Sunday, May 5, 2024
Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges [& a note on language]
Nichols R, Charbonneau M, Chellappoo A, et al. Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges. Evolutionary Human Sciences. 2024;6:e12. doi:10.1017/ehs.2024.2
Abstract: The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.
From the introduction:
An efficient means for researchers concerned with CET [cultural evolutionary theory] to contribute to improvements in the field is to take account of and respond to the most pressing stated challenges facing the field. As a result, the present critical review of theoretical needs takes its cue from results of a recent survey of the membership of the Cultural Evolution Society about the field's ‘grand challenges’ (Brewer et al., Reference Brewer, Gelfand, Jackson, MacDonald, Peregrine and Richerson2017). Published results of this survey detail two varied sets of challenges. The first set was drawn from semantic analysis of topics directly from survey results. (Subsequent references to ‘survey results’ are to this paper.) Its most pressing challenge, revealed to be about twice as important as the next topic, was with ‘knowledge synthesis’. The authors state that this topic relates ‘primarily to issues of theoretical integration and speaks to the idea that while many behavioural scientists and humanities scholars see culture as a defining feature of humankind, different subfields rarely read each other's work or build interdisciplinary research programmes to explore how human cultures differ from those of other animals’ (Brewer et al., Reference Brewer, Gelfand, Jackson, MacDonald, Peregrine and Richerson2017: 1). Additional topics of appreciable concern in the first set of results were topics labelled ‘culture definition’, ‘theory’, ‘shared language’ across the disciplines, ‘pro-sociality’ and ‘cultural transmission’.
Language as an evolutionary phenomenon
Until not long ago, discussion of language ‘evolution’ was somewhat taboo. As recent as 1994, textbooks observed that ‘Evolution … has become a “dirty word” in modern linguistic theory’ (McMahon, Reference McMahon1994: 314). This is because through the twentieth century the nomenclature of evolution risked some allusion to outdated, often racist, views about how some languages – and by extension some social groups – might be ‘more evolved’ than others. It is now uncontroversial within linguistics that no language is inherently ‘better’ or ‘more useful’ than others. So, while vigilance must be maintained, the socio-political risks associated with evolutionary talk have begun to fade, and in the past 30 or so years evolutionary approaches to languages have grown dramatically in prominence (Tallerman & Gibson, Reference Tallerman and Gibson2011; Dediu & de Boer, Reference Dediu and de Boer2016).
Today, the expression ‘language evolution’ is widely used to describe at least two distinct phenom- ena and one methodological advance. The two phenomena are: the biological process by which humans, and apparently only humans, became a ’language-ready’ species; and the set of cultural – or ‘cultural evolutionary’ – processes by which relatively simple and unstructured systems become highly structured, and hence acquire some of the common, characteristic properties of languages, such as symbolism, compositionality and duality of patterning. The methodological advance is the application of phylogenetic tools, derived from population genetics, to study language history and lan- guage change. All three of these literatures are now very large, comprising thousands of papers each. Multiple past papers review, summarize and synthesize them (e.g. Mace & Holden, 2005; Tomasello & Call, 2019; Greenhill et al., 2020; Haspelmath, 2020; Roberts & Sneller, 2020; Scott-Phillips & Heintz, 2023; Scott-Phillips & Kirby, 2010). Here we focus on a philosophical issue arising from this growing influence of evolutionary thinking.
The challenge, put simply, is: what exactly does the evolutionary perspective bring that other approaches do not? The biology of language, language emergence and language change have all been important topics for language science for a long time, and a great deal of what has been uncovered by evolutionary approaches has previously been investigated and described in other terms. Research adopting an evolutionary perspective has enriched our understanding, provided new methods and added many new findings, but does it fundamentally alter our understanding of what the empirical phenomenon is and how it works?
