I’m sorry, but political philosophy has been, and always will be, art

[Geist takes a bit of a stroll down memory lane. Before insulting Heideggerians]

Back in my college days, I developed what I now recognize to be an “approach” to reading political theory. I treated each political philosopher’s image of his[1] political subject as a work of art. Political philosophy was a matter of aesthetic appreciation. What I wanted to imagine and experience was human beauty.

Though I eventually achieved a somewhat respectable facility with the technical aspects of theorizing, I primarily read these texts to imagine what the experience of being a particular subject was ‘like’. What did being Aristotle’s citizen feel like? What was the texture of his everyday experiences? How did he perceive the world? And was his mode of life beautiful?

Many of us read novels for the same reason. This approach assumes that philosophers are not merely describing human beings, but creating them (though creation under the guise of description).[2] The ultimate question for me when assessing the value of a political theory was never ‘do I think this is right?’, but rather ‘do I want to make myself into this?’ Is this what I want to be?

That beauty, and not truth, could be the foundation of a political order has never been a particularly well-received notion. Plato famously casts the poets out of the Republic. Liberal political theory has long relegated aesthetic appreciation to the private realm. And fascism always stands as the guiding example of the dangers inherent in mixing art and politics, art and truth.

But we should recall that Plato only banishes the poets from the Republic after their job was done, that job being the moral education of its children. Songs and poems cultivate particular affective desires in the citizenry. The Republic itself orients our mode of experience in particular ways, ways that its citizens find to be beautiful.

Similarly, liberalism’s autonomous individual who freely makes choices is too an image of a particular mode of life, a particular way of being in the world. It’s a particular way of relating to other people and the world of “things”. When we say we agree with “liberalism” what we’re saying is that we want to experience the world in a particular way. We find that mode of engagement to be aesthetically desirable. I think conservatives, those who privilege the community over the individual and tradition over change, too are conservative for this same reason. As are democratic socialists. Communists. Anarchists. And so on.

We desire to become a particular imagining.

Which, of course, presents us with something of a problem. What we see in a pluralistic society is not, as we tend to think today, competing and differing political logics, but rather competing and differing aesthetic visions. And this is where I think liberal pluralism misunderstands the question. It proposes a meta-logic that all political logics can reasonably assent to. But these political logics are really the scaffolding upon an aesthetic foundation. They don’t provide the foundation in and of themselves.[3] What political liberalism needs instead is an over-arching meta-aesthetic that holds society together. That is, of course, if we find that vision of society to be aesthetically desirable.

In my reading, political philosophizing engages in what it was meant to deny: politics as art. But, if as I suggest, our judgment of the political subject is ultimately an aesthetic evaluation, then perhaps it’s time to accept this fact and work out what it means for our politics and our philosophizing. I think most of us can at least agree that this is an issue best not left to the Heideggerians.

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[1] The philosopher was always a male. Yes, political philosophy is very gendered.

[2] I would agree though that there is still a discernable descriptive component to political philosophy

[3] My reading of Habermas is that he’s painfully in love with Kant.

A Farewell to the Academy - The Left's Conservatism

[Fight fire with fire, ladies. Objectify away]

I’ve spent the past few posts discussing problems with how quantitative political science is conducted.[1] It’s now time to wrap up this needlessly bloated series by discussing how the Left has lost its way.

The New Left is a conservative force. What this means is that it denies itself the intellectual resources needed to challenge the status quo and as a result lacks the capabilities to articulate a positive vision for social change. Instead, Leftist politics today is primarily an aesthetic and affective force. It’s a mark of privilege and a sign of immense cultural capital. It’s clothing. It’s internet polemics. It’s blacklisting. It’s protest as a self-expressive activity. The revolution will look quite nice on that Ikea bookshelf.

                

But this diatribe is nothing new. And many before me have noted the conservative tinge of New Left politics. But let’s talk about why it’s conservative.

The problem is simple: the New Left wrongly view critique as an end in itself as opposed to the means to ground a positive project. 

Okay, so what does this mean?

                

The world is a vast diffusion of differences and similarities. By categorizing the world in one way rather than another, we privilege some similarities and some differences over others. And how we categorize the world follows from what our goals are. We categorize humans based upon race, gender, nationality, class, et cetera. For centuries, mind and body were distinct categorizations. The soul too. We have egoists and altruists. We have what constitutes harm. These are all chosen ways to cut up the world into objects. And they have all assumed differing levels of social and political significance through time.

