Resistances and such

In Cultural Studies (a well-meaning Marxian political project that is not really a science, however), resistance has been spotted everywhere: any symbol or purported meaning can be exegisised as such. I too, sometimes try to play Devil's advocate too trying to see cop-outs that people attempt at least as a coping strategy: like people glued to their smartphones might be trying to create a sense of connection and intimacy in the social environment that alienates them from each other. However, I still find this strain of glorifying "resistance" rather flimsy. This kind of "resistance" reminds me of that scene in Precious where the protagonist is imagining herself a star singer on a stage while her stepfather is raping her again. We are getting screwed over big time, the sooner we realise it, the sooner you can do something meaningful about it. Foucalt was right, a shift in knowledge begets a shift in power relationship.

Holistic understanding and mythical thinking.

Growing up, I read the fairy tales of practically all peoples of the world: from Persian, Chinese and Russian, to Madagascan, Georgian and Aboriginal. It wasn't, however, before decades of life experience, meditational and yogic practice and, finally, an encounter with structural anthropology and depth psychoanalysis, that the actual meaning of fairytale metaphors has finally dawned on me. If Jesus Christ had to use similes to explain the intangible structures of reality, so should social sciences, instead of confusing themselves and everyone around with the sky-high castles of educated guesswork and terminology.

Supermarket bread and mass control

Human earthlings are mad: they go crazy about the calorific value of their food and joust over vegan suitable or non-suitable snacks but no one seems to wonder if "mono- and  di-acetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerdies of fatty acids" is something you need your bread to contain (and end up in your system). Why do "esters of synthetic fats with a composition similar to partially digested natural fat esterified with other natural acids" need to be used to make something that comes out just fine when simply made from only flour, water, and salt? I have googled around and sent a couple of emails and here's what I have seen/read.

Modern supermarkets flood their food packaging with excessive, overwhelming data on the amount of calories in a slice, the presence or absence of celery, and other superfluous trivia, while the full ingredient lists are deviously omitted. I had to beg Marks & Spensers' Nutrition department do divulge any information on what they actually put in their French baguette. Their (probably unpaid) intern responsible for communicating with pesky inquirers shared with me that "we don’t have a list of ingredients for categories of products available in a format I can share via email". How very smart for a major supermarket chain not to have one in 2015! Their colourful website, once again plastered with tangential factoids and the word "healthy" in every other sentence, suspiciously skirts around the most important issue: what is the food actually made of?

One of my most vivid memories of my trip to Croatia was seeing full lists of ingredients on every price label in the bakeries. Their content was such that I stopped buying bread after that. In the UK, however, no such info can be found. The Vegan Society have somehow managed to procure a list of ingredients on Lidl's house-brand baked goods, something Lidl do not publish on their own website nor displays in their shops. Instead, Lidl has opted for an Instagram-style display of heavily photoshopped pictures as well as typical fancier-than-PowerPoint marketing-bullshit and essentially irrelevant number juggling. Chocolate twists barely containing any actual chocolate aside, their produce is abound with such insalubrious things as cysteine (an amino-acid derived from human hair), palm oil and diphosphates. At the same time, highlighted in bold text, no doubt to make them out to be the culprits, are things like wheat, rye, milk, eggs, and sesame. The Orwellian Newspeak mission is accomplished: war is peace and peace is war! Tetrasodium diphosphate is good, wheat is bad!

From these little observation, two things become clear.

Firstly, quantitative data is the latter-day language of power, used to manufacture wilful, even enthusiastic ("Let's all lose weight by going low-carb!") consent across large swathes of the populace. Instead of arbitrarily drawn quotes from the Holy Writ to prove just about anything under the sun, now we have the highly elevated art of number-juggling, the so-called "hard figures" to the very same end.