One answer might be that a relatively faithful transposition of the Darwinian model – where vari- ation, selection and inheritance combine to generate natural selection and hence the appearance of design in nature – is possible, and brings with it new insights, explanations and tools. With languages, there is something like variation (linguistic items vary enormously), there is something like selection (some items become more common than others) and there is something like inheritance (we learn from the previous generation). Some linguists indeed propose that linguistic items, of some sort or another, could be identified as units of selection closely analogous to genes (e.g. Croft, 2008; Ritt, 2004; Tamariz, 2019). However, deeper analysis raises difficult questions, and the issue is contentious: a decade ago, a group paper on language as a culturally evolving system observed that, ‘Various scho- lars have proposed that concepts, cultural behaviors, or artifacts may function as replicators. It remains to be seen whether any, all, or some combination of these entities are reasonable candidates for cultural replicators’ (Dediu et al., 2013: 314). The situation has not changed substantially since.
Another response to this question would be to adopt only specific parts of the Darwinian toolkit. That is, one could reduce the role of an analogy between variation in language and variation in genes while retaining other parts of Darwinism (Claidière et al., 2014). For instance, there might be scope for perspectives that adopt population thinking and some commitment to selectionism, but without the stronger commitment to replicators.
I have some remarks on the cultural evolution of language in:
Culture as an Evolutionary Arena, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19(4): 321-362, 1996, https://www.academia.edu/235113/Culture_as_an_Evolutionary_Arena
The Evolution of Human Culture: Some Notes Prepared for the National Humanities Center (Version 2), Working Paper, 2014, 65 pp.
I have proposed the idea of a coordinator as the cultural analog to the biological gene:
“Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture, Signata 6, Annales des Sémiotiques /Annals of Semiotics: Sémiotique de la musique / Music and Meaning. Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr., eds. Presses Universitaires Liège, 2015, pp. 271-285, https://www.academia.edu/23287434/_Rhythm_Changes_Notes_on_Some_Genetic_Elements_in_Musical_Culture
Intelligence, A.I. and analogy: Jaws & Girard, kumquats & MiGs, double-entry bookkeeping & supply and demand
Think of this post as an adjunct to my series on A.I., chess, and language, which is about the structure of computation in relation to difficult problems.
I’m interested in the general question of what it would mean to say that an A.I. is more intelligent than the most intelligent human, something like that. That’s an issue that’s being debated extensively these days. For the most part I don’t think the issue is very well formulated.
To be honest, I don’t find it to be a very compelling issue. It doesn’t nag at me. If others weren’t discussing it, I wouldn’t bother.
The notion of intelligence itself is vague. I rather expect that as A.I. becomes more developed, we’ll develop a more sophisticated understanding the issue. The general notion seems like it can be captured in a simple analogy:
Intelligence is to a mind’s capacity for dealing with cognitive tasks, such as finding a cure for cancer
AS
Horsepower is to an engine’s ability deal with mechanical tasks, such as the acceleration of an automobile.
But I don’t want to take up the general issue in this post. Rather, I want to look at analogical reasoning. I start with 1) a specific kind of analogical reasoning, interpreting narratives, 2) use some remarks by Geoffrey Hinton to move to some more general remarks, and 3) conclude with another specific example, an analogy between double-entry bookkeeping and supply and demand.
Interpreting Texts: Girard and Jaws
A lot of literary interpretation proceeds by constructing analogies between events that happen in texts and patterns of behavior specified in some theory about human behavior. Psychoanalysis has theories about how individuals behave in their personal lives; Marxism has theories about how social class and roles in the economy affect individual action. René Girard has a theory about imitation and sacrifice. That’s what I want to look at.
Early in 2022 I did a Girardian interpretation of Spielberg’s Jaws. At the end of that year I had ChatGPT do the same. Of course ChatGPT can’t watch movies, but Jaws is well-known there’s lots of stuff about it on the web, including scripts, though I don’t know whether or not any of the available scripts give the dialog word-for-word as it is in the film (the scripts I downloaded, for free, did not). Now, I didn’t just ask ChatGPT to use Girard’s ideas to interpret the film. First I prompted it about the film itself, and specifically about Quint. Once I’d established that it had a reasonable grasp of the film I then brought up Girard, generally at first, then specifically about mimetic desire. Then I asked it: “How does mimetic desire work in Jaws?” It gave a reasonable answer. I did the same thing with sacrifice, first Girard, then the application to Jaws.