                

The goal of political philosophy traditionally conceived is to establish what categories should provide the foundations for our political order. For Plato, it was the proper care of the soul. For Aristotle, human flourishing. For Rawls, a particular understanding of the human being as a Kantian(ish) moral subject. Whatever they are, it is argued that certain categories provide the basis for our positive social project.

                

These categories are not proposed arbitrarily. A crucial aspect of any political philosophical project is to weed out all other competing categorizations of the world as either inadequate to the task at hand or normatively undesirable. Critique for political philosophers is the means used to determine what our foundational categories should be. And these foundational categories provide the basis for our positive social projects, our vision for what society should look like.

                

The New Left takes all categories to be necessarily arbitrary. Its goal, then, is to uncover how all the categories we take to be natural or grounded by reason are in fact the results of some humans dominating others. All categorizations follow from power relationships. They discipline and constrain us. But we tend to say otherwise. So their true origins need to be exposed.

                

Thus the primary divide between the two traditions is over whether or not all categories are arbitrary and contingent. Kant tried to show that not all were, though it’s largely agreed by both sides that he failed here. Political philosophers tend to just ignore this and assume from the start that foundational categories are at least pragmatically necessary. The New Left, however, points to how this in itself is an exercise in domination.

                

Be that as it may, by deconstructing all categories into incoherency, the New Left denies itself any platform for a coherent social vision. There are no categories that we can build upon. They’re all problematic in this view. Ironically enough, the Left is too Kantian here: they too, like Kant, think that for our categories to hold any sort of purchase, they must be shown to be grounded in reason. If not, we stand defeated. All that remains is power. All we can do now is expose power’s effects.

              

Though, perhaps not all power is equally bad. Perhaps, even, not all power is bad at all. By denying us a social vision because doing so requires the ossification of certain categories, it denies the disempowered anything to organize around and fight back with. It denies those in power the opportunity to weigh competing choices. It advocates razing the earth with no plan for what should be built instead.[2]

Our visions may reek of power’s effects but at least they’re better than what we have.

                

One problem with political philosophy throughout its history has been its need to offer final solutions.[3] Plato’s republic, Aristotle’s polity, and Rawls’s liberal society are offered as “the end state”. We should not offer final solutions. But in rejecting final solutions, we should not feel defeated. We should not decry all solutions. What we should aspire toward are temporary solutions to problems at hand. We should constantly revise our categories and our visions.

Revision implies both negative critique and positive vision. It’s both creative and destructive. No categories should be final, but neither should we be afraid to use them.

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[1] See here and here

[2] It’s simply impractical to advocate leaving our categories in constant suspension and fluidity as many Leftists propose. Mainly because even the Leftist academic cannot epistemologically do this. No one can. What does language do? It fixes meaning. For every one category we deconstruct, we must hold 99 others constant in our head. We must objectify the world. If not, no semantic content can be conveyed at all. So deconstruction itself requires what it wishes to deny.

[3] I would include contemporary Marxish work in this category

A Farewell to the Academy - The Escapism of the Academic Left

When you separate a man from what he loves the most what you do is purge what’s unique in him. And when you purge what’s unique in him, you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you kill the revolution. Revolution is dissent. You don’t re-write what I write!

--Jack Reed, as played by Warren Beatty, Reds  

For anyone who’s watched Reds, what Jack Reed loves the most is not his art, or the revolution, or his wife, but the fantasy of the artist, the revolutionary, the lover. He is, to varying degrees, all of those things. But fantasy is about escaping from oneself, becoming something we cannot possibly imagine what it is. What we desire is the feeling of anticipation experienced just before the moment of transformation. The arrival of the promised escape. And we wait, for a sign, for anything really. A harbinger. We’re not sure. And then, one day, we ponder how something that never existed could possibly melt away.

Or so the high school Godot essay goes. It’s a pity we young academics oftentimes intellectualize these themes rather than reflect upon them. But then again, Beckett and, to a far lesser extent, Beatty have lived some shit. What the young academic and their high school selves lack is not intelligence, but experience. What can we know of Beckett when we’re 17? Or 25? Aren’t his condition and themes, for us, more like intellectual toys we play with but think are real? How dangerous is this? Quite, so it seems. We’re in grad school. And won’t stop bitching about it.

Our culture treats knowledge as an unmitigated good. But perhaps it’s still the case that some forms of knowledge are dangerous if held at the wrong time. What do Beckett or Proust or even Hegel impart to us at that tender age beyond the fantasy that we are on the verge of knowing some hidden truths about life and the world? The Beckettian references, the Proustian gestures, the Hegelian dialectics are nothing but accumulated cultural capital and seemingly existential comforts. One should never read Beckett and feel that he’s been mastered. But that’s all the young person can do.

