfect encapsulation of conservative politics.” But there are more things in degree and authority, Ulysses, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

We start by recognizing that there is no one definition of “authority”: Dictionary.com lists 13. Several of these specific meanings become relevant to the discussion, but what is most important to me is that they are all related. “The power to determine, adjudicate, or otherwise settle issues or disputes; jurisdiction; the right to control, command, or determine,” then, is etymologically linked to “an accepted source of information, advice, etc.,” to “an expert on a subject,” and to “right to respect or acceptance of one's word, command, thought, etc.” The clear (and optimistic) implication here is that “authority” in the sense of power is derived from “authority” in the sense of expertise.

Thus, the notion of degree, central to Renaissance humanist philosophy, may mean “knowing your place,” but such a construction simultaneously recognizes that skill comes in many forms. The “Renaissance man (or woman),” moreover, is not a person who has achieved mastery in many fields, but rather who is competent or better across a spectrum of pursuits. Indeed, the Renaissance prince was warned by the likes of Erasmus and Castiglione not to become too accomplished at ancillary occupations: one could not be a successful courtier without having basic skills in the arts, for example, but to develop into as good a painter as a professional artist would inherently mean taking time away from learning the more important, or at least more relevant, skills of statecraft. The English Renaissance playwright John Lyly, the subject of my MA thesis, provides numerous examples of this phenomenon in action: characters who attempt to learn something outside their intended role in society always come across as misguided (Alexander the Great in Campaspe) or even silly (Raffe the page in Gallathea).

We see examples of this in our world all the time. I can help you understand that Shakespeare passage because that’s what I’m trained to do: and I received that training at least in part because I demonstrated a pre-existing aptitude for the work. It helps me that I know something of history and philosophy, even that I have a basic understanding of scientific method. But that young woman from the Chemistry Department who presented at the Undergraduate Research Conference a few weeks ago left me in the dust beginning at about her second sentence. And that’s a good thing. To use an example from a different discipline: while I’d love to have a better understanding of derivatives and credit default swaps and all that other stuff that brought the world economy to the brink, the fact remains that there’s a opportunity cost involved: time I spend doing that is time I don’t spend preparing for my next class, next production, or next article.

In the purely practical world, I can fill my own gas-tank, change a tire, and replace a battery, but don’t ask me what’s wrong when your car makes that funny noise. But—and here’s the part that matters—the same mechanic who can diagnose and fix whatever’s wrong with my vehicle while I stand by helplessly might well struggle in the most elementary course I teach. In an advanced society, we have different skills. One might almost say that such distribution of work—jobs matched to workers on the basis of specific competencies—is the foundation of a modern economic system.

All this, then, can be taken as a paean to one kind of authority, the kind defined by expertise. It is not necessarily specifically not an endorsement of the other kind of authority, the kind defined by power. And that distinction, it seems to me, is what has come to define the political divide between the hard right and everyone else. The folks at Palin-R-Us are all about power—their own, at least—but not so much about that other kind of authority, the one having to do with mastery. And those of us cloistered in the ivory-towered, chablis-sipping, tweed-jacket-with-leather-elbows world of the (shudder when you say it) intellectual tend not to respond terribly well to the other form of authority: the one that presumes legitimacy based on the position of the individual concerned rather than on his/her actual credentials. (Think Heckuvajob Brownie.) The first time I ever heard the term “herding cats,” it was used by a Stanford dean to describe trying to manage the faculty at that institution. I would like to think that I, too, am roughly as herdable as the average feline.

All the actual evidence suggests that global warming is a real and serious phenomenon, and climatologists, geologists, meteorologists, and similar people who actually know what they’re talking about are virtually unanimous about the situation’s gravity, causes, and potential solutions. Evolution is accepted as the best available explanation of observed phenomena by an overwhelming majority of biologists, geneticists, et al. Every study conducted by qualified sociologists and similar professionals shows that abstinence-only sex education programs not only don’t work, but are often even counter-productive. The list goes on and on. And the right continues to pretend that their ability to drum up contention on Fox News qualifies as an actual challenge to this science. There was a point in time when the right was as accepting of evidence as the left was. The debate, and it was vigorous and authentic, was not over the facts but over the interpretation of those facts. But that was before the Jimmy Swaggerts and Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons found they could achieve personal wealth and power by preaching willful ignorance and often outright lies to their acritical flocks.