The form of the required reasoning is analogical. In effect, is there an analogy between Girard’s general statements about mimetic desire and sacrifice and the specific events in Jaws? I would argue that setting up the question is more difficult than working out an answer to it. I note that it’s not the kind of question that has only one answer; thus the argument I actually made in my paper is more sophisticated than the one ChatGPT came up with through my prompting. What is it that brought me to pose the question in the first place?
I watch a fair amount of streaming video, but I don’t write about most of the titles nor do routinely a watch a particular title with the intention of writing about it. That decision is made later. I had no intention of writing about Jaws when I decided to watch it. I was simply filling a hole in my knowledge of movies – I’d never seen the film, which I knew to be an important one. Once I’d watched the film, I read the Wikipedia article about it, something I routinely do, mostly to ‘calibrate’ my viewing experience. The article noted that the sequels were not as good as the original. I decided to see for myself. I was unable to finish watching that last two sequels (of four), but I watched Jaws 2 at least twice, and the original three or more times. It was obvious that the original was better than the others. I did the multiple viewings in part to figure why the original was better. I was on the prowl, though I hadn’t yet decided to write anything.
I decided there were two reasons the original was best: 1) it was well-organized and tight while the sequel sprawled, and 2) Quint, there was no character in the sequel comparable to Quint. I have no all but decided that I would write about Jaws.
I posed a specific question: Why did Quint die? Oh, I know what happened in the film; that’s not what I was asking. The question was an aesthetic one. As long as the shark was killed the town would be saved. That necessity did not entail the Quint’s death, nor anyone else’s. If Quint hadn’t died, how would the ending have felt? What if it had been Brody or Hooper?
It was while thinking about such questions that it hit me: sacrifice! Girard! How is it that Girard’s ideas came to me? I wasn’t looking for them, not in any direct sense. I was just asking counter-factual questions about the film.
With Girard on my mind I smelled blood. I had a focal point for an article. I started reading, making notes, and corresponding with my friend, David Porush, who knows Girard’s thinking much better than I do. Can I make a nice tight article? That’s what I was trying to figure out. I was only after I’d made some preliminary posts, drafted some text, and run it by my friend David, who knows Girard’s thought much better than I do, that I decided to write an article. It turned out well enough that I decided to publish it.
Now, when we’re thinking about whether or not A.I.s will come to exceed our intelligence, are we imagining them going through such a process? For this kind of search and exploration is central to human thinking. I certainly do this sort of exploration when thinking about other things, such as the structure of human cognition, the nature of cultural evolution, the functioning of the nervous system, and so forth. This blog is a 14-year record of my explorations, during which I’ll gather some of them together in a more formal way and write a working paper which I’ll then post at Academia.edu, SSRN and ResearchGate. Every once in a while I’ll write an article which I’ll submit for publication in the formal academic literature – a few of those have gotten published. And then there are the monthly pieces I publish in 3 Quarks Daily, which is quite different from the formal academic literature. And of course I’ve got pages and pages of unpublished notes that support all this activity.
Is this kind of exploratory work part of the routine of the Superintelligent A.I., or does it go straight for the good stuff, cranking out fully-realized work without need of exploratory effort? If so, how does it know where to dig for the good stuff? Is that what superintelligence is, knowing where the good stuff is without having to nose around? No one says anything about this. Perhaps they’re thinking about the Star Trek computer. But it knows where to look because Spock points it in the right direction.
But I digress. Back to Jaws. There is a world of difference between what I did in writing about Jaws and what ChatGPT did. I did the hard part, figuring out that there was a specific intellectual objective there, Jaws and Girard. Once I’d done that there was still work to do, quite a bit of work, but it was of a different kind. I was no longer prospecting for intellectual gold. I was now constructing a system for mining the ore and then refining it into gold. ChatGPT only had to do the last part, dumping the ore into the hopper and cranking out the refined metal, and even then I gave it some help.