It’s painfully ironic, then, that Godot and works like it have become their own sort of Godot for us: by devoting our lives to these texts and others like them we’ll one day achieve transformative knowledge. The act of reading Godot is the promise of escape.[1] And when transformative knowledge awaits, the gamble of tenure can be easily rationalized.

The life of an academic, just like the life of an activist, is a life of ritual. And ritual, as the anthropologists tell us, opens us up to transformation. In Reds Jack Reed performs all those required of the Marxist activist: the gestures, the meetings, the agitations, the speeches and polemics. Each action is thought to further prepare you for the transformation. It will purify your body and mind, make you ready. Just have faith in the rituals themselves.

Academia, like activism, is no different. It’s a mood, a collection of gestures, objects, and arguments. It’s what you wear. How you talk. The secret language you speak. The dusty book stacks. The tenor of your thoughts. The arguments as they are framed. The very problems that you consider. These all prepare us for transformation.

It would seem, then, that in leaving academia, we’re abandoning this project. That we, like Jack, have watched the fantasy melt away. But I doubt it. A constant gripe among academics in the humanities and social thought is about the stultifying nature of academic writing and argumentative conventions. Liberation from this confinement is an important and prominent theme in much of “quit lit”. But if this is the case, what’s being abandoned is not the fantasy, but the ritual. The ritual, you see, was tarnished. By modernity. By capitalism. By liberalism. It’s time for a new ritual at a new site far away from the academy. Because the academy is now wicked. It’s tainted. Its oracular properties disturbed.

It’s time, then, to found a new religion.

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[1] It’s astounding, yet understandable, how so many supposed readers of Nietzsche fall into this trap.

Bill Simmons thinks Bosh sucks--enough to be paid like a super-star

[This morning saw Geist, our ever lovable rapscallion, get into the lowest of low-grade Twitter scuffles with Grantland’s head NBA writer, Zach Lowe. To all his little Kafkas who have no idea who that is, it’s okay. Geist will be posting on “Love, Politics, and the Left” soon]

It began with a tweet.

Which was met with a reply:

And thus ensued the following conversation:

I have a great deal of respect for Lowe. His reporting and analysis are some of the best in the business and though a bit wonky, his podcast has quickly become one of my favorites. Truth be told, I’m not sure why I included Lowe’s twitter handle in the tweet. Probably because I wanted to get a reaction from someone whose opinion I value. And Lowe surely gets shit like this all the time, so it’s commendable that he even replied to me in the first place.

That Lowe proves himself to be a company man is neither particularly surprising nor is it something I’d hold against him. If I worked for a company like ESPN I’d give a diplomatic answer and a bit of snark at the end of my replies too. And it’s worth noting that my criticism does not extend to Lowe himself who’s largely defended Bosh during the Miami years.

And it’s not like Lowe is deaf to the shit that gets hurled at Bosh, much of it from ESPN. His Bosh commentary is oftentimes framed with “hey, this dude gets a bunch of undeserved shit slung at him.”

As for the merits of my critique, it could easily be settled by looking at the numbers, which I don’t have and frankly don’t have the time to compile. It could be done though. And it could be the case that among all writers, when aggregated, there’s not much substance to my criticism. That being said, there are a few ‘analysts’ out there who have a disproportionately large soap box and who fit the description.

For instance: Lowe’s boss, Bill Simmons.

Never mind all of the inane things Simmons has said about Bosh dating back to 2010 (like saying continuously on his podcasts first that the Heat were really just the “Big Two” and more recently that the Heat are just LeBron). Here’s what Simmons wrote about Bosh on June 18^th, 2014:

Q: Gut Feeling -- have we seen the best of Chris 

Bosh?

Almost definitely. For one thing, he suddenly has 11 years, 796 regular-season games, 89 playoff games and nearly 32,000 career minutes on his NBA odometer. But once the minutes, rebounds and free throw attempts start slipping, that’s the beginning of the end for elite big guys — Bosh dropped from 39.7 MPG, 8.5 RPG and 6.7 FTA in the 2011 playoffs to 34.3 MPG, 5.6 RPG and 2.4 FTA in 2014. At the same time, his 3-point attempts climbed from 0.2 (2011) to 3.7 (2014). Basically, Bosh quietly morphed into this generation’s Sam Perkins. And look, I loved me some Sam on those mid-’90s Sonics teams; Bosh could play for another 10 years doing a rich man’s Perkins impression. But not for $20 million a year.

