Anthropologist Showdown! Revisited

There is probably no better example of Henry Kissinger’s famous maxim that academic debates are so heated because the stakes are so low than Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere ’s heated debate over whether or not Hawaiins actually thought Captain Cook was an avatar of their god Lono. Anyone who’s read How Natives Think knows that would should have been a simple ethnographic question turned into a long, incredibly personal exchange in which two prestigious scholars debased themselves by insinuating all sorts of nasty things about their opponents.

But just because a debate is overhyped doesn’t mean I can’t comment on it! Or, take issue with someone else’s comment on it. In this case, Brad Delong’s:

Here’s my Pushback post on Sahlins and the Milton Friedman Institute. I’m a little surprised that Rashi “Shock Doctrine” Kesarwani hasn’t chimed in…

And it had always seemed to me that Gananath Obeyeseke had a good point in his debate with Sahlins: Obeyeseke maintained that British insistance that the Hawai’ians regarded Captain James Cook as a living avatar of a God had little to do with Hawai’ians imposing their myths about Lono on Captain Cook. It had, he said, more to do with the British imposing on the Hawai’ians their myths about how the British acquisition of technological knowledge had made them “like God”:

I think that neither Delong and I are really in a position to accurately judge this debate, but let me put in my few cents on the entire issue. I think that, prima facie, one should take Sahlins side in this debate. Why? Because unlike Obeyesekere , Sahlins actually did his field work in the Pacific islands, much of it in Hawaii. Obeyesekere, on the other hand, did his research in Sri Lanka and India. So, instinctively, I would trust Sahlins in interpreting what Hawaiians actually had to say about Cook, as well as having a better grip on some fairly arcane questions, such as whether Cook’s path around the islands matched up with the foretold path of Lono’s. Exactly what Obeyesekere would have to add to that discussion, I don’t really know.

Also, Obeyesekere relies on a fairly unconvincing argumentative device. Basically, he uses his identity and heritage as an “indigenous person” - as opposed to Sahlins anodyne whiteness - as a tool to indite Sahlins’ arguments; because Obeyesekere, being Sri Lankan, would instinctively have a better idea of the rationality of other indigenous peoples. This, of course, is essentialist nonsense. While there are some commonalities among all people who experienced modern, Western colonialism, merely being Sri Lankan hardly gives anyone license to say that Polynesians have Western rationality. All this move really did was cover up the fact that it was Sahlins, not Obeyesekere, who actually did the grunt-work of ethnographic and historical research on the question.

This move was also unhelpful because Sahlins, despite being an old white guy, not only thinks that Hawaiians (as well as many other non-Western peoples) have a different thought process or rationality than Westerners, but that their rationality is equal, or maybe even better, than ours. It’s not like Sahlins was some sort of Orientalist of Said’s worse nightmares, making broad claims about the inalienable otherness of brown people in service of an Imperialist agenda. Instead Sahlins probably goes too far in the other direction, by giving Hawaiian and other Native rationalities more credit than they deserve.

His besting of Obeyesekere , of course, hardly validates his sloppy arguments against the Milton Friedman Institute. More on that forthcoming…

Mark Penn, Social Theorist

Rick Perlstein found an amazing bit of Mark Penn arcana. His Harvard Crimson review of famed legal theorist Robert Unger’s first work, “Knowledge and Politics.” It’s not interesting so much for its content - Penn deftly handles some far-left social theorizing (he discusses plenty of obscure Marxist concepts easily) - but for the fact that the author is Mark Frickin’ Penn! The Mark Penn who wanted Clinton to emphasize her basic connection to American value, the Mark Penn who has the pollster-wizard of the New Democrats for over a decade. The Mark Penn who counseled small-bore domestic policy over anything ambitious in the second Bill Clinton term.

One of the most interesting things about elite American education is that it manages to get a ton of students to at least read Marx, and then maybe some Weber, Durkheim, Adorno, Foucault and Habermas, and yet still churns out investment bankers and Teach for America teachers.

One of my brother’s best friends majored concentrated in Social Studies*, which is basically  Social Theory with some quantitative stuff thrown in. So, what did he do with this solid background in Benjamin, Marx and the Frankfurt School? Became a management consultant. Not that there’s anything wrong with management consulting, it’s a perfectly honorable profession, but this is a guy who summarized the entire Foucault-Habermas debate between the Dumbarton bridge and 238.
*Penn was a Social Studies concentrator, as well as Brad Delong. The best blogger under the drinking age is planning to do the same. Reihan Salam is also a recovering social theory nerd. Geoff Garin, Penn’s replacement as chief pollster for the Clinton campaign, advocated for violent revolution in the Crimson.

Greatest Modern Thinkers

Stephen Dubner asks the question, and solicits the internet’s answers. As usual with these types of questions, the answer isn’t nearly as important as the criteria for selecting answer. And so to make this easier, I’ll limit myself to those thinkers that are A. Alive and B. made contributions whose importance are recognized by people outside their field and/or the general public. So here we go, in no particular order.

Noam Chomsky - The man invented modern linguistics almost entirely on his own. He also single handedly vanquished two theories that had dominated the social sciences before him - The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and behaviorism.

James Watson - discovered the double helix. He’s responsible (along with Crick, of course) for the biological sciences taking over physics as the science which has been making the greatest advances in explaining our world

Vint Cerf - Invented the internet.