A year later, in January of 2023, I decided to see how ChatGPT would do without all of my prompting. I gave it this prompt:
Stephen Spielberg is an important film-maker. Jaws is one of his most important films because it is generally considered to be the first blockbuster. Rene Girard remains an important thinker. Can you use Girard’s ideas mimetic desire and sacrifice to analyze Jaws?
It didn’t do so well. It needed my prompting to get it through the exercise.
Now, no one is claiming that ChatGPT is superhuman in any respect but its ability to discourse on anything. But GPT-5, who knows, maybe it’ll be superhuman in some interesting way. If not GPT-6, or GPT-7, or maybe we’ll need a more sophisticated architecture, but surely at some point an A.I. will surpass us in the way that we surpass mice. Perhaps so.
But I have no sense that these breezy predictions are supported by thinking about how human intelligence actually goes about solving problems. I does no good to say, but it’s an A.I.; it works differently. Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but there has to be some kind of process. At the moment the human process is the only example we have. Perhaps we should think about it.
Just how is it that Girard popped into my mind in the first place? How do we teach a computer to look around for nothing in particular and come up with something interesting?
Analogy: Kumquats and MiGs
As I remarked above, the process of interpreting Jaws is an analogical one. So let’s think about analogy more generally. I’m thinking in particular of some remarks Geoffrey Hinton made at a panel discussion in October of 2023. You can find the video here. I’ve transcribed some remarks:
1:18:28 – GEOFFREY HINTON: We know that being able to see analogies, especially remote analogies, is a very important aspect of intelligence. So I asked GPT-4, what has a compost heap got in common with an atom bomb? And GPT-4 nailed it, most people just say nothing.
DEMIS HASSABIS: What did it say ...
GEOFFREY HINTON: It started off by saying they're very different energy scales, so on the face of it, they look to be very different. But then it got into chain reactions and how the rate at which they're generating energy increases– their energy increases the rate at which they generate energy. So it got the idea of a chain reaction. And the thing is, it knows about 10,000 times as much as a person, so it's going to be able to see all sorts of analogies that we can't see.
DEMIS HASSABIS: Yeah. So my feeling is on this, and starting with things like AlphaGo and obviously today's systems like Bard and GPT, they're clearly creative in ... New pieces of music, new pieces of poetry, and spotting analogies between things you couldn't spot as a human. And I think these systems can definitely do that. But then there's the third level which I call like invention or out-of-the-box thinking, and that would be the equivalent of AlphaGo inventing Go.
OK. Let’s start from there. Given that GPT-4 “knows about 10,000 times as much as a person,” what procedure will it use “to see all sorts of analogies that we can't see”? I’m thinking of that procedure as roughly analogous to the exploratory process I undertake whenever I decided to watch some video. Every once in a while I decide to write about one of the titles. Most of the time, time, though, what I write isn’t as elaborate as my article about Jaws and Girard – I’ve collected many of those pieces under the rubric of Media Notes, though most of those pieces do not focus on analogical reasoning.
What’s the procedure by which an GPT-4 would search through all those things it knows and come up with the interesting analogies? There isn’t one and I suppose it’s a bit churlish of me to suggest that Hinton should specify one. But really, if there he has no procedure to suggest, then what’s he talking about? We know how chess programs search the chess tree. How do we search through concept space for analogies? Alas, while the chess tree is a well-defined formal object, the same cannot be said of concept space, which is little more than a phrase in search of and explication. And how do we evaluate possible analogy-pairs?
Perhaps the simplest procedure is simply to ask. That’s something I recently tried. Here’s the prompt I gave to ChatGPT:
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story [Media Notes 119]
Was it funny? Yes. Worth watching? I suppose. But it wasn’t the laugh-out-loud hilarity fest I was hoping for. It wasn’t Duck Soup for the 21st century.