If taken literally, Simmons is saying that Chris Bosh isn’t worth $200 million over the next decade. But seriously, who would argue that? Maybe LeBron would be worth $20 million a year at 40, but...no, that's insane. Even for LeBron. No, Simmons is saying that Bosh isn’t worth what he once was. He’s 30 now. The decline is inevitable. For his closing jab not to be completely meaningless, Simmons must be suggesting that Bosh isn’t worth $20+ million anymore (even though he’s never actually broken $20 million in his career). Simmons continues:

The Heat didn’t lose the 2014 Finals because of their offense; they lost because their supporting cast sucked, they couldn’t defend anyone, and Wade and Bosh aren’t the same guys anymore.

Doesn’t look like Bill’s willing to give Bosh a raise.

But here’s Simmons less than one month later on his podcast, which Lowe guests (starts at 14:45):

Bosh is the one who shouldn’t take any discount whatsoever, and I agreed with your column today. It should be up to him to take less because his team has to pay Dwyane Wade like a superstar because all he means to Miami.

Here’s how Lowe’s column starts:

[I]n a time of hushed meetings and amorphous potential offers, the Rockets have transformed a thought exercise into a real thing by presenting Chris Bosh a concrete choice: take a pay cut to stay in Miami, or earn your full maximum salary over a four-year deal in Houston.

The max salary? Averaging $22 million a year. Is Bill now suggesting that Bosh is actually worth his player maximum? If we’ve seen the best of Chris Bosh, which according to Simmons was never that great, why should he be pulling in almost as much as Carmelo is demanding? Why, if all the shit Simmons has given him is to be believed, does Chris Bosh deserve a super-star’s payday?

Sorry, Voxheads. A lot of people are a lot of fucked in the coming years

[Still riding off his buzz from the Germany-Brazil game, Geist, our intrepid truth-teller, sits in his office, full-Cheever, listening to “Hit Me Baby One More Time” on loop through really, really expensive headphones late into the night]

Vox’s favorite West Wing extra, Zack Beauchamp, has written, in one venue or another, that 2013 was the greatest year in human history. Basically, because liberalism. Though we should always be suspicious of anyone relying on “happiness studies” to make his case, I guess I can more or less see his point. Instead of dying, more people live on the edge of starvation than ever before. But let’s talk about why this rosy picture of the world might not persist in the coming decades.

Let’s talk about why a lot of people in the world are probably fucked.

(1)    The entire African continent. Status: massively fucked

It would make more sense for me to discuss Africa after I cover the environment and the global economy. It would be more dramatic if I gradually scaled up the fuck-level, capping it off with the massive fuckery that awaits this continent. But I’m not going to do that. Because it needs to be said upfront: Africa is stone-cold fucked.

[Drunkenly re-reading the above paragraph out loud, Geist is a bit taken aback by the task he’s set for himself]

It’s not just because Africa has no physical or institutional infrastructure to speak of, leaving it hypersensitive to climate fluctuations and the resulting famines, droughts, migrations, and conflict. And it’s not just because African leaders have struck deals with Asian and American multinationals to exploit the fuck out of its people and land.

No, let’s assume that, somehow, these things are resolved, or at least ameliorated. Which they certainly won’t be. But let’s assume that they are. Africa is still bone-deep fucked.

All countries undergo a crash course in technological development as they industrialize because, as late adopters, they have the benefit of being able to buy what’s already been developed. China didn’t independently have to invent the computer. India is the beneficiary of the Internet and smart phone technology. Much of the “growth” we see in these countries is a function of high returns on these technological soft cases. It’s when they catch-up that we see their economies slow down (*cough* China).

The multinationals sinking their FDI into Africa in the coming years are going to import the same industrial technology into Africa as is being used elsewhere: robots. Within the coming decade almost all industrial production will be manufactured by automated processes. The factories will have no need to employ the African people. Despite how fucked up modernization is, it at least put people to work and pulled them out of their even shittier conditions. Africa won’t even get that. There will be no jobs. In the West we’ll be talking about the ‘African miracle’ up until the point we have the shit shocked out of us when there are mass revolts by the unemployed workforce.  

(2)    The Environment. Status: Almost certainly fucked

You know how we know that the environment is fucked? Because when pressed, the only solution optimists have to offer is the faith that somebody will figure something out. Because we have to. When hard-pressed, sparks will fly. And from those sparks: a perfect solution. Whatever it is. Because that’s how narrative arcs resolve themselves, Goddammit.