Be it noted: 1). I do not think science has all the answers, 2). I’m all in favor of skepticism, and 3). I recognize that minority opinions are valuable and often accurate (I hold a number of them, politically and professionally). That said, I do think biologists know more about biology than televangelists or right-wing think-tankers do. I am all in favor of questioning both methodologies and conclusions, but not of denying facts. And while minority opinions are useful challenges to conventional wisdom, minority fact-sets are generally just fabrications.

All of this brings us—at last (you were waiting, weren’t you?)—to one of the leading news stories of the week: the decision by the Texas Board of Education to radically revise curriculum standards for social studies courses throughout the state. I’ve already commented, in the initial posting of this particular chapter of my blogging life (it’s essentially the second half of that essay), on what I think of these changes. If you didn’t read that piece, you can probably guess my attitude, either through knowing me personally or by reading the above paragraphs.

As I said in the earlier piece, some of the objections to the TBOE actions are a bit over-the-top. I really don’t give a damn if Dolores Huerta is included in the 3rd-grade list of good citizens or Henry Cisneros is included on the 4th-grade list of notable Texans. But in terms of both content and process, the Board deserves plenty of derision.

According to a report in that socialist mouthpiece the Wall Street Journal, here’s one example of what happened in January: “The previous standards [for 1st-graders], a decade old, defined good citizenship as ‘a belief in justice, truth, equality and responsibility for the common good.’ The new standards talk about respect for others, personal responsibility, and the importance of voting and of ‘holding public officials to their word.’ Board member Don McLeroy, who leads the most conservative bloc on the board, said that ‘responsibility for the common good’ does not belong in the standards because it is ‘a liberal notion’ that edges toward communist philosophy.” Snorted the Texas Freedom Network live-blogger in response, “McLeroy must be really unhappy with the folks who write Marxist claptrap like ‘promote the general Welfare.’”

Well, actually, yes, he is. Neither he nor his far-right cohorts do, in fact, care much for the Deist Gouverneur Morris, who is widely credited with writing those words from the Preamble to the Constitution, and still less for James Madison, crafter of the First Amendment… he thought there should be separation of Church and State, after all. Here’s one of many articulations of that fact, this one from an 1822 letter: “An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against.” Thomas Jefferson, who wrote most of the Declaration of Independence? Nope: devalue him. He invented the term, after all. (To be fair, Jefferson was ultimately added back into the curriculum; Madison, the father of the Bill of Rights, wasn’t so lucky.)

In other news… The Board now lists “sectionalism” (whatever the hell that is) as the principal cause of the Civil War. Slavery? Third in line, behind states’ rights. The Venona papers, which prove basically that some of the people whose lives were ruined by HUAC and/or Joseph McCarthy were in fact guilty, are now credited with “confirm[ing]” HUAC “findings.” The conservative faction, generally all about required lists, shifted ground when Sonia Sotomayor was added to a standard on women’s contributions to American history… all of a sudden, that list is merely “suggested.”

Here’s a selection of the live-blogging done by a representative of the Texas Freedom Network:

• “In January the board deleted Bill Martin, author of the popular children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, from the third-grade standards. Based on a simple Internet search by a board colleague, board members mistakenly confused Martin with another Bill Martin who wrote a book about Marxism. After an avalanche of derision, in March the board put the Brown Bear, Brown Bear author back in the standards. One wonders how these board members can still say with a straight face that they don’t need experts advising them as they rip through the standards, offering numerous revisions based on little more than their limited personal knowledge and opinions.”

• “Board member David Bradley wants third-grade students to study the impact of taxes and government regulations on consumer prices. In third grade? It passes.”

• “Now [Don] McLeroy offers his expected standard on global organizations: ‘evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U. S. sovereignty through the use of treaties.’ His justification is that U.S. sovereignty is threatened by cooperation with international organizations. This is typical right-wing paranoia. In fact, we’re looking for the black helicopters he must think are circling the building…. But guess what? It passes.”

Need I continue?