I like Seinfeld, a lot. I’ve written a bunch of posts about his stuff, mostly Comedians in Cars and assorted stand-up bits, and gathered most of those into two working papers, Seinfeld's Comedy, Jokes are Intricately Crafted Machines (2023), and Jerry Seinfeld & the Craft of Comedy (2016). That Seinfeld is a miniaturist. Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story started life as a stand-up bit. In this clip Seinfeld talks about how he created that bit (with shots of his hand-written notes on a yellow legal pad):
I wonder about that line he mentions (02:36), “chimps in the dirt playing with sticks.” He explains why he likes it, four of the seven words are funny (underlined). It makes me think of the Kubrick’s 2001, which picks up on the space theme Seinfeld had introduced seconds before (02:30 “it was like an alien spacecraft”). Was that connection rattling around in Seinfeld’s mind as well? Who knows? Does it matter? Maybe yes, maybe no. And he’s only halfway through his explanation.
Back to the movie, Unfrosted. It’s bright and cheery, something Seinfeld was aiming for. In one or three of the dozen interview clips I watched over the past week he says that, just as you are greeted with a shelf of brightly colored cereal boxes when you go to fix breakfast in the morning, so this movie about a breakfast pastry needs to be bright and cheery. Bright and cheery? I’ll give it a smile and two chuckles.
Seinfeld also goes on and on about getting to work with Hugh Grant, a hero of his. Hugh Grant is cast as Thurl Ravenscroft, a Shakespearean actor reduced to (the indignity of) playing Tony the Tiger – remember Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest, “by Grabthar’s Hammer”? In that role he comes up with that famous tag-line, “They’re gr-r-eat!” You know what? Not so great. Add two smiles and a chuckle to the score. And then in the climax, which is a mascot rebellion filmed as a parody of MAGAs storming the Capitol Building on January 6, Hugh “Tony the Tiger” Grant is wearing a horned fur helmet like Jacob Chansley, the QAnon guy. Why?
The movie’s set in the 1960s, the clothes, the cars, the music – Chubby Checker doing “The Twist” fergodsake! – Khrushchev, JFK, the missile crisis, Walter Cronkhite, NASA & Tang, it’s all there. What’s the MAGA rampage doing in there? It makes no sense. A mascot rebellion? Fine. But all those shots modeled on video footage of the MAGA insurrection? That reference is just a distraction that adds nothing to the story.
The idea seems to be that you take the Pop-Tart comedy bit, turn it into a competition between Kellogg’s and Post, and then frame that competition as a parody of the 1960s space race – I must have heard that line in a half-dozen of those interviews. It sounded promising each time I heard Seinfeld say it. I was intrigued. But on the big screen? Whats the score now, three smiles and three chuckles? And no belly laughs. That seems about right. You can’t take a Godzilla toy, hook it up to an air-pump, and expect to inflate it into a world-destroying comedic monster. That’s not how these things work.
But that seems to be what Seinfeld has done. Here’s what the good folks at Rotten Tomatoes had to say: “Much like a preservative-packed toaster pastry, Unfrosted is sweet and colorful, yet it's ultimately an empty experience that may leave the consumer feeling pangs of regret.” That’s a bit harsh. No pangs of regret, no ultimate anything, not empty. But not particularly filling.
* * * * *
Bonus: I decided to see what kind of scenario ChatGPT could come up with. Here’s a record of a session I had with it. It’s not gr-r-eat!! But it got a couple of chuckles from me. As always, my prompt is in boldface, the Chatster’s response is plain-face.
Evidence of predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech
Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Gramfort, & Jean-Rémi King, Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech, Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 7, 430-441, March 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01516-2
Abstract: Considerable progress has recently been made in natural language processing: deep learning algorithms are increasingly able to generate, summarize, translate and classify texts. Yet, these language models still fail to match the language abilities of humans. Predictive coding theory offers a tentative explanation to this discrepancy: while language models are optimized to predict nearby words, the human brain would continuously predict a hierarchy of representations that spans multiple timescales. To test this hypothesis, we analysed the functional magnetic resonance imaging brain signals of 304 participants listening to short stories. First, we confirmed that the activations of modern language models linearly map onto the brain responses to speech. Second, we showed that enhancing these algorithms with predictions that span multiple timescales improves this brain mapping. Finally, we showed that these predictions are organized hierarchically: frontoparietal cortices predict higher-level, longer-range and more contextual representations than temporal cortices. Overall, these results strengthen the role of hierarchical predictive coding in language processing and illustrate how the synergy between neuroscience and artificial intelligence can unravel the computational bases of human cognition.