My empirical work—when I did empirical work—was in international relations. I was a terrible scholar. But I know one thing about states: getting them to cooperate on anything non-trivial is like getting a libertarian to share a cookie: it’s not going to happen.[1] States are nasty, nasty Randian assholes. China will spray as much Prius repellent into the atmosphere as is necessary in its quest to build an authoritarian capitalist hyper-economy for its one billion citizens. Yes, it cares about pollution within its borders and will take care to hire Thomas Friedman to scrub every coal stack in the nation’s arsenal with his moustache. But fuck anyone who tells China it needs to tie one hand behind its back as it builds the most powerful economy in the world. Ditto India fifteen years from now. And the American people will take any excuse not to do anything, which leaves the EU, recycling so much of its trash that it’s actually causing more pollution than it’s preventing.

You know who will be least affected by global warming? The states that caused it. Their infrastructures can more or less handle the shocks. No, the global periphery will bear the brunt of the effects. There will be climate induced famines. There will be mass migration and a mass backlash and possibly mass violence from native populations. There will be resource wars. And water wars. Hyper-scarcity, bro. And the West and China and probably India will say “oh shit!” and raise the draw-bridge.

(3)    The Global Economy. Status: somewhat fucked

Though the environment is almost certainly fucked, for at least the next 50-60 years it’ll be business-as-usual among the core countries. They’ll largely be insulated from shocks and, let’s be honest, it’s not like the periphery really has that much of an effect of global economic trends. So things will largely be stable on that end.

But things are likely not going to be great by any measure. Global economic dynamics have made Keynesian interventions into economies largely impossible. The 1950s America Paul Krugman talks about, the one where the government-fostered middle class formed the economy’s demand base, is no longer possible for the simple reason that in the 1950s, companies weren’t able to play competing countries off one another. America was all there was. Today that’s not the case. The 2008 financial collapse was brought about, in part, by financial firms playing New York and London against each other with the result being decreased regulation across the board. The race-to-the-bottom abounds: wages, taxes, debt management.

There will be pressures for increased labor mobility. The welfare state will be largely dismantled. An entire generation of Westerners are likely to be uneducated and uncompetitive and underprovided for by the state when they enter into the global economy. And the jobs they otherwise would have taken, manufacturing, has either been outsourced or automated. Oh, and there will be no demand to sustain continued growth.

(4)    The Palestinians. Status: who are we kidding here?

Do I really need to go into this?

(5)    Immigrants and migrants. Status: royally fucked

You know what the non-NPR consensus is on immigration? Hunt them down, round them up, ship them out, and build the biggest fucking wall Halliburton advertises in its monthly catalog.

You know what the sentiment in Europe is right now? The same damn thing. White people hate brown people. They hate black people. And with increased global labor fluidity and climate induced mass migrations all but assured, they’re going to be freaking the fuck out. Cue the nativist backlash.

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[1] I once knew a staunch libertarian in college who, during one dinner in our dining hall, had his cookie playfully stolen by a mutual friend. Red in the face and fists clenched, he turned to the friend and barked “Give me back my property”. He also loved Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and anything by Selena Gomez.

A Farewell to Academia, Pt. IV - Why is Political Science Research So Bad??

Check out Pts. I, II, and III

[In this post, Geist, our intrepid explorer, considers why much of the statistical work being done in political science is quite bad. Will he bore himself to death? Read below to find out!]

To the layperson, statistics is oftentimes tedious and quite boring. So are laws. So is anything that massively affects your life outcomes. It’s why I have no idea what Obamacare actually is. And it’s why I don’t care to find out. From what I’m told, it’s why we need Obamacare in the first place.

Pop statistics sites, with their manifestos and self-proclaimed brio, have tried to gussy up something that’s by its very nature rather unsexy. So inevitably, Five Thirty Eight has succeeded at sucking the fun out of everything from eating burritos to masturbation[1],Vox has us memorizing flashcards for a Vox quiz that’s always seemingly just over the horizon, and the Monkey Cage is, well, fine I guess. I doubt many people ever click the link to the article being referenced or the book being cited.

Because if they did, they’d likely see a lot of statistics. And statistics do two things to high-minded, supposedly well-informed liberals: scare the shit out of them and confer authority on whatever it is being said.[2] Now, I’m not talking about basic findings like “Mitt Romney is responsible for 23% of the unemployment found among Hispanics”. People are pretty comfortable citing these things when it helps their point and conveniently skeptical when they don’t. 

