380. Blindness in Elites: (3) The Blindness of Advocacy

Ever since Plato founded the Academy there have been academicians who failed to live up to its ideal of detachment from the world that to Plato defined a philosopher.  Plato himself abandoned the ideal when he decided to serve the government in Syracuse, where he expected to advocate worldly causes he thought were good.

There must have been conflict, both within him and in his academy, and, given the disharmony between the roles of  advocate and thinker, conflict there must be, in every academic institution founded on his model.  When it reaches a peak, as I think it is doing in our time, it distresses us as both academics and citizens, but it also gives us a better chance to understand it.

The primary claim on the detached, or pure, side is to better vision.  The claim is well founded.  Pure academics see better than advocacy academics because advocacy always distorts.  In every judgment the force of the advocate's cause will move him or her away from drawing, and never toward drawing, an accurate picture of reality.  Not an ultimate or absolute reality, something whose existence and accessibility are easily disputed, but the proximate reality of the world, something our most successful skeptics can't dispute.  Pure academics claim the clearest view of what's operating in the world, how things work.

There are no perfectly pure, or detached, academics, only imperfect ones trying to be pure.  These striving academics believe that their picture of reality is still bound to be less distorted than the picture drawn by advocates.  They traditionally call their view "objective" but if this word is questioned (as it has been, strenuously, in our time) they can substitute "disinterested" or "impartial" without loss.

This lets them offer themselves as problem solvers.  "Before you can solve a problem you need an accurate picture of what's making it a problem.  We can provide a more accurate picture than advocates can."

This offer is tested most severely when it is presented to those engaged in the best causes.  Say the cause is improvement in the life of blacks in America, now certainly one of the very best causes.  Say the problem presented is the poor performance of blacks in school.  There is the usual disagreement over cause and responsibility, with the usual division into sides and the usual distortion by advocacy.  The academic draws his less distorted picture and comes saying, "Here's what's most significantly at work causing the problem and here's what has the best chance of solving it."  If it's found that there is not a favorable difference between his solution and that of either side he and what he represents fail the test.

Because that's so unrealistic the test nearly always has to be done in the imagination.  This sets the pure academic's claim back one remove: an advocate's imagination will distort reality more than an academic's will.  It is the same claim on the same grounds.

For social problems the imagination of academics works best when it draws on discussion outside the academy. Editorials, TV debates, blogs, dinner parties, the most passionate contributions to public discussions, the blindest advocacy in any of them, all broaden the academic's imagination and are essential material for the best solution to problems.  Academic purity, this makes clear, is not purity from the world but from partiality in the world.

Restrictions on public discussion — censorship, prohibitions, intimidations, taboos — limit the range of the imagination and are handicaps to problem-solving.  The better the cause the more likely the restrictions.  In our time it has been the goodness of the black cause that has imposed the most restrictions.  Studies of genetic differences are tightly monitored.  Discussion of the poor performance of blacks in schools is ringed with taboos.  Explanations that include fault in blacks risk putting the speaker (a "victim-blamer") outside the ring.   Eviction from the discussion-ring gets rhetorically intense.  "You don't improve the life of blacks when you give them a black eye."  Reminders from the evicted get more pointed:  "Nor do you, if you can't discuss everything that's significantly at work causing the problem, come any closer to solving it — and improving the life of blacks." 

The conflict between advocacy academics and pure (here analytical) academics is seldom that stark and, if it is, seldom useful in clarifying our conception of them.  But sometimes we get a good look.  In 1985 Maxine Hairston stated the essential beliefs of an analytical academic teaching English Composition: that writing is taught "for its own sake as a primary intellectual activity that is at the heart of a liberal education"; that writing courses "must not be viewed as service courses"; that they "should not be for anything or about anything other than writing itself and how one uses it to learn and think and communicate."

The theorists opposing her and quoted by her present what I take to be the essential belief of an advocacy academic teaching English Composition, that "the teacher should avoid the pretense of detachment, objectivity and autonomy" (Ron Strickland) and remain free to support a good cause.  The causes prominently cited at that time were "to ensure radical visions of the world" (Charles Paine), and to help students "engage in a rhetorical process that can collectively generate knowledge and beliefs to displace the ideologies an unjust social order would prescribe" (Patricia Bizzell), but the justification for them would be the same for any cause believed to be good, like improvement in the life of blacks or the status of women.

An analytical academic would see in the above advocacy of "radical visions of the world," blindness to merit in any conservative visions of the world, and in the dismissal of "detachment, objectivity, and autonomy" as pretense, blindness to fallacies in logic, the analyst's primary instrument.  Strickland, in dismissing objectivity as pretense, implies a fallacious argument commonly used by advocates to support their position, that because perfect objectivity is impossible advocacy is justified.  They do not see that this is a form of the slippery slope fallacy.  Observing the differences between Hairston and her opponents we see how analysts and advocates are in conflict, and how analysts win (as by making fewer logical mistakes), or can believe they've won.

It's a victory denied the advocacy side because that side is blinded by the priority of its cause.  Analysts can be blinded too, but only by their human defects.  Advocates are blinded by doctrine, the position their theory puts them in.  A perfect advocate for a cause would still be blinded by the overriding need of his cause.

Can such a need ever override the need for clear vision?  This question is easily answered by an advocacy academic ("Yes, my cause, now") but very painfully answered by an analytic one.  A true statement made in the world may be a harmful statement, as our mothers remind us.  A statement merely offered up for discussion of its possible truth may be harmful.  "Some causes of the poor performance of blacks in schools, in a degree yet to be determined, are found in black culture."  The analyst in his role wants to calculate cost-benefit, and strike a balance, harm against help, but here he faces so many variables, so many of them incalculable, that he's in a quandary.  So much — harm to feelings, harm to the already harmed, harm to black-white relations, harm to peace in society — is contingent on time and place.  That's all very confusing and painful but one conclusion emerges firmly enough: that there are times when clear vision is a handicap, when truth is not worth its price.  Seeing the contingencies, the analyst has to admit that advocates can claim the last override, or victory over him.  He has to be content with recognition of the price paid for this victory.

Victory and defeat.  The culture war moved academics to think in those terms.  The analysts thought they had won when they pointed out the logical fallacy in the arguments made by the advocate Ron Strickland.  They had a hard time calling this a victory over advocates, though, since, for all the logical mistakes analysts could point out, the proportion of advocacy academics over analytical academics in American universities grew larger and larger, right up to our time.  Logical demonstration seemed to have little effect.  They walked away thinking they had won only to wake up the next morning and find their opponent still strong and getting stronger.

The parallel with American politics will not escape citizens living at the time of Donald Trump's victory, when logical demonstration — and it's companion strategies, citing evidence, establishing facts — seemed to have very little effect on his credibility, or popularity, or vote total.

Is there any cause-effect relation in that parallel?  If there is it would lie in the academic's function as a teacher, appearing inevitably as a member of an elite, someone to look up to and model yourself on.  Many of those who voted for Trump — 49 percent of white college graduates (CNN exit poll) — were schooled in universities increasingly dominated by advocacy academics.  Their causes might have been far from Trump's but their epistemology, their assumptions about reality, their blindness to their own distortions, their depreciation of logic, were very close.  This is worth exploration and debate.