Friday, May 3, 2024
Self-medicating orangutans, and others
Douglas Main, Orangutan, Heal Thyself, NYTimes, May 2, 2024.
Scientists observed a wild male orangutan repeatedly rubbing chewed-up leaves of a medicinal plant on a facial wound in a forest reserve in Indonesia.
It was the first known observation of a wild animal using a plant to treat a wound, and adds to evidence that humans are not alone in using plants for medicinal purposes.
The male orangutan, Rakus, lives in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the island of Sumatra and is thought to be around 35 years old. For years researchers have followed orangutans like him on his travels through the forest, threading his way through the canopy in search of fruits to eat. [...]
The plant Rakus used, known as akar kuning or yellow root, is also used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat malaria, diabetes and other conditions. Research shows it has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.
Other uses, other animals:
Primates have been observed appearing to treat wounds in the past, but not with plants. [...]
Orangutans have been spotted using medicinal plants in a different way: In 2017 scientists reported that six orangutans in Borneo rubbed the chewed-up leaves of a shrub with anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties onto their legs and arms, probably to soothe sore muscles. [...]
Examples of self-medication in primates remain uncommon and the behavior is incompletely understood. [...]
But that behavior is not unique to primates. Indian civets, a catlike mammal, also swallow whole leaves, most likely to be rid of worms. Various birds engage in a strange behavior, called anting, in which they rub themselves in ants, to help them treat feather mites or other parasites. Hundreds of species of bees also harvest flower extracts that prevent fungal and bacterial growth in their colonies, which could be considered a type of preventative self- or group-medication.
Presumably this is learned behavior that is passed on through observation – even among the bees?
Divestment is futile, shift the debate & "turn the encampments into open air teach-ins, 24/7" [Explore]
The NYTimes has an article on protestor's demands that university endowments: Santul Nerkar, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell, Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course (May 3, 2024). Three universities have struck deals:
Brown University, the liberal Ivy League institution, agreed this week only to hold a board vote this fall on whether its $6.6 billion endowment should divest from any Israeli-connected holdings. In exchange, the pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus's main lawn was dismantled.
Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have also struck deals with student protesters to clear camps in exchange for a commitment to discuss the schools’ investment policies around Israel. The moves could add pressure on administrators at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, among others, where protesters have made divestment from Israel a central rallying cry.
After discussing the history of and current state of such demands the article notes:
But there are also practical challenges with any effort to divest. One, simply, is identifying what to divest and how to define the terms of such a policy.
Some academics question whether divestment works, with research finding that it has little to no impact on the bottom lines or behavior of targeted firms. Others point to the logistical complexity of divesting: As a private institution, Brown isn’t required to disclose all of its endowment’s investments, and in fact says almost nothing about them. Some 96 percent of its coffers are invested via outside asset managers.
The Brown Divest Coalition said it wanted to the university to sell off “stocks, funds, endowment and other monetary instruments from companies facilitating and profiting from Israeli human rights abuses.” It outlined criteria for divesting from certain companies, drawing upon lists compiled by three organizations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The students acknowledge that they don’t even know if Brown invests in any of those companies. That’s because what Brown does with its money — and how the institution or any other school would get rid of them — is hardly straightforward.
Timothy Burke, who teaches history at Swarthmore College, discusses this difficulty in his Substack column, Eight by Seven (May 2, 2024):
Divestment made marginal sense at best as a pressure strategy way back in the anti-apartheid movement, but ever since then has been less and less coherent as a tactic. The primary reason is that the nature of investment itself has changed so dramatically. Universities don’t own stock of particular companies for a long time now: most of their endowments involve frequent trading and in a much wider range of asset classes than stocks. Their investments are also frequently firewalled off from direct scrutiny by administrators, who are not kidding when they say they don’t even know what the endowment actually owns on a given day. Moreover, publicly traded companies largely could care less whether some group of potential buyers are not buying their traded stock, and mostly you don’t have shareholders who bring pressure on companies if the stock value is falling. Even when you do, boards and CEOs might ignore that pressure. Excluding companies from a list of assets an endowment can own doesn’t hurt them in any real way, and they are the real targets of a divestment campaign.