Instead, I’m talking about articles using techniques like maximum likelihood estimation. Then fear strikes: most people will pledge blind devotion to whatever the findings are because “Holy Shit! Look at those equations! I don’t want to be seen as stupid in the company of my STEM overlords.” Others (the liberal arts Left), though equally scared of something they don’t understand, performatively thumb their noses at authority by trashing the whole enterprise altogether.

As I’ll discuss in my next post, there’s nothing inherently wrong with statistical research when it’s properly conducted. It’s something that I think the Left needs more of. That said, the statistics produced by political scientists largely suck.

I’m not going to spend much time substantiating this claim. It requires too much space and it’s boring as hell. That said, having worked with one or two tenured political scientists who are actually quite good at their job, the general feeling among those who are highly statistically literate is sheer wonderment over how most of the articles published ever get through peer review. Most political scientists know a lot of advanced, sophisticated techniques just enough to use them, but not well enough to know if they’re being used correctly. The result is that political scientists bury many of their more suspect assumptions or design decisions under layers of high level statistical techniques.

Perhaps to uncover why this is happening we should conduct a sociological examination of the discipline. While I don’t have any hard evidence for my following hunch, it's certainly testable. 

The problem, I think, is how the graduate school is underserved by the undergraduate curriculum. A political science degree essentially confers a bachelor’s in electives. Very few programs require any statistical or mathematical training. All of the articles we have undergraduates read are either purely theoretical or historical in nature. The findings are presented either as fact or they’re debated like issues are on cable news—which is to say, without any sort of rigor. Very few papers are ever assigned that give the undergrad a huge dose of statistics (cuz it’s scary!) and if they are the statistical section is not assigned. American political science students are presented with a very skewed (and inaccurate) view of how the field works. They think the field is what people were doing in the 80s and 90s.[3]

But since the early 00s, the sophistication of our statistical methods has increased by magnitudes. Everyone has to be trained in a whole battery of quantitative methodological approaches in order to be at all employable. Political science departments began hiring academics with PhDs from economic and business school programs. The field has become massively teched-up as a result. Much of the work done by these academics (largely in American political science) requires a Masters in economics to understand what they’re doing.[4] The other subfields—international relations, comparative politics, and even some of political theory—have since borrowed from their techniques and methods.

Political science graduate schools are not pulling from economic undergraduate programs, however. Instead, they’re selecting primarily from a pool of undergraduates who think political scientists either generalize from news stories and history books, theorize endlessly, or conduct surveys all day.[5] They’re pulling from a group of students who didn’t do much math or statistics in college and then expect them to learn graduate econometrics in roughly a year. This is a recipe for terrible, terrible scholarship.

What usually happens is this: students attend “math camp” for a week or two where they learn the parts of calculus that will later help ground their statistical training. They’re then trained in a variety of statistical methodologies over the next year and a half, frustratingly being taught as if they were statisticians or economists in training. The economists or business school PhDs who teach these courses teach in equations and proofs. These students only understand in prose. They then have a political scientist explain the work in English, which gives them a grasp of the material at a basic conceptual level. Unfortunately, statistics is ultimately a mathematical discipline, so there’s very little sense among graduates students what the mathematical reasons are underpinning any one statistical decision. The result is what I talk about above: bad research.

Unless political science departments change their undergraduate programs, this problem is not likely to be ameliorated. Economists and statistician undergrads are not going to apply to political science programs because the job opportunities are terrible, especially in comparison to those in economic and statistics departments or the private sector. And the field can’t go back to the pre-millennium Stone Age.

Pt. V on the problems with Leftist political science will be posted soon.

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[1] I know much of what they do is tongue in cheek, but should we go so far as to read Nate Silver’s manifesto in that way too?

[2] Conservatives on the other hand just don’t give a fuck about numbers

[3] Which is the old literature most tenured faculty are fluent in

[4] They’re immune to my criticism’s here. My main problem with these researchers is addressed in Pt. II of this essay.

[5] I do think that our survey research has been fairly successful, though I do have some normative reservations regarding how it’s conducted. See (pt. II). 

A Farewell to the Academy, Pt. III - Political Science's "Anti-Theory" Bias

If we grant that no social scientific inquiry can be value-neutral, then we are left with the situation where political scientists are relying upon implicit and uninvestigated value assumptions when constructing their descriptive categories (see Pt. II). This parallels the “no-theory” fallacy consistently made by political scientists who employ quantitative methodologies. Quantitative political science is quite resistant, and at times openly hostile, to theorizing. Instead, the majority of papers that have been published over the past decade have openly eschewed it for strict hypothesis testing. The field has become almost completely inductive.

