Subject: RE: BHA: RE: Re: Richard Boyd on Iraqi resistance fighters getting us pastKant
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 09:26:41 -0500
Hi Cox, Carrol,
I agree that relations between different entities can be internal. But if these internal relations are taken to constitute identity, then we are talking about the relations an entity has with itself. I don't find that very interesting.
Dissent by itself produces some social change -- a setting without dissent is not the same as a setting in which there is dissent. But I agree with you that dissent or criticism produces greater changes when people act upon their "deviant" beliefs and values. I also agree that those who represent established organizations are likely to say and write stuff that will support the institutional order within which the organizations have been successful. We should hardly be surprised that this is true of those who represent universities and scientific societies, or that dissenters within these organizations would make common cause with actiists, and vice versa.
I don't think all of us are just following the election returns.
Best regards,
Moodey, Richard W.
"Moodey, Richard W" wrote:
>
>
> I began my studies in sociology and anthropology in the late 1950s, and from my very first course in racial and minority relations, I was taught that race was not a real biological category -- I particularly remember Ashley Montagu's "Myth of Race" -- and that the arguments for genetic differences in IQ between races was an artifact of the the interaction between social conditions and the biases of the tests. At that time, it had not yet been discovered that a lot of the evidence supposedly based on test scores had been cooked. I don't deny that there has been a great deal of racist "science," but there was vigorous internal criticism of it.
>
> I think that we should continue to distinguish between scientific or philosophical work and struggles to overcome social, economic, and political oppression. They certainly can be related in a variety of ways, but to be related they must be different.
>
The relations could be internal?
There is usually dissent within the sciences (and 'outside' them) -- it
was a fellow englit grad student at Michigan in 1956 who pointed out to
me that iq tests were culturally biased.
BUT: I expect without the liberation struggles of the '50s and '60s that
that "dissent" would have remained just that -- dissent within a
establishment primarily (whether or not intentionally) devoted to the
rationalization and justification of "the way things are." It is at
least a strong possibility, for example, that without the political and
armed might of the NLF and DRVN the biological careers of Richard
Lewontin and Richard Levins might have been rather different.
I myself remember an argument of several hours, beginning in an Ann
Arbor bar, then after midnight continuing in an Ypsilanti bar, in which
four (male) grad students (I one of them) vigorously combatted the (in
retrospect quite rational) contention of a fifth (female) grad student
that it was doubtfully in the interests of the USSR to "conquer the
world." My training was in the (heavily ideological) traditions of the
new criticism and history of ideas; almost certainly I would never have
challenged that training had it not been for the struggles of the
Vietnamese and Chinese peasantry, and of blacks in the u.s. (In fact
from 1951-55 I 'enjoyed' a top secret clearance as an airman attached to
the National Security Agency, where I was a key person in the discovery
of the use of isomorphic key by the Czech Border Guard. It was not pure
reason or intellectual persuasion that led me far away from that 'happy'
state.)
Science, like the Supreme Court, has a tendency to follow the "election
returns" (broadly defined to include those who vote with feet or stones
or guns).
Carrol
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