Later in his piece Burke makes a more interesting and more important argument:
These protests should have stopped being about colleges and universities except now they have to be about them.
What do I mean by that?
All the way back to the anti-apartheid movement, the weakness of campus activism has often been that it gets drawn obsessively into demanding that the institutions act as allies within larger struggles against distant or well-protected adversaries. This structure of protest has turned colleges and universities into proxies for those targets and eventually replacements for them, because protesters accurately perceive that they have some hope of minor concessions or that they will at least be able to compel the authorities on their campuses to listen to their demands, with whatever legitimacy that provides. Effectively, protesters come to hallucinate that their university administrations ARE the bad guys they want to attack, and equally completely miss out on understanding what is wrong with those administrations.
The obsession with making the university knuckle under to a particular demand trapped campus activists in a cul-de-sac of their own making, where superior options for change were scorned because protesters wanted to hang a particular kind of trophy head on the wall. My colleagues here know that was my position on fossil fuel divestment for years, and I feel fairly vindicated on that point. I warned students that they were going to get stuck chasing an action that would have zero impact even if their demands were met, that was premised on a really poor reading of how to bring meaningful political pressure on the U.S. government to end subsidies for fossil fuel production. In the meantime, lots of possible actions that would directly commit universities and colleges to the goals of climate activism were scorned as distractions from the divestment effort.
What the Gaza protests have revealed, however, is first that there’s been a change in the internal architecture of power on campuses and that this change is now allowing external actors to directly intervene in university and college affairs in new and largely unaccountable ways. Moreover, I think those changes are aligned with the larger remapping of U.S. politics and social life to new forms of oligarchy. Now the issue really is the administrations and I think for the first time in a while, student activists understand why that is.
Burke goes on to argue:
So what I suggest is that right now and immediately at the start of next fall, student activists should call the bluff that many university administrators have made in their passive-voice statements in the past week. If universities claim to support reasoned disagreements and debates, if they really do believe in learning together, if they embrace diversity of thought and experience, then turn the encampments into open air teach-ins, 24/7.
Make them expressly about conversation, debate and education, and not just about Gaza. About all the things that matter that aren’t highly prioritized in most university curricula. Let a thousand flowers bloom! The encampments should be alive with people talking about the flaws of nationalism generally, or about the reasons they support nations as a political form. About socialism, capitalism, anarchy, authoritarianism, about what has been and what might be. About political change and how it happens—or fails to happen. About the way the world got to be as it is. About why the curriculum is organized the way it is and what it could be. About pedagogies. About labor markets past and future. About oligarchy and hierarchy. About bodies and rights. About power and helplessness. About violence and peace. And none of it with fixed, hardened ideological positions. Explore. I think this generation is ready to make its own theories, conduct its own observations from what they’re living and what they hope to live.
Turn the encampments into makerspaces. Publish writing, formalize theory. Create art, stage performances. Experiment.
Reverse-engineer end-state political positions that people scream at each other, work back to first principles. What do we mean by freedom? What is unfree in our world? What do we know and how do we know it? How do we live and what do we want to live? Who are we here, who is not present with us, what is local to us, what is far away?
Make the encampments into what universities claim they want. Call their bluff.
Sounds good to me.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
Why We Started to Fear Extinction
Why We Started to Fear Extinction | John McWhorter & Tyler Austin Harper | The Glenn Show
Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how did the end of the world begin? In this clip, Tyler Austin Harper tells John McWhorter about his research and forthcoming book, which address the history of the idea of human extinction.*
Recorded April 28, 2024
*It starts with the identification of woolly mammoth fossiles in the late 18th century.
Conversational English in 1586
Simon Roper: In this video, I explore a 1586 work by Jacques Bellot, and what it can tell us about 'street English' in the early modern period.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)