What this means is that political scientists are largely content with investigating whether or not the observed relationship between two variables is explainable by random chance. While in the natural sciences this is done by controlling the environment and running a large number of trials, political scientists are frequently unable to do this. Instead, they must rely upon large sample sizes and statistical ‘controls’ to accomplish this task.[1] To a certain extent this explains why the bar has been set “lower” with respect to social scientific publications: they can’t run island experiments for both ethical and practical reasons. Any well designed statistical model that strongly suggests a correlation between two variables is in itself an accomplishment. So I do not mean to begrudge the political scientist this difficult task.

But to suggest that we should stop here, I think, sells us short. We should try to explain why these relationships exist. The approach that political scientists take today is akin to Newton being fully content with knowing that two objects of different mass fall at the same rate. For the political scientist, there’s no need to take the extra step and start theorizing about gravity.

                

Except, they’re still tempted to do a little bit of explaining. But these explanations largely serve as illustrations of how the data might work together in the larger political ecosystem. Stories are told in a few lines that narrate why these variables might interact with each other the way that they do. This is crude theory construction. Or rather, it’s hypothesizing a possible theory. The theory itself, though, is rarely tested against other competing theories.

                

Normally the story that’s told that links our variables together is some variation on rational expectation models. “Of course this would be the outcome!” the political scientist implicitly says. “The actors are maximizing their payments subject to their budget constraints. Now look over here at this correlation I found…”

                

There’s a term for this. It’s called “assuming your conclusions”. It means that the explanations are always made to fit the findings. Or in other words, our explanations are inherently unfalsifiable.[2]

                

“Theory” should not be confused with “models”. Political scientists love their models. Quants build statistical models, which is to say that they put certain variables in relation to one another. They could be linear, multi-linear, or logarithmic (to name a few). To illustrate, here’s a simple multilinear model:      

y = x² + x

It’s postulated that there’s some sort of quadratic relationship between the independent and dependent variables. This is a model. It proposes a relationship. It doesn’t explain why this relationship exists. That’s what theory’s for.

                

One result of neglecting rigorous theorization is that there’s not much of a logic behind why political scientists include the particular control variables that they do beyond the impression that they might be important (or others have used them). The strategy is oftentimes to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and see what works. I can understand this impulse (I’ve had it myself) and to a certain extent it rests on compelling logic: you can’t know a priori that a variable doesn’t have a confounding effect on the relationship we’re looking to measure. Therefore, you might as well test everything you can in order to come up with the most robust model possible.

                

And while the point that you cannot know before testing it whether or not a variable is important or not is well taken, you should have a good idea based upon theories whether or not a given variable should have an effect or not on your findings.

                

Take the classic example of the direct relationship between ice cream sales and murders. Obviously ice cream sales are not causing murders to rise and vice versa. The confounding variable here, temperature, explains both. As temperatures go up, people get angrier and more murders take place. Similarly, people enjoy cool treats on hot days. It makes physiological sense.

                

But, if political scientists were attacking this problem, they’d run through an exhaustive search of all possible variables they could think of (gender, race, political ideology, income, et cetera) along with temperature. And though they’d arrive at the same finding, their procedure is thoughtless. It’s the same exhaustive search that computers execute while playing chess. And more importantly, it is only now that explanations (i.e. crude theories) are offered.

We should be testing our theories and our models at the same time. A successful model may produce evidence against a theory. Or it may support it. By waiting until after the model is confirmed to weave a possible explanation, we are theorizing without theory testing. The paper usually ends here. We don’t then test the theory in differing circumstances to see if it holds.

                

Despite the “let the data speak for themselves” ethos prevalent in both political science and pop quant journalism, it’s actually more theory that would make model building easier. This is because knowing how our findings fit together would allow us to know beforehand which combination of variables are more likely to work. We’ll also know which combination of variables we should test them against to substantiate or refute our prior theory.

Also read parts I , II, and IV

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[1] Control variables are variables other than your independent and dependent variable that you build into your model. You include these because they might actually be driving your findings (i.e. be a ‘confounding’ variable). The temperature variable I discuss below is a good illustration of this.

[2] And before we forget, assuming rational actor models from the start have specific normative implications (see Pt. II).

A Farewell to the Academy: Pt. II - Between Facts and Norms

Between Facts and Norms

                

            Part I of this essay is found here              

[Summary: Geist, our intrepid explorer, plunges headfirst into the “fact-value” debate. What fate awaits him? Who will he not piss off? Will he make it out alive? To find out, keep reading!]