The problem here isn’t simply that these people are political hacks, gracelessly perverting the cause of real education for the sake of their religio-political agenda. It isn’t even the irony—not to say hypocrisy—of a right-wing attempt to impose restrictions on the individual freedoms not merely of teachers, but of principals, superintendents, and local boards of education by mandating inflexible and ultimately stultifying governmentally-defined “standards”—a paradigm which is, when one thinks about it, far more socialistic than anything the Obama administration has dreamt of, let alone attempted to enact.

No, it’s the Sarah Palin syndrome: the idea that “just folks” are who we want making our decisions. As I said in a piece on my old blog: “I [don’t] see the advantage to having someone ‘like me’ in positions of responsibility: I don't want that in my plumber, my arborist, or my dental hygienist: why should I want it in a Vice President? Worse yet, why should I be interested in someone less knowledgeable about the issues than I am? If I'm better with an axe than anyone I could hire would be, I'll chop my own damned firewood.” And most of these folks are way less qualified in any real terms to sit on a state board of education than I would be. (N.B. that doesn’t mean I think I’m qualified, just less unqualified than these people.)

The most vocal members of the conservative cabal that will influence curricula and textbook sales across the country for the next decade consist of: a businessman and executive in the state Republican party, a real estate broker, a small-town newspaper publisher, an insurance salesman, a dentist, and lawyer whose degree is from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (she’s the one who wrote a book in which she describes public education as “a subtly deceptive tool of perversion” and thinks it’s unconstitutional and “tyrannical”—just who we want on a State Board of Education, right?). Unsurprisingly, the one Republican on the TBOE who seems at all interested in educating rather than propagandizing (arguing, for example, that students should contemplate the “effects” rather than simply the “benefits” of free enterprise) is Patricia Hardy, who taught world history for thirty years. I disagree with her about a lot (it was her idea, for example, to strike Madison from an amendment that would have returned him, along with Jefferson, to the standards), but at least she’s worth listening to.

But the others scrupulously avoid coming into contact with anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about. The standards were created by a panel of teachers and scholars… then the politicos hacked them beyond recognition. Attempts by the Democrats on the board to have the standards reviewed by experts: rejected, as were the overwhelming majority of attempts by actually qualified people to address the Board during the decision-making process. Moreover, the evidence suggests that they aren’t even representing the wishes of the electorate.

According to a poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research, not only do Texans think curricular decisions should be made by “teachers and academic scholars” rather than by “an elected state school board” by an overwhelming 72-19 margin, but support for actual expertise goes up among parents (78-15) and even holds very strong among Republicans (63-24). Indeed, a majority (53%) of Republicans feel strongly that the TBOE should butt out. Similarly, belief that separation of church and state is a “key principle of our Constitution” comes in at 68-26 overall, and 59-34 even among Texas Republicans, who aren’t necessarily known for making that distinction. [N.B. the poll was conducted for the Texas Freedom Network, and pollsters are sometimes wont to provide results akin to what their client would like to see…]

If I were on the Board, I’d yield to child development experts on when certain ideas should best be introduced; I’d yield to historians and other social scientists on who’s more important than whom and what’s more important than what; I’d yield to elementary and high school teachers on what works in their classrooms. To the right-wing indoctrinators who, alas, comprise the majority of the TBOE, however, I’d yield on not one damned thing. Which, my friends, is why I have no future in politics.

One does not disagree about the empirical...

The 1976 election wasn’t my first, but it was the first for which my own political sensibility had developed enough that I felt confident voting for someone other than the candidate my parents liked. So it was that, in the contest for Senator from New York, I chose not to go with the incumbent, James Buckley, but rather with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Buckley, like his better-known younger brother William, was an intelligent, principled conservative (they existed back then), and although I disagreed with him on many issues, I would have been perfectly content had he won re-election. Indeed, I would cheerfully have voted for him over either of the major-party presidential candidates that year: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

But there was something very appealing to me about Moynihan. He was widely respected from across the political spectrum: there was no doubt that he was a Democrat, and a rather liberal one at that, but he had served in three significant positions in the Nixon administration, most notably as Ambassador to the United Nations. More to the point, there was a sort of swaggering intellectualism about the man, a character trait that was darned near intoxicating to this 21-year-old wannabe intellectual. Pat Moynihan was, more often than not, the smartest person in the room… and he wasn’t afraid to let everyone else know it. How cool is that?