Secondly, this kind of mass control works because the education system does not equip the majority of people with  knowledge necessary to navigate successfully through life, just with enough indoctrination to 'believe in science'. Not having basic understanding of chemistry and biology, because you chose Media Studies and PhE for your A-levels, will inevitably result in a lifetime of feeding on the worst in biochemical engineering, never knowing where your illnesses come from. The "freedom to choose" turns out to be the worst form of slavery, that very "iron cage" that repulsed Max Weber so much.

Universals and particulars in anthropology

Anthropology has had a difficult relationship with acknowledging human universals. The contradiction is that the claim that all cultures are particular and all universals are social constructs particular to the culture in question logically leads to a conclusion that humans share noting in common.

Dealing exclusively with the micro-level of cultural particulars is well known to result in culturalism and villagism, known malaises amongst anthropologists. However, those who work with the macro-levels, like political scientists and IR people, tend to zoom out of even such staples as ethnicity, gender and even political economy. But what if all of them are correct, but not completely? Like those blind men touching the elephant, they all make correct guesses but miss the entirety of the picture. This article (albeit I do have some beef with it) offers a handy way of thinking about what we have been discussing here: (Bloch's Blob)

Traditional anthropology is holistic only to a limited degree on the micro-level, looking at the social context of the tail, not just the tail itself and also somewhat aware of the hind legs (say, political economy). The rest of the elephant and the biology of the tail escapes the view. What would really come in handy, is an awareness of that fact and participant objectivation Bourdieu-style, the deconstruction of the Homo academicus. But then again, that would take another level of self-reflexivity and painful soul-searching. It is a huge individual endeavour and not everyone would be willing to put themselves through that...

Science boffins to philosopher kings: is the rule of science a good thing?

Lack of methodologies for collecting empirical data and  the Second Danger of Unreflexive Scientific Observation (over-intellectualising) keep plaguing many branches of social sciences. When you're not required to find any evidence to back up your claim, yet feel entitled to professing opinions by the sheer virtue of your fancy education, things can go really wrong. Reading a recently published article (Maciej Pletnia 2014, Asian Identity: Regional Integration and Collective Memory of the Pacific War in Contemporary Japanese Society) on a topic very close to my heart reminded me of that part of War and Peace (Volume IV, Part Two, VII), where Andrei Bolkonsky reminisces about the haughty conviction of Austrian generals in the Battle of Austerlitz that things in reality would go exactly the way they, highly learned and esteemed generals, believe they should happen: "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... Die zweite Kolonne marschiert..." Things, of course, did not pan out according to someone's educated guess, and a humiliating defeat ensued. 

So is, sadly, the case with many branches of social sciences, where arm-chair ponitification reigns supreme, with no signs of abating. It could be simply annoying, if ignorable, should the ideas produced in that manner remain safely within the Ivory Tower. Unfortunately, the recent surge of technocrats assuming top government positions (repeatedly exalted by the Economist's editorial board) indicates that we are in for some years of painful rule by "philosopher-kings", which both Plato and empirical research warned against.

 

Two variables are not reality: private prisons vs. universities

The US apparently boasts the most extensive prison system with the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. A fair share of the prisons are private companies running for and actually making profit, so in terms of market efficiency they are probably world's best. SCORE! Let's all go private! (in my best Eric Cartman's voice) That would however ignore that such a system is fed by the judicial systems where too many people are incarcerated long-term for minor felonies, that private prisons are allowed to select "low-cost" inmates and have access to funding, the slavery-like labour exploitation (re. the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution), the poor staff training and low wages, the lack of oversight and accountability, the inhumane living conditions due to cost-saving, etc., etc.

This is merely to illustrate the point that describing reality in terms of two variables, i.e., no state funding = high success of universities (most cited research papers + high rankings), is a formal logical fallacy. That and treating social and environmental costs as "externalities" are exactly the kind of destructive pseudo-scientific thinking that Economics and Political Science students are indoctrinated in, and which is, unfortunately, is presently the language of power and self-proclaimed "science".

#GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.