The re-posting of my little Swiftian fantasy triggered a tsunami of comments -- well, three, but since I really do think of this blog as a conversation, that is a lot. So let me respond. First of all, to my friend Warren Goldfarb [who is, as perhaps a few of you may not know, a famous senior logician in the Philosophy Department at Harvard], what on earth is "der shmekel hack"? Google fails me on this one, but it sounds like something I ought to know about.
To James Camion McGuiggan:
What you say strikes a responsive chord in me. There is something extremely odd about making
one's living as a philosopher. This is a
rather recent development, of course, as philosophy goes -- really only in the
18th century did people start to earn their bread as philosophers. By the way, recall that until Kant was
elevated to a professorship at Kรถnigsberg,
he was a privat docent, which meant
that he was paid by the student. For those of us who considered the transition
from a 2-2 to a 3-3 teaching load the end of an era, it is chastening to recall
that the greatest philosopher since
Aristotle lectured fourteen hours a week or more on every conceivable subject.
It is even odder that in the United States there are perhaps
eight thousand people whose job description is "Professor of Philosophy." I have not been to a convention of
philosophers in a number of decades, but the last time I attended the annual
meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, I
recall standing in the crowded lobby of the hotel where the meeting was taking
place and thinking to myself, "This could be a meeting of the sales force
of United Porta-Toilet Corporation, except that they would be better dressed." What on earth would Socrates think of eight
thousand philosophers? Did Plato charge
Aristotle tuition in the Groves of Academe?
I hope not.
By the way, I don't know about where you are, but in the
United States, although the manifest function of higher education is to
introduce students to the life of the mind, the latent function [to employ
Robert Merton's useful distinction] is to sort too many young people into too
few high paying jobs. We are
gatekeepers, essentially.
To Magpie:
Your comment reminds me of the hierarchy of characters in
the great comic strip Peanuts. Charlie Brown talks to his dog, Snoopy. Snoopy talks to his little bird friend,
Woodstock, in language that is printed in very small letters. Woodstock talks to his even littler bird
friends, but Woodstock is so small that what he says is represented simply as a
series of tiny exclamation marks, which presumably are comprehensible to the tiny
birds. Well, when I was young, Quine
talked to people like Charles Parsons and Hao Wang and Burton Dreben and
Hartley Rogers [or, later on Warren
Goldfarb], who in turn talked to folks like me, but in characters too small to
be read by the likes of Quine, and all of us little birds talked to one another
in equally small characters, understandable by ourselves but probably heard
only as high-pitched squeaks by Quine.
Still and all, life was fun among us baby birds. I still recall all of us going out for a
collective Chinese meal, whose cost we shared equally, and trying to eat faster
than Hubert Dreyfus, who, thin though he was, wielded chopsticks with deadly
speed and accuracy.
4 comments:
Thanks for the response! Regarding the last paragraph in your response to me, let me out-Tigger you and insist that although the latent function may be what you say it is (my sense (I'm in the UK) is that people are trying to make it so but with a huge amount of fightback from academics, which renders the whole situation messy and confused, which is fine by me, considering the forces ranged against us), as educators and teachers and members of the academy, we have some say in what the function is. Philosophers especially can teach their students about hegemony and Marxism, about how art can change your life in a deep way, about how we have to act politically; more generally, we can undermine the problematic latent function in many and various ways. And some of us do! (With eight thousand philosophers in the U.S. alone you might hope that this battle would be easier, but imagine how much harder again it would be if we didn't have these eight thousand.)
"Shmekel hack" is a somewhat made-up Yiddish expression, by the comic actors Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion (whose four short routines, which I find really funny, can be found at yidlifecrisis.com): "shmekel" is one of the many Yiddish words for the male organ; "hackn" is Yiddish for "to cut". (In traditional Yiddish the word that would have been used is simply "bris".)
I don't think further explanation should be needed, but the fact is that Sullivan has been obsessed with the practice of circumcision: he thinks it is genital mutilation on a par with what is done to women in the Middle East.
Thank you, Warren What is the Twitter acronym for smacking one's head with the palm of one's hand? I should have guessed. He is indeed obsessed about circumcision. Well, as Richard Nixon famously said about himself after losing the California governor's race [I think], we won't have Andrew Sullivan to kick around anymore.
...!!! :-)
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