I’ve been thinking about Pat Moynihan lately, not so much for his manifold accomplishments per se, or indeed for the fact that today is St. Patrick’s Day and Moynihan was a quintessential Irish-American politician, as for a particular quotation often attributed to him, although it is pretty clear that he wasn’t the first to say it. The preceding caveat is especially important, given the aphorism itself: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” That sentence, or a variant of it, was probably first used by the financier Bernie Baruch, who apparently argued that no man “has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger supposedly introduced the concept of having one’s own facts. Either way, the saying came to be associated with Moynihan, for whom it became something of a motto. Facts do matter—including facts about the provenance of the quotation, which accounts for the nuanced (some might say “equivocating”) inclusion of such words as “attributed,” “probably,” “apparently,” and “supposedly” earlier in this paragraph.

Facts apparently don’t matter to today’s right wing. It used to be (you know, in that antediluvian era before the W administration) that there was a distinction between the facts themselves and our interpretation of them. As a recipient of a PhD in the humanities in the 1990s, I can assure you, gentle reader, that I am familiar with the critical theories (advanced, I note sardonically, almost exclusively by Marxists) that everything is an act of interpretation… to which I reply, because this essay may be read by those of tender sensibilities, “Bovine feces.” Empirical evidence is different from opinion, even from analysis. True, that line has been blurred a lot of late. To pick one of literally dozens of examples, take the Supreme Court’s assertion of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to justify federal interference in states’ medical marijuana laws for activity which is neither interstate nor commerce. But there’s a reason that Supreme Court rulings are called “opinions,” and most of us can wrap our respective heads around that concept.

We have long known, too, that there are those on the right who dispute evolution or climate change, or who recklessly toss around incendiary rhetoric about “death panels” and the like. But while such arguments may involve what an old grad school professor of mine called “active misreading,” the fact remains (if I may use such a phrase) that evolution, for example, is indeed a theory: a theory which answers far more questions than any competing explanation, but a theory all the same. And the lies about death panels are just that: lies. No one saner than Virginia Foxx or our own Louis Gohmert, and that’s about everybody but Glenn Beck (or, rather, the wingnut character played by Glenn Beck to the tune of millions of dollars), who has looked at the evidence believes any of that crap.

Ah, but that’s the key: looking at the evidence. The last week has provided us with a couple of stories which I find relevant to this discussion. One is this assertion by JD Hayworth, the talk-show host for whom John McCain is far too liberal: “the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this… move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage—now, get this—they defined marriage as simply, quote, ‘the establishment of intimacy.’ Now, how dangerous is that? …. I guess that would mean, if you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse.” Let’s leave aside the offensiveness of his commentary, its equation of homosexuality and bestiality, and the implicit argument that in Hayworth’s world horses can enter into contracts and sign all the requisite papers. And let us grant that Mr. Hayworth is entitled to an opinion—one with which I passionately disagree, but one to which he has every right—that gay marriage is/would be an abomination. But now the Baruch/Schlesinger/Moynihan observation becomes relevant: he is not entitled to his own facts. Here’s Rachel Maddow having a very good day even by her standards, dismantling Hayworth the other night, after Hayworth repeated his claim on her program: “’The establishment of intimacy’ as the definition of marriage: it’s just not there, let alone the horse thing…”

Maddow explains that she has spent the afternoon word-searching the relevant documents and can’t find anything like the definition Hayworth uses as the cornerstone of his argument.

Then we get this:

Maddow: What you said about the establishment of intimacy being the definition of marriage in Massachusetts: I don’t think it’s true, sir.

Hayworth: Well, that’s fine. You and I can have a disagreement about that.

Maddow: Well, it either is true or it isn’t; it’s empirical.

Hayworth: OK. Well, I appreciate the fact that we have a disagreement on that…

WHAT???

A disagreement? If some student says on a theatre history test that Adolphe Appia was a German playwright when in fact he was a Swiss designer, are we “hav[ing] a disagreement on that”? Nope. That student is wrong. Period. End of discussion. And, Mr. Hayworth, you’re wrong. There are three possibilities: you’re sloppy, you’re insane, or you’re lying. Pick one (or more).