Norman Borlaug - Not so much a thinker, but he’s the scientist who’s had a direct, positive impact on more people’s lives than just about anyone else in history.

You’ll notice that this quick list doesn’t include anyone from the humanities. That’s because even though I dearly love philosophy and literature, there are very few novelists, theorists or philosophers that I would define as “important.” That’s because very few of them ever change the material conditions in which they operate, or really have a whole lot of realinfluence (much the same can be said about economists, another filed I ignored). I guess a few philosphers (broadly defined) have - Marx, Friedman (even that is debatable) - and maybe some novelists (Harriet Beecher Stowe…), but nowhere near on the scale that any of the scientists and inventors that I’ve listed have.

Chomsy certainly seems to stand out - it’s hard to recognize the influence of his linguistics on the world at large, and it definitely pales in comparison to Watson or Borlaug - but I view Chomsky as a thinker who’s intellectual contribution, as far as changing the way people view an entire field (or inventing an entire field) is certainly comparable to Darwin or Smith, and maybe even Einstein or Newton.

Now, if we got rid of my first criteria of “alive” and just talked about “Modern” thinkers, then the list would obviously change a lot. If we define modernity as starting in the early 19th century, then the Greatest Modern Thinkers would be Darwin, Einstein, Marx and Maxwell. (Smith is only omitted because Wealth of Nations was published in 1776)

Greg Clark Continues His Jihad Against Sociology

Greg Clark is on a interesting crusade. First in a piece for Chronicle of Higher Education, he lambasted left-wing, worlds-system theorist Giovanni Arrighi and his book calling China a fufillment of Adam Smith’s vision of the economy. Clark’s review made the book itself seem rather stupid, but he also included all sorts of potshots at the field of sociology (of which Arrighi is a rather eccentric member):

In summary, the evidence Arrighi offers for his sweeping cosmology is astonishingly thin. The book indeed is little more than an extended anti-market, anti-capitalism, anti-Western harangue. Statements of dramatic import are proffered with little explanation: “The decisive battle to contain the rising power of China is still being fought in Iraq”; the Iraq War “aimed at using military might to establish U.S. control over the global oil spigot”; “China is not a vassal of the United States, like Japan or Taiwan.”

The book offers more insight into the sad state of intellectual development in sociology departments, even at such prestigious institutions as Johns Hopkins, than it does into the realities of wealth and poverty in the world economy.

Clark was being incredibly abtuse by implying that world-systems theory is preponderant in American sociology or political science departments, because it isn’t. Most sociologists do rather careful work, much of which is quantitative. There are, of course, social theorists that Clark probably doesn’t care for, but if he really wants to cast out the work of Weber, Durkheim and even Benjamin and Adorno into the “romantic” left-wing trash bin, he would be making a rather silly move.

Greg’s second attack on the discipline goes to a work that is actually beloved by social scientists, especially sociologists - Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But once again, he radically overstates his case. The weird tension in his short essay is that he seeks to A. disprove Polanyi’s historical argument that free markets are deliberate political and human inventions and B. take potshots at his generally left-wing, anti free market politics. So Clark goes on to say that there were really free markets in pre-Industrial Revolution Europe, Ancient Greece, Mesomopotamia and so on. But how does this square with Greg’s own work, which makes the argument that the Industrial Revolution was a world-historical change like no other. This fairly problematic tension makes itself pretty obvious:

But Polanyi was no better a historian than a prognosticator. Indeed, the more we learn of history, the more evident it is that the free market was not an 18th-century innovation, but one of mankind’s oldest social institutions. Medieval England, for example, had elaborate free markets in goods, labor, capital, and land. Forget groaning serfs, over-weaning lords, the lash of the whip; think private property, wage labor, market incentives, and social mobility. By 1200, a large class of landless laborers worked for cash, bought their food in markets, and rented their dwellings. The free market indeed has some claim to be the natural habitat of modern people, not a perverse and unnatural innovation. (We have evidence for extensive markets long before the time of Christ: in the Roman Empire, in ancient Greece, and in ancient Babylon.)

The Industrial Revolution in England did not represent a trade-off between gains for plutocrats and the horrors of poverty and unemployment for the poor. Instead, the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution were the unskilled; this truly great transformation reduced the terrible inequalities that existed since at least the Middle Ages. The elaboration of the modern credit nexus eventually produced cyclical unemployment, but the Industrial Revolution also reduced the enormous annual shocks to income pre-industrial workers endured because of harvest successes and failures.

But wait, I though free markets had always been around, then what was that innovation of “modern credit”? And if the Industrial revolution was just the continuation of institutions and practices that had been around forever, then why did all these good things happen because of it?

Clark and other free market advocates/libertarians need not be so afraid of Polanyi that they simply take a shotgun approach to his work. Instead, they should probably concede his argument that the free market we see today is a relatively recent human invention. They should just say that it’s a good human invention! That things really have gotten better since the Industrial Revolution! That the atomization Polanyi criticizes allowed individuals to break free from tyrannical social arrangements from which they previously had no hope of exit! Sure, go after his predictions and general left wing slant of his argument, but there’s really no reason to fear the fact that great political changes allowed the free market that you all love to exist in its beautiful form.

More Polanyi related commentary, check out Will WIlkinson and Mark Thoma.

And for sociology that doesn’t suck (but even has a fain echo of Polanyi) watch Will WIlkinson’s diavlog with Douglas Massey.