Most political scientists either buy into the Weberian “fact-value” distinction wholesale or they simply assume it.[1] Either way, it’s the dominant organizing principle of modern social science. What the “fact-value” distinction says is that inquiries into the facts of the world and the values that we should hold are two separate enterprises. It’s one thing to describe how the world works and it’s another thing entirely to judge how human actors should act in this world. We know the mechanics behind how a gun shoots bullets. And we know that in most cases we shouldn’t use that gun to shoot people. The descriptive fact informs the normative fact,[2] but not vice-versa. Independent of the ethical question of whether or not we should shoot a person, we know that the gun shoots bullets.[3]

                This is certainly how we treat scientific inquiry, but there is still a bit of a wrinkle to this. Scientists operate within a social web and therefore their motivations and their discoveries will always assume a social dimension. So while it is true that my thoughts about the morality of killing have nothing to do with the operations of the gun itself, particular social conditions are what led scientists and inventors to reconfigure the material world and produce the gun in the first place.

                Furthermore, how scientists categorize the world will differ depending upon the problem at hand. A geneticist will lump dolphins with other animals owing to their genetic lineage, though an ecologist interested in patterns of predatory behavior will group dolphins with sharks (a fish) and speak of them both as “marine predators”.[4] No set of categories is more right than the other outside of the particular problem the researcher is trying to solve. Now these problems most often derive proximately from issues in the particular scientific subfield. But the overall source of these scientific problems is found in society and the values that its members share.[5]

                A similar dynamic is seen in the social sciences. Today, government form is evaluated on a continuous scale from democracy on one end to autocracy on the other. But this has historically not been the only way that governments have been categorized. The classical republican tradition studied monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mass rule, and mixed constitutions.[6] There’s no reason why a political scientist couldn’t study and advocate for monarchies beyond the fact that it’s considered by Western societies to be illegitimate. Furthermore, oligarchies, simply defined as the rule of the wealthy, certainly exist today. But to speak of oligarchies would be to also speak of class conflict[7], something that American political scientists are resistant to acknowledge, let alone study. And the reason’s because inequality isn’t treated as much of a problem by contemporary political scientists—and even if it is, class categories do not factor into their analyses. This owes to contemporary Western societies holding a different understanding of what individual freedom is than was held by classical republican thinkers.[8] The amelioration of class conflict was at the heart of republican social science because its understanding of what freedom involved demanded that it privilege class categories. Different problems necessitate different categorizations of the same material.

                What I’m arguing, then, is that all forms of science smuggle values into their descriptive categories. Therefore, political scientists shouldn’t be able to “bracket” normative considerations from their work because they frame the researcher’s categories of analysis. The normative justification of our categories requires the same amount of attention as do the justification of our categories on predictive and explanatory grounds.

                Political scientists should grapple with where their currently implicit normative commitments arise from: a reasoned social consensus? Or perhaps social conflict? Maybe blind deference to authority? Or quite possibly even structural power relations? Class domination? All political scientists should therefore ask themselves the following three questions when conducting their research:

(1)    Why do we categorize differences in the way that we do?

(2)    Are our purposes cited for these categories legitimate?

(3)    Once demarcated, who benefits from privileging certain categories over others?

This synthetic approach, matching empirical research with normative evaluation, was the dominant understanding of political science up through Marx. Today, only certain Habermasians continue in this tradition. Not reviving it risks naturalizing what are in fact historically contingent and socially mediated facts. If we fail to recognize that our social scientific problems ultimately originate in the normative commitments of the researcher’s society, then we risk evaluating our categories in purely explanatory and predictive terms. That is, a category is good solely because it explains our data well. We’re then able to “trojan horse” our values in under the guise of supposedly neutral scientific findings (i.e. the explanatory criterion). And because these social scientific findings are placed under the halo of “scientific inquiry” the normative predispositions informing category formation are enshrined as something beyond debate because science has now supposedly settled the matter.  The power relations that ground a culture’s normative commitments are thus more resistant to revision.[9]

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[1] It’s mostly the latter

[2] If you don’t want to kill people don’t fire that gun, cuz it, like, shoots bullets.

[3] It don’t matter if it’s right or wrong to kill people, guns are still gonna do it

[4] Michael Neblo, “Philosophical Psychology and Political Intent”, The Affect Effect, 29-30

[5] Because Wittgenstein.

[6] See Aristotle’s Politics

[7] Not in the Marxist sense. The classical republicans treated oligarchies as “rule by the rich” and democracies as “rule by the poor”. Simple as that. No teleology required. And no Hegel.

[8] See MacGilvray’s The Invention of Market Freedom

[9] This is Marx’s point in “On the Jewish Question”