All of which brings us to the recent preliminary decisions by the Texas Board of Education regarding social studies curricula. There are serious repercussions here, spawned by the outsized national influence of decisions made by a collection of political hacks in Texas. Texas, you see, buys a lot of books, and authors and publishers more interested in making a buck than in accurate portrayal of events pander to the whims of whatever zealots happen to be in charge in Texas at a precise moment in time. So, textbooks written and distributed by these intellectual whores people get a massive order up front, bringing down per-copy production costs and thereby lowering the cost of the book everywhere, making it more likely to be adopted in districts outside Texas, and, of course, by evangelical home-schoolers. This example of capitalism (excuse me, the “free-enterprise system”) in action, by the way, does not seem to be highlighted in the new curricular guidelines.

Certainly, speaking as someone who will have to deal directly with the consequences of this initiative, I’m not pleased. Well over 90% of my students come from Texas public high schools, and there are already problems, especially in the general university population. Whether because of the reputation of our theatre program or because theatre students are by nature more curious and/or anti-authoritarian, I am actually (with notable exceptions) very pleased with the analytical skills of the majority of theatre students I see in our introductory (100-level, for majors and minors) Play Analysis class. And, to be sure, there are always good students in the (non-major) Theatre Appreciation class… but their numbers are small, and apparently dropping. I always begin my lecture on the modern theatre in that class, for example, by discussing the social, economic, and intellectual climate of the 19th century. I talk about the Industrial Revolution. Blank stares. I ask for examples of seminal thinkers. Deer-caught-in-the-headlights stares. I prompt them to talk about Freud or Nietzsche or Marx. Few students can utter a single intelligent comment about any of them. There’s always a sociology major who has never heard of Comte or a philosophy major who has never encountered the word “dialectic” or a biology major who can’t articulate the most basic principles of natural selection.

And now we’re getting a degrading of the importance of perhaps the single most significant (and influential) American political thinker ever, the man primarily responsible for writing the Declaration of Independence, because he was a Deist instead of a Christian per se and advocated the separation of church and state (a term he coined, by the way)? We’re placing Jefferson Davis’s inaugural speech alongside Abraham Lincoln’s? Phyllis Schlafly is now a significant historical figure? The Heritage Foundation is worthy of study in a high school history course? All this from a board which not only doesn’t include anyone with actual credentials in the social sciences, but which is so arrogant it can’t be bothered even to consult actual experts? Oy.

To be fair, some of the arguments from the left aren’t exactly intellectually rigorous, either. I don’t want history classes to “include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population.” I want them to include discussions of such people because they did something significant. Nor do I object to the inclusion of the Black Panthers (for example) alongside the nonviolent philosophies of Martin Luther King, nor of Milton Friedman on the list of prominent economic theorists. And it is true, for example, that the release of the Venona papers does confirm the guilt of some people long regarded by the left as falsely accused. But context is all. To suggest that the excesses of Joseph McCarthy were in any way legitimized by the fact that there were indeed Soviet spies in America at the time (did anyone ever really doubt this?) is roughly equivalent to vilifying anyone who has ever been to a gun show or taken a handgun to a firing range on the grounds that gun-related murders take place every day. Sooner or later, you’ll probably catch an actual murderer. That doesn’t mean it’s worth the cost.

The trouble with the social sciences and humanities is that those disciplines don’t exist without analysis. We can state as fact that Shakespeare has long been regarded as the most important English-language playwright; we can’t say that he’s the best—or, rather, to say so would be to express an opinion, not a fact. Similarly, we can argue over the extent to which the Founding Fathers were or were not influenced by a specifically Christian theology: even the innocuous suggestion that some were more than others is probably a matter for debate. But we cannot argue that the concept of separation of church and state does not exist, that it was not propounded by the author of the Declaration of Independence, that it did not reverberate throughout the Western world, or indeed that generations of Supreme Court Justices haven’t continually re-affirmed that distinction. Any attempt to deny, suppress, or distort this simple truth by whatever means, direct or indirect, is inevitably an attempt to advance a religio-political agenda rather than to achieve a balanced pedagogy.

That last sentence is an